It’s a joy to be with you all this morning, but I admit that I come to you also in a season of lament. It’s a season of lament for me because I’m a 38-year-old tennis fan, and what that means is I am lamenting the end of an era that has marked my entire life as a tennis fan: What we call the era of the big 3. From 2003 until last year, men’s singles tennis was dominated by three men: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. Even as I say their names, I feel the weight of their glory. Nadal was my favorite, and when I talk about Nadal, I can’t talk about him without a measure of excitement. He’s Rafael Nadal, the king of clay, the 14-time French Open champion, the 22-time grand slam champion. Not only did he win the French Open 14 times, but four of those times he won it without dropping a single set. One time he won it having only had his serve broken once the entire tournament. What am I doing when I talk about him like that? In some way, I’m trying to give credit where credit is due. In the Psalm on which we are focusing today, that’s what we are called to do with God, but sometimes his glory and accomplishments are less visible and apparent to us than are Rafael Nadal’s or whoever you may look up to and admire. Nonetheless, they are far more real, and far more glorious. So give glorious worship to the God who is glorious, and in this passage we’ll see the glory of his worship, the glory of his voice, the glory of his temple, and finally, the glory of his people.

The glory of his worship

Psalm 29 begins with a command, though it’s not a command given directly to us. Instead, it’s a command issued to the heavenly beings, the angels. You may have noticed when we sing the doxology that we also address the heavenly beings when we say, “Praise him above, ye heavenly host.” Angels are spiritual beings created by God who dwell in the spiritual realm of heaven, but here there is one spiritual being among them whom they are called to worship: Yahweh, whose name appears in your Bibles as the LORD in all capital letters. Yahweh is the distinctive name by which God revealed himself to Israel, and which distinguishes him from all other spiritual beings. The name Yahweh in Hebrew means “I AM,” as in it is his essence to exist, as in he was created by no one else and has no cause for his being. He is the one who simply is, whereas the angels exist only because they were made by him. He is creator, and they are creatures. In fact, if you look at your ESV footnote on verse 1, it says that “heavenly beings” is the translation for what in the original Hebrew was “sons of God.” That name obviously conveys that they were created by God, whereas Yahweh, the LORD, is God.

And we too are created by God. So even as this call to worship is directed at the heavenly beings, it also applies to us. If even the angels ought to worship him, how much more should we? And what does it mean to worship him? What does that look like? Verse 1 tells us to ascribe to the LORD glory and strength. Listen to how David, the author of this Psalm, did that in 1 Chronicles 29:11 – “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all.” What’s he doing there? He’s ascribing to the Lord greatness, power, glory, victory, and majesty. So how do we ascribe to the LORD glory and strength, as verse 1 commands? We say to him something like, “Yours, O LORD, is the glory and the strength.”

Glory is a word referring to weightiness; something is glorious if it really, really matters, and verse 2 tells us that there is a glory due to God’s name. I’ve already alluded somewhat to the significance of God’s name, the name Yahweh, the great I AM. Rapper and executive Birdman coined a new phrase when he appeared on The Breakfast Club radio show and told the hosts to “put some respect” on his name when they use it. That’s what David is telling us to do with God in verse 2: If you’re talking about Yahweh, the great I AM, the one who simply is, the one who made everything else…put some respect on his name, like I instinctively do when I use Rafael Nadal’s name. By the time David wrote this Psalm, though, there was even more glory due to Yahweh’s name, not only for who he is, but what he has done. All his works add up to a kind of resume giving us reasons to say that he really, really matters, that he really is glorious and strong.

So when we gather for worship like we are today, we gather to ascribe to God the glory and strength that are due his name. We don’t most fundamentally gather because of what we get out of it, though no doubt as God remakes us, we increasingly enjoy ascribing glory to him. We don’t most fundamentally gather to express ourselves either, though as God remakes us, we do want to express what is true of God. But that’s the point: In worship we express what is true of God more than what is true of our feelings. This command to give him the glory due his name should guard us from making whether to do so dependent on our feelings or our highly fallible assessment of whether we’re really getting anything out of it. If I told my children I wasn’t going to feed them today because I just didn’t think I was going to get much out of it, or because deep down, to be truest to myself, I’d rather just sit on the couch and watch something, you’d rightly call me a bad parent. I’m their father; I owe it to them to feed them, and as God’s creatures, we owe him the glory due his name. This affects even the songs we choose to sing when we gather. They should be chosen not most fundamentally because of the perceived emotional impact; all kinds of music can impact us emotionally that has nothing to do with God. The songs we sing when we gather for worship, though, are worship songs to the degree that they declare what is true of God, both in who he is and what he has done.

Notice also in verse 2 how we are to worship the LORD: In the splendor of holiness. The word behind “worship” there originally just meant to bow down to something; it was an act of humbling oneself, lowering oneself, in recognition of the comparative greatness of the one worshiped. So when we say to the LORD, “You really, really matter” we are saying that not only in an absolute sense, but in the sense that he matters more than we do. When I talk about Rafael Nadal’s accomplishments, I never add, “but you know, I did also qualify for the PIAA AA district 3 championships in doubles my senior year of high school.” Why? Because that doesn’t matter in comparison to 22 grand slam championships. Why would I talk about myself in the presence of such glory? So our worship of him should be humbling, self-abasing, making much of him, and making little of ourselves.

And it should resplendent: Worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness. There’s a word we don’t use enough anymore. The idea here is that God is resplendent, glorious, and especially glorious in his holiness. To be holy is to be set apart from the world and uniquely devoted to God and his glory. The splendor God is after in worship is the beauty of a holy heart, a heart wholly devoted to God, a heart that burns for him and for him only.

A heart that burns for God and his glory like that typically will express itself in some visible way when worshiping him that indicates that he really, really matters. For some of you that may look like raising hands or dancing when you sing; it doesn’t have to, and I’ve known plenty over my years of being a Christian who raised their hands when singing and then left and demonstrated a heart that desired anything but God by the unholy lives they lived. So I’m not prescribing what it has to look like, but it probably doesn’t look like mumbling through the songs you sing in these gatherings with a bored look on your face. When you say, “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing,” really say it. Declare it. When you say, “My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought, my sin, not in part, but the whole, is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more, praise the Lord, praise the Lord, oh my soul,” say it like you are actually praising the Lord!

Those are just some of the things we can say in worship that ascribe glory to God; let’s look next at what this Psalm focuses on: The glory of his voice.

The glory of his voice

In verses 3-9 of the Psalm, the voice of the LORD is mentioned seven times. It begins in verse 3 where we read that it is over the waters, and in the parallel we learn that David is taking the thunder of a storm as an image of the voice of the LORD. When he heard thunder, he didn’t think of the rapid expansion of air that occurs when a lightning bolt heats it to an extremely high temperature. The ancient were aware of material explanations for event—they knew that things got blown around because the wind blew on them, but they thought of the wind as the breath of God. They recognized that behind the laws of nature there is a sovereign God.

What are the laws of nature, after all? What is gravity, electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear forces? These are our attempts to explain how the world works, and when we go to make that explanation, we find that the world operates according to these unchangeable, present-everywhere forces. They don’t change, they’re true everywhere, and they can’t be violated. What does that sound a lot like? Something unchangeable, omnipresent, and omnipotent…those are among the basic attributes of God. What best explains a universe governed by unchangeable, omnipresent, and omnipotent laws? Why is it that gravity exists not only in this room, but everywhere on earth, and everywhere in the universe? Could it be because there is an unchangeable, omnipresent, and omnipotent being who is ruling the universe the same way throughout? You say, “well no, maybe it’s just there,” but that just pushes the question back a step. Where’d it come from? The best science available to us today suggests that there was a time it began, which we call the big bang, and what caused its beginning? What best explains the data?

That Bible certainly explains it in terms of a creator God, and so nothing is “just” the way it is. We should never hear thunder and think “oh it’s just really hot air.” It is really hot air, but behind that majestic, powerful sound is a majestic, powerful God. That’s what the majesty and power of thunder is meant to reveal. The storm he causes begins over the waters, and then in verse 5 it moves into Lebanon and breaks its cedar trees. Lebanon was known for its lush forests with tall, sturdy cedar trees. But the storm over which God is sovereign breaks them with ease. Sirion is a mountain, and verse 6 says he makes Lebanon skip like a calf and this mighty mountain skip like a young wild ox. The image there is perhaps of an earthquake or a personification of the land skipping in fear like a startled young animal might when faced with a force far greater than themselves.

In verse 7 the voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire, there probably a reference to lightning. In verse 8 the storm makes it to the wilderness, which is then shaken by it, either by an earthquake or intense winds. It makes the deer give birth, or as the footnote says, it makes the oaks to shake, and strips the forest bare it is so intense. You can easily imagine that a storm like this would be bad news for a land. The thunder comes, the cedars are broken, lightning strikes, the earth is shaken, and the forests are stripped bare. I can’t help but think of the wildfires that seem to be a more and more common occurrence in California every year. The most recent ones destroyed the homes of some of the wealthiest and most famous people in our country. We rightly lament such disasters, we rightly pray for them to end, but do we see in them the hand of God, and reason also to ascribe to him glory and strength?

Though we should be slow to ascribe any of these specific disasters to punishment for some specific sin, Jesus did tell us one thing we can learn from every so called “natural” disaster. Reflecting on a tower that fell on 18 people and killed them, he said this in Luke 13:4-5 – “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” What is the voice of God saying to us through thunder, lightning, earthquakes, and as we’ll see in a moment, floods? He’s saying to us, “Repent. Turn. Unless you do, you will all likewise perish. This is not the being you want to be fighting against. Do you really think you can withstand his wrath coming against you if you remain in rebellion against him? Lebanon and Sirion skip like scared little animals at the sight of it. The cedars of Lebanon can’t withstand it. Stop competing with his glory and trying to build your life around the accumulation of your own glory, and instead just bow down, deny yourself, and ascribe to him glory and strength.”

This is, in fact, what the heavenly beings in his temple are doing. Let’s look next at the glory of his temple.

The glory of his temple

So verse 9 ends with this statement that in his temple all cry, “Glory!” This likely refers to God’s heavenly dwelling place, though even the earthly temple building before the coming of Christ was patterned on that temple and meant to visibly reveal it on earth. In it there were appointed singers to ascribe to the LORD glory, but certainly in his heavenly temple, what are the heavenly beings doing? When we see thunder over the waters, lightning striking the ground, trees split, earthquakes, and whole forests stripped bare, we are perhaps evacuating, lamenting, even praying for it to stop, none of which is wrong per se, but in the heavenly temple, what are they doing? They’re responding to the call of verse 1. They are ascribing to the LORD, Glory! They are seeing what is realistically happening. They are behind the curtain, recognizing that in all these things it is the voice of God that is heard, and it is his glory and power that is revealed.

And what is the LORD himself doing? Verse 10 tells us: He’s just sitting there. We often say that like it’s a bad thing: How can God just sit there when forests are being stripped bare and trees are being split in two? Or, more to the point of verse 10, how can he just sit there on his throne during a flood? This is the only time in the Old Testament the word flood is used except for the ten times it appears in Genesis 6-9, the story of the great flood that God sent on the earth in judgment on the sin of humanity. That flood wiped out all of humanity except one man’s family, and what was God doing during it? Just sitting there. Why?

Of course, God does not have a body, but the poetic image here of him sitting on his throne is meant to convey truth to us: The truth is that as a king is the sovereign ruler over his realm, such that his orders determine what happens, and no one has the power to veto his orders or give orders back to him, so God reigns as the sovereign king over all the earth, including the floods. Not only was he enthroned then, but verse 10 goes on to say that he sits enthroned as king forever. He’s just as sovereign over the wildfires of 2024 as he was over the flood of Genesis 6. Now a king is king whether he’s seated on his throne or not, but when a king sits on his throne, he sits there especially to render his judgments, to deliver his orders. What was God doing when seated on his throne over the flood? He wasn’t just sitting there passively as though he was indifferent to what was happening on earth. He was sitting there to render judgment! His powerful voice of judgment was sending the flood!

Does this revelation of God seem harsh or unpalatable to you? If you are here today and you are not a Christian, maybe you expected to hear a nicer portrayal of God. One thing I’d want you to know though is that we as Christians don’t feel at liberty to paint our own picture of God. We believe there is a real God who is the great I AM, who is what he is, and who has revealed himself to us in the Bible. If we want to know the real God, then, we shouldn’t waste our time projecting what we’d want him to be like if we were creating him. We should instead try to get to know him as he really is. But furthermore, this passage doesn’t present this as the bad side of God or something. It’s presented instead as all the more reason to worship him!

Consider the alternatives. We all know that there are floods, earthquakes, and other forms of extreme weather in the world that strip forests bare and claim human lives. What’s the alterative to a God who rules over them? One option is no god at all—they’re just the way the world is. But then where do we get off calling them “disasters” or treating them like they are a bad thing? And what hope is there that we could ever be free of them? If there’s a real God ruling over them, that doesn’t just mean he sends them; it also means he can choose not to. To try to cope with the reality of disasters by rejecting belief in God entirely leaves us unable to even call them disasters and without hope for the future in the face of them. Ok, then another option: There is a real God, but he’s not sovereign over the disasters. It’s not really his voice in them. This was the approach of much ancient religion: The flood, the chaotic waters, were another force in opposition to their god, and their god does his best to defeat it. But is that really a God worthy of our worship? A god who is frantically running around trying to stop the floods and who is apparently losing on the regular given how often floods and other disasters still ransack our world?

No, the God worthy of our worship is the God seated above it all, ruling over it all, and sending it with perfect justice. That’s why the heavenly beings who really know what’s going on don’t say to him, “How can you just sit there?” They say, “Glory!” Do you know why God sent that original flood? Genesis 6:5 tells us that it was because, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” The only way you can accuse God of wrong for sending floods and other disasters is if you are clueless on the reality of his justice and our sin against him.

I’ve had the privilege of sitting on a couple juries in my time in Philadelphia; I’ve also seen court scenes in a number of movies and news stories. When a just judge has a guilty defendant in front of them, do you know what the judge is doing as they pronounce a life sentence on the murderer? Just sitting there. And you know what else? I’ve never heard anyone criticize them for it. Why? Because we recognize that it is just for a judge to declare a murderer guilty and sentence him or her to prison. And so also, if you could just see the splendor God’s holiness the way those heavenly beings in his temple do, if you could see how pure, how good, how perfect he is, and just how evil our hearts are by nature, how evil your heart is by nature, you wouldn’t say, “How can he send floods?” You’d say, “How has he not already sent one to consume me?”

The astounding thing in the Bible is not that God judges; the astounding thing in the Bible is found in verse 11. So let’s look last at the glory of his people.

The glory of his people

In verse 11 we encounter the possibility the LORD will give strength to his people, instead of using his strength against his people. In verse 11 we encounter the possibility that just as God is at peace, seated above the flood, even when his voice roars, his lightning strikes, cedars are broken, forests are stripped bare, lands quiver in fear, that is his people can be blessed with peace. Th