The Festival, The Father, and The Foreign Tongue Text: Psalm 81:1-5
Introduction: The Tragic 'If'
There are few things in Scripture more poignant, more tragic, than the laments of God over His own people. This psalm is one of them. It begins with a thunderous, joyous, full-throated call to worship. It is a summons to a festival, a command to make a glorious noise to the God of Jacob. And then, as the psalm unfolds, the music dies down, and we hear the voice of God Himself, recounting His faithfulness and lamenting Israel's deafness. The central tragedy is captured in one word that hangs heavy in the air later in the psalm: "Oh that my people would listen to me!"
This psalm is a tale of two voices. The first is the voice of the congregation, summoned to loud and celebratory praise. The second is the voice of God, a fatherly voice filled with both tender recollection and sorrowful rebuke. It is a psalm about the stark contrast between the worship God commands and deserves, and the stubborn refusal of His people to render it from the heart. It is about the relationship between liturgy and life, between festival and faithfulness.
We live in an age that has little appetite for loud, objective, commanded joy. Our worship is too often shaped by our fickle inward dispositions, our therapeutic needs, or our desire for a respectable, quiet, and slightly detached experience. But the Bible will have none of it. God commands His people to be loud. He commands them to celebrate. He ties this celebration not to their feelings, but to His mighty acts in history. Our joy is not rooted in our circumstances, but in His character and His covenant.
But this psalm also warns us that it is possible to go through all the right liturgical motions, to blow the trumpets and strike the tambourines, while our hearts are a thousand miles away. It is possible to have a form of godliness while denying its power. The great tragedy is not that God is unwilling to bless, but that we are unwilling to listen. He stands with His hands laden with gifts, but our own hands are clenched fists, refusing to receive. This psalm confronts us with a fundamental choice: will we have the festival and the Father, or will we have the festival and our idols? You cannot have both.
The Text
Sing for joy to God our strength; Make a loud shout to the God of Jacob.
Lift up a song of praise, strike the tambourine, The sweet sounding lyre with the harp.
Blow the trumpet at the new moon, At the full moon, on our feast day.
For it is a statute for Israel, A judgment of the God of Jacob.
He established it for a testimony in Joseph When he went forth over the land of Egypt. I heard a language that I did not know:
(Psalm 81:1-5 LSB)
A Command to Be Loud (v. 1-2)
The psalm opens not with a polite suggestion, but with a series of imperatives. This is a command performance.
"Sing for joy to God our strength; Make a loud shout to the God of Jacob. Lift up a song of praise, strike the tambourine, The sweet sounding lyre with the harp." (Psalm 81:1-2)
The first thing to notice is the character of this worship. It is joyful, and it is loud. The Hebrew commands us to "sing for joy" and to "make a loud shout." This is not the quiet, internal, sentimental piety that our therapeutic age mistakes for reverence. This is robust, masculine, full-throated praise. This is the kind of noise a victorious army makes. Why? Because the one we worship is "God our strength." He is not our weakness, our cosmic therapist, or our life coach. He is our fortress, our might, our deliverer. Weak and timid praise is an insult to a God of infinite strength.
He is also the "God of Jacob." This is covenant language. This is the God who wrestled with Jacob and blessed him, the God who made promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and who keeps those promises across the generations. Our worship is not a generic spiritual experience; it is a covenantal transaction with the God who has named us and claimed us as His own.
And this worship is musical. It is structured. It involves instruments: the tambourine, the lyre, the harp. This is not just an emotional outburst; it is ordered art. God is glorified by skilled musicianship offered in His service. The call is to "lift up a song," which implies both melody and words. We are to sing theology. We are to praise God with our minds and our bodies, with our voices and with our hands on the instruments. This is embodied worship, a total response of the whole man to the living God.
Appointed Times, Divine Authority (v. 3-4)
This loud, joyful worship is not a spontaneous, "let's-get-together-when-we-feel-like-it" affair. It is anchored in the sacred calendar, by divine decree.
"Blow the trumpet at the new moon, At the full moon, on our feast day. For it is a statute for Israel, A judgment of the God of Jacob." (Psalm 81:3-4 LSB)
The trumpet, the shofar, was blown to signal significant events: the start of a festival, a call to war, the coronation of a king. Here, it announces the sacred times appointed by God. The new moon marked the beginning of the month, and the full moon often coincided with major feasts like Passover and Tabernacles. God's people were to order their lives, their work, their rest, and their worship, not according to the dictates of Pharaoh or the rhythms of the pagan world, but according to the calendar of Heaven. Their time belonged to God.
And why do they do this? "For it is a statute for Israel, a judgment of the God of Jacob." This is crucial. Their worship is an act of obedience. It is grounded in divine law. The word "statute" refers to a permanent, binding ordinance. The word "judgment" here means a ruling, a legal decision from the supreme court of heaven. We do not worship God because it feels good, or because it meets our needs, or because it's a nice community activity. We worship God because He has commanded it. He is the Creator, we are the creatures, and He has the absolute right to dictate the terms of our approach to Him. To worship God on His terms is freedom; to invent our own is the very essence of idolatry and bondage.
This is a direct affront to the modern evangelical mindset that treats worship as a consumer product to be tailored to the tastes of the unbeliever or the preferences of the seeker. God has given us the pattern. Our job is not to be innovative, but to be faithful. Our worship is a "judgment" of the God of Jacob, and therefore it is also a judgment on all other rival claims to authority.
The Testimony in a Foreign Land (v. 5)
The psalm now grounds this statute in a specific historical event, and then takes a very interesting turn.
"He established it for a testimony in Joseph When he went forth over the land of Egypt. I heard a language that I did not know:" (Psalm 81:5 LSB)
The foundation for this festival worship is the Exodus. God established this "testimony" when He brought His people out of Egypt. The phrase "in Joseph" can mean "among the people of Joseph," referring to all of Israel. When God acted to deliver them from slavery, He simultaneously established the pattern of worship by which they were to remember and celebrate that deliverance. The worship is a testimony, a witness to the mighty acts of God in history. It retells the story of redemption. Every time the trumpet blew on a feast day, it was a declaration that the God of Jacob, not Pharaoh, is the true king.
Then comes the shift in speaker. "I heard a language that I did not know." Who is this "I"? The context of the whole psalm makes it clear that this is the voice of the nation, personified. This is Israel speaking. When were they in a place where they heard a foreign language? In Egypt. The Egyptians were a mighty, sophisticated, and utterly alien culture. Their language, their customs, and most importantly, their gods, were not Israel's. In Egypt, Israel was confronted with a worldview entirely hostile to their own.
But there is a deeper meaning here. The "language" they did not know was not just Egyptian. It was the language of divine revelation. In Egypt, God began to speak to them in a new and powerful way. He spoke in the language of plagues, of judgment, of fire and blood and deliverance. It was a language of sovereign power that Pharaoh did not understand and that Israel had never heard before. It was the strange and terrifying voice of the living God cutting through the noise of a pagan empire. This was the voice that established the statutes and judgments. God spoke His alien word of grace and power into their world of slavery, and it changed everything.
Conclusion: Hearing the Voice We Know
This psalm begins with a summons to a party, a loud and joyous festival. But it is a party with a purpose. It is a covenant renewal ceremony, a national pledge of allegiance to the God who rescued them from a land where they were surrounded by a foreign tongue.
For us, the application is direct. We too have been delivered from a foreign land, the land of sin and death, ruled by the prince of the power of the air. We were slaves in that kingdom. And in that bondage, God spoke a language we did not know. He spoke the strange language of the cross. He spoke of a righteousness that is a gift, of a forgiveness bought with blood, of a victory won through death. The gospel is a foreign tongue to the natural man; it is foolishness to him.
But God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts. He has given us ears to hear. The foreign language of the gospel has become the mother tongue of our souls. The voice of the Shepherd is no longer strange to us; it is the voice we know, and we follow Him.
Therefore, we are commanded to worship. Our worship is also a statute, a judgment, a testimony. When we gather on the Lord's Day, we are blowing the trumpet of the new covenant. We are celebrating the true feast, Christ our Passover, who has been sacrificed for us. We are commanded to sing loudly, to rejoice with all our might, because our God is our strength. He has delivered us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of His beloved Son.
The great tragedy of this psalm is that Israel, having heard that divine voice, grew deaf to it. They preferred the whispers of idols. Let that not be said of us. God has spoken to us definitively in His Son. Let us not be a people who need to be told, "Oh that you would listen to Me." Let us be a people who say, "Speak, Lord, for your servant hears." And having heard, let us answer with the loudest and most joyful praise we can muster.