Bulletins - HOPE BIBLE FELLOWSHIP

o praise him
How He Loves
Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone)
Psalm 98 ESV
A Psalm. 1 Oh sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things! His right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him. 2 The Lord has made known his salvation; he has revealed his righteousness in the sight of the nations. 3 He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. 4 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises! 5 Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody! 6 With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord! 7 Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who dwell in it! 8 Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing for joy together 9 before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.
Introduction:
Have you ever planned a surprise party for someone? Do you remember the sneaking around and trying to get them to not be at the place or figure anything out and then get them there at just the right moment and everyone jumps out and yells, “surprise!” At that point, all of that anticipation gives way to joy. Friends gathered to celebrate the life of someone they love. It’s great fun. Our lives in some ways can mirror this as we wait for what God is doing and when He has revealed it, we find it has built greater joy to erupt from us when God’s way happens in His perfect timing.
Advent is a season of waiting, anticipating the celebration of Christ’s incarnation. One of the most popular Christmas carols this time of year is Sir Issac Watts’ “Joy to the World”. I don’t know if you realize it or not but it was not originally a Christmas song. Here is what Greg Forster wrote for Crossway regarding this:
Did you know that “Joy to the World” was not written as a Christmas carol? In its original form, it had nothing to do with Christmas. It wasn’t even written to be a song.
Isaac Watts was one of the great hymn writers in church history, and I guess nothing shows that better than the fact that he wrote one of his most famous hymns by accident. In 1719, Watts published a book of poems in which each poem was based on a psalm. But rather than just translate the original Old Testament texts, he adjusted them to refer more explicitly to the work of Jesus as it had been revealed in the New Testament.
One of those poems was an adaptation of Psalm 98. Watts interpreted this psalm as a celebration of Jesus’s role as King of both his church and the whole world. More than a century later, the second half of this poem was slightly adapted and set to music to give us what has become one of the most famous of all Christmas carols.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come; Let earth receive her King! Let every heart prepare him room And heaven and nature sing! And heaven and nature sing! And heaven . . . and heaven . . . and nature sing.
Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns! Let men their songs employ While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, Repeat the sounding joy! Repeat the sounding joy! Repeat . . . repeat . . . the sounding joy!
No more let sins and sorrows grow, Nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make his blessings flow Far as the curse is found! Far as the curse is found! Far as . . . far as . . . the curse is found!
He rules the world with truth and grace And makes the nations prove The glories of his righteousness And wonders of his love! And wonders of his love! And wonders . . . wonders . . . of his love!
Today, as we walk through Psalm 98, my goal is for you to understand this:
Main idea: God’s work of salvation brings JOY to the world.
To get there, we are going to break down the three sections of the passage like this:
A song of joy, a signal of joy, and a supreme joy
I. A Song of Joy V. 1-3
The 98th psalm actually fits into a couple of different categories. First it’s an exodus psalm. It was likely written long after the exodus but looks back and echoes the song of Moses’s in Exodus 15.
Exodus 15:2 ESV
The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
Exodus 15:6 ESV
Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.
As such, it is first a psalm for an Old Testament people. It is a response to what God had done but provided a new perspective on Israel’s victory. God was doing something new that was connected to what He had already done and was still doing. He brought them out of Egypt but also brought has brought His church out of the exile of Genesis 3, the exile from the garden caused by the fall of man due to their sin.
Why are they to sing a new song? Because of the marvelous things God has done. Marvelous things done in an unprecedented manner and not done by human means. These marvelous things, this salvation was done by God alone without the aid of any usual means. This was new.
These new wonders that God had done called for a new song. In the exodus He had brought Israel out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. His hand and arm have now worked salvation for His people. This salvation was salvation from real hazards and problems, not some theoretical or imagined situation. This was real salvation from real danger.
John Calvin wrote this:
“The language of the Psalmist amounts to a declaration that God would not save the world by means of an ordinary kind, but would come forth himself and show that he was the author of a salvation in every respect so singular. He reasonably infers that mercy of such a wonderful, and, to us, incomprehensible kind, should be celebrated by no ordinary measures of praise.”
Sometimes, in our excitement for the Christmas season, we forget that the people waited in darkness for hundreds of years. At the time of the nativity, God had been silent for 400 years. There was a LONG, LONG wait between the promise and the realization of salvation. Verse three is a response to the long wait for God to redeem.
Psalm 98:3 ESV
He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.
God did not forget His people. He remembered them. They were always on His heart. His delay in fulfilling the promise was an opportunity for the people to exercise faith. As we wait for God to fulfill the promise of His final victory at the end of days we also have the opportunity for faith. This is a good gift from God as well.
The word that gets translated as “steadfast love” is the Hebrew word, chesed which we can understand as “loyal love”. This chesed, loyal love, is one of God’s defining characteristics. He is loyal to the people He has chosen. He will remember and rescue them always according to His promises and will. His rescue will not necessarily look like the people thing it will. It will be marvelous but unusual. It is out of the ordinary and that should bring joyous song.
When we read of God’s right and and holy arm, we should understand that this includes strength not just in salvation but also in judgement. His judgement comes in later in the passage. Jesus is Savior. God provided Himself as Savior. But He is also judge and will judge the earth.
The next section begins in verse 4 and in this section we see a signaling of joy. A signal of joy.
II. A Signal of Joy V. 4-6
Not only is this a psalm for the Old Testament people but this is most definitely a psalm for New Testament people as well. When God brings salvation we realize every hope, the substance of all faith, the longing of all our hearts, and the good of people has been achieved. God is the end of all of this. He’s the goal. He’s the object of our faith.
Verse 4 summons the earth to make a joyful noise, to break forth in celebration, and to sing His glory. Compare that to what we find in Psalm 100:1
Psalm 100:1 ESV
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
A feature that we see in Hebrew poetry is what is called an inclusio. The phrase make a joyful noise appears in both verse four and verse six bracketing the included language of the instruments they are to use. The trumpets in verse six and the horn are both a signal call. They were used to signal the people. The horn would have been a shofar, in particular. It was used as a signaling device such as calling the people to war.
Numbers 31:6 ESV
And Moses sent them to the war, a thousand from each tribe, together with Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, with the vessels of the sanctuary and the trumpets for the alarm in his hand.
This shout, this song should spill forth from the lips of the people because what God has done for Israel is for the sake of bringing light to the whole world. Ultimately, the Messiah, the Savior, Christ the Lord, would come from Israel, through the line of David, the tribe of Judah. God would save sinners by preserving Israel from which the Savior would come as prophesied. In all of these things God was working with His strong arm and in His sovereign will to work salvation for His people.
And this brings us to verses 7 through 9 and the realization of a supreme joy.
III. A Supreme Joy V. 7-9
Not only is this a psalm for OT people and a psalm for NT people, but it’s a psalm for God’s people. It’s a prophetic psalm. It pictures the time when the Lord will judge the world and the people will live the way they were meant to.
If you’re like me you find the personification of nature a kind of odd. It’s actually not unusual to see this in scripture. However, when the Bible does it, the natural world is not embodied with personality as the rest of the ancient near East cultures did. In the Pagan cultures of the day nature was considered a manifestation of individual deities. If that’s the case, you see here even those elements as giving glory to God. It reminded me of the plagues in Egypt when each of the plagues seemed to correspond to one of the Egyptian gods signifying that God was the one true God and defeated all false gods.
We, humans, were made to submit to God’s rule and steward creation in wisdom and love. When we acknowledge God’s rule, his kingship and bow the knee to Him, then the rest of creation flourishes. That is the issue with the world. It’s a lack of surrender to the true King.
Adam’s sin infected all of his descendants and even his environment. Only when sin is finally done away with at God’s final victory can the world be renewed.
Genesis 3:17 ESV
And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
Romans 8:18–22 ESV
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
This idea of creation groaning. But it won’t go one forever. Eventually renewal will come.
And at the end of time:
Revelation 21:5 ESV
And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
God will make all things new and we can have joy now in that coming joyous time. We can rejoice in it. We should live rejoicing in it.
“Joy in God is the happiest of all joys.” - Spurgeon
The final word of the chapter is “equity.” I wanted to address this because that word in our modern American culture has gotten misused. In this case we are not talking about equal outcomes. It’s speaking of God’s judgement of the people being orderly and fair with integrity and truth. It will be a level path. It will be done rightly and righteously. Only those who have Christ’s righteousness imputed to them through trusting in the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ on the cross and resurrection and repenting of their sin will stand in the judgement. His strong hand of salvation saves. But there is judgement to come and those who do not know Christ will spend eternity apart from Him in hell. That is just the reality. It is a reality that should bring us and all of the world to joy! It will be the cause of much rejoicing for all eternity.
Hamilton writes:
“Psalm 98 joins with its context to point forward to the final triumph of God, whereby truth, goodness, and beauty will be vindicated, and to which all creation will respond with praise for the only creator and redeemer. That creator, the King himself, has now come in the flesh, and at the cost of mortal pain to himself, he has paid his bride’s debt, broken the bonds of her captivity, vanquished her tormentors, cleansed her of defilement, clothed her with his own righteousness, and promised to bring her to the place he has prepared where he will dwell with her. We need only believe, wait, hope, love, and respond as Ps 98 instructs.”
It looks back and looks forward and commands us to REJOICE! Be Joyful! Joy to the World indeed! The Lord has come!
Let earth receive her king!
Will you receive your King today?
Will you allow that sense of the darkness and despair give way to a burst of joy?
This Christmas, make a joyful noise to the Lord because of the marvelous things that He has done, chiefly among them that Christ has come, lived perfectly, died on the cross for our sins, and rose triumphantly and will return for His bride, the church. May that good news be the corner of your life. Repent and believe. … and have JOY.
Let’s pray
Pray.
Psalm 98 ESV
A Psalm. 1 Oh sing to the Lord a new song, for he has done marvelous things! His right hand and his holy arm have worked salvation for him. 2 The Lord has made known his salvation; he has revealed his righteousness in the sight of the nations. 3 He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. 4 Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises! 5 Sing praises to the Lord with the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody! 6 With trumpets and the sound of the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord! 7 Let the sea roar, and all that fills it; the world and those who dwell in it! 8 Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing for joy together 9 before the Lord, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with equity.
Introduction:
Have you ever planned a surprise party for someone? Do you remember the sneaking around and trying to get them to not be at the place or figure anything out and then get them there at just the right moment and everyone jumps out and yells, “surprise!” At that point, all of that anticipation gives way to joy. Friends gathered to celebrate the life of someone they love. It’s great fun. Our lives in some ways can mirror this as we wait for what God is doing and when He has revealed it, we find it has built greater joy to erupt from us when God’s way happens in His perfect timing.
Advent is a season of waiting, anticipating the celebration of Christ’s incarnation. One of the most popular Christmas carols this time of year is Sir Issac Watts’ “Joy to the World”. I don’t know if you realize it or not but it was not originally a Christmas song. Here is what Greg Forster wrote for Crossway regarding this:
Did you know that “Joy to the World” was not written as a Christmas carol? In its original form, it had nothing to do with Christmas. It wasn’t even written to be a song.
Isaac Watts was one of the great hymn writers in church history, and I guess nothing shows that better than the fact that he wrote one of his most famous hymns by accident. In 1719, Watts published a book of poems in which each poem was based on a psalm. But rather than just translate the original Old Testament texts, he adjusted them to refer more explicitly to the work of Jesus as it had been revealed in the New Testament.
One of those poems was an adaptation of Psalm 98. Watts interpreted this psalm as a celebration of Jesus’s role as King of both his church and the whole world. More than a century later, the second half of this poem was slightly adapted and set to music to give us what has become one of the most famous of all Christmas carols.
Joy to the world, the Lord is come; Let earth receive her King! Let every heart prepare him room And heaven and nature sing! And heaven and nature sing! And heaven . . . and heaven . . . and nature sing.
Joy to the earth, the Savior reigns! Let men their songs employ While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains, Repeat the sounding joy! Repeat the sounding joy! Repeat . . . repeat . . . the sounding joy!
No more let sins and sorrows grow, Nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make his blessings flow Far as the curse is found! Far as the curse is found! Far as . . . far as . . . the curse is found!
He rules the world with truth and grace And makes the nations prove The glories of his righteousness And wonders of his love! And wonders of his love! And wonders . . . wonders . . . of his love!
Today, as we walk through Psalm 98, my goal is for you to understand this:
Main idea: God’s work of salvation brings JOY to the world.
To get there, we are going to break down the three sections of the passage like this:
A song of joy, a signal of joy, and a supreme joy
I. A Song of Joy V. 1-3
The 98th psalm actually fits into a couple of different categories. First it’s an exodus psalm. It was likely written long after the exodus but looks back and echoes the song of Moses’s in Exodus 15.
Exodus 15:2 ESV
The Lord is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
Exodus 15:6 ESV
Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.
As such, it is first a psalm for an Old Testament people. It is a response to what God had done but provided a new perspective on Israel’s victory. God was doing something new that was connected to what He had already done and was still doing. He brought them out of Egypt but also brought has brought His church out of the exile of Genesis 3, the exile from the garden caused by the fall of man due to their sin.
Why are they to sing a new song? Because of the marvelous things God has done. Marvelous things done in an unprecedented manner and not done by human means. These marvelous things, this salvation was done by God alone without the aid of any usual means. This was new.
These new wonders that God had done called for a new song. In the exodus He had brought Israel out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. His hand and arm have now worked salvation for His people. This salvation was salvation from real hazards and problems, not some theoretical or imagined situation. This was real salvation from real danger.
John Calvin wrote this:
“The language of the Psalmist amounts to a declaration that God would not save the world by means of an ordinary kind, but would come forth himself and show that he was the author of a salvation in every respect so singular. He reasonably infers that mercy of such a wonderful, and, to us, incomprehensible kind, should be celebrated by no ordinary measures of praise.”
Sometimes, in our excitement for the Christmas season, we forget that the people waited in darkness for hundreds of years. At the time of the nativity, God had been silent for 400 years. There was a LONG, LONG wait between the promise and the realization of salvation. Verse three is a response to the long wait for God to redeem.
Psalm 98:3 ESV
He has remembered his steadfast love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.
God did not forget His people. He remembered them. They were always on His heart. His delay in fulfilling the promise was an opportunity for the people to exercise faith. As we wait for God to fulfill the promise of His final victory at the end of days we also have the opportunity for faith. This is a good gift from God as well.
The word that gets translated as “steadfast love” is the Hebrew word, chesed which we can understand as “loyal love”. This chesed, loyal love, is one of God’s defining characteristics. He is loyal to the people He has chosen. He will remember and rescue them always according to His promises and will. His rescue will not necessarily look like the people thing it will. It will be marvelous but unusual. It is out of the ordinary and that should bring joyous song.
When we read of God’s right and and holy arm, we should understand that this includes strength not just in salvation but also in judgement. His judgement comes in later in the passage. Jesus is Savior. God provided Himself as Savior. But He is also judge and will judge the earth.
The next section begins in verse 4 and in this section we see a signaling of joy. A signal of joy.
II. A Signal of Joy V. 4-6
Not only is this a psalm for the Old Testament people but this is most definitely a psalm for New Testament people as well. When God brings salvation we realize every hope, the substance of all faith, the longing of all our hearts, and the good of people has been achieved. God is the end of all of this. He’s the goal. He’s the object of our faith.
Verse 4 summons the earth to make a joyful noise, to break forth in celebration, and to sing His glory. Compare that to what we find in Psalm 100:1
Psalm 100:1 ESV
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth!
A feature that we see in Hebrew poetry is what is called an inclusio. The phrase make a joyful noise appears in both verse four and verse six bracketing the included language of the instruments they are to use. The trumpets in verse six and the horn are both a signal call. They were used to signal the people. The horn would have been a shofar, in particular. It was used as a signaling device such as calling the people to war.
Numbers 31:6 ESV
And Moses sent them to the war, a thousand from each tribe, together with Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, with the vessels of the sanctuary and the trumpets for the alarm in his hand.
This shout, this song should spill forth from the lips of the people because what God has done for Israel is for the sake of bringing light to the whole world. Ultimately, the Messiah, the Savior, Christ the Lord, would come from Israel, through the line of David, the tribe of Judah. God would save sinners by preserving Israel from which the Savior would come as prophesied. In all of these things God was working with His strong arm and in His sovereign will to work salvation for His people.
And this brings us to verses 7 through 9 and the realization of a supreme joy.
III. A Supreme Joy V. 7-9
Not only is this a psalm for OT people and a psalm for NT people, but it’s a psalm for God’s people. It’s a prophetic psalm. It pictures the time when the Lord will judge the world and the people will live the way they were meant to.
If you’re like me you find the personification of nature a kind of odd. It’s actually not unusual to see this in scripture. However, when the Bible does it, the natural world is not embodied with personality as the rest of the ancient near East cultures did. In the Pagan cultures of the day nature was considered a manifestation of individual deities. If that’s the case, you see here even those elements as giving glory to God. It reminded me of the plagues in Egypt when each of the plagues seemed to correspond to one of the Egyptian gods signifying that God was the one true God and defeated all false gods.
We, humans, were made to submit to God’s rule and steward creation in wisdom and love. When we acknowledge God’s rule, his kingship and bow the knee to Him, then the rest of creation flourishes. That is the issue with the world. It’s a lack of surrender to the true King.
Adam’s sin infected all of his descendants and even his environment. Only when sin is finally done away with at God’s final victory can the world be renewed.
Genesis 3:17 ESV
And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
Romans 8:18–22 ESV
For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
This idea of creation groaning. But it won’t go one forever. Eventually renewal will come.
And at the end of time:
Revelation 21:5 ESV
And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
God will make all things new and we can have joy now in that coming joyous time. We can rejoice in it. We should live rejoicing in it.
“Joy in God is the happiest of all joys.” - Spurgeon
The final word of the chapter is “equity.” I wanted to address this because that word in our modern American culture has gotten misused. In this case we are not talking about equal outcomes. It’s speaking of God’s judgement of the people being orderly and fair with integrity and truth. It will be a level path. It will be done rightly and righteously. Only those who have Christ’s righteousness imputed to them through trusting in the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ on the cross and resurrection and repenting of their sin will stand in the judgement. His strong hand of salvation saves. But there is judgement to come and those who do not know Christ will spend eternity apart from Him in hell. That is just the reality. It is a reality that should bring us and all of the world to joy! It will be the cause of much rejoicing for all eternity.
Hamilton writes:
“Psalm 98 joins with its context to point forward to the final triumph of God, whereby truth, goodness, and beauty will be vindicated, and to which all creation will respond with praise for the only creator and redeemer. That creator, the King himself, has now come in the flesh, and at the cost of mortal pain to himself, he has paid his bride’s debt, broken the bonds of her captivity, vanquished her tormentors, cleansed her of defilement, clothed her with his own righteousness, and promised to bring her to the place he has prepared where he will dwell with her. We need only believe, wait, hope, love, and respond as Ps 98 instructs.”
It looks back and looks forward and commands us to REJOICE! Be Joyful! Joy to the World indeed! The Lord has come!
Let earth receive her king!
Will you receive your King today?
Will you allow that sense of the darkness and despair give way to a burst of joy?
This Christmas, make a joyful noise to the Lord because of the marvelous things that He has done, chiefly among them that Christ has come, lived perfectly, died on the cross for our sins, and rose triumphantly and will return for His bride, the church. May that good news be the corner of your life. Repent and believe. … and have JOY.
Let’s pray
Pray.
- - Psalm 98ESV
- - Exodus 15:2ESV
- - Exodus 15:6ESV
- - Psalm 98:3ESV
- - Psalm 100:1ESV
- - Numbers 31:6ESV
- - Genesis 3:17ESV
- - Romans 8:18–22ESV
- - Revelation 21:5ESV
A Christmas Hallelujah

I. A Song of Joy V. 1-3

II. A Signal of Joy V. 4-6

III. A Supreme Joy V. 7-9

I. A Song of Joy V. 1-3

II. A Signal of Joy V. 4-6

III. A Supreme Joy V. 7-9

Psalm 98ESV

Exodus 15:2ESV

Exodus 15:6ESV

Psalm 98:3ESV

Psalm 100:1ESV

Numbers 31:6ESV

Genesis 3:17ESV

Romans 8:18–22ESV

Revelation 21:5ESV