Ps. 47.6-7 ('kingdom-praise')

“Sing praises / to God / sing praises! – sing praises / to our king / sing praises! – For / God is king / of the whole earth; - sing a maskil.” It is perhaps a statement of the obvious, within the context of this psalm, but it deserves noting: for our psalmist, this liturgical act is one that sees ‘God’ and ‘king’ as interchangeable, indeed, parallel. These verses show this, first, by dividing and paralleling the two terms God and King: ‘sing praises to God…’; ‘sing praises to our king…’. And then combining them together in a single verse: ‘for God is king…’. In other words, ‘God’ does not sit behind, in a more powerful eternal way, the image of ‘king’. Rather, God is King. Perhaps more significantly, the first call is to sing praises to “God”, the second to “our king” and the last for “God is king”. The seemingly more expansive “God” flows into the more seemingly limited “our King” (not “the king”) until both terms emerge as joined together in “God is king”. While initially a seemingly mundane observation, it does strike me as of rather large importance. As we have said, the impetus of the praise issuing (indeed, overflowing) in this psalm is one that originates from the idea of Yhwh-Elyon’s, not simply ‘authority’ over the earth, but his regal authority, his kingly authority. It is one that erupts in praise precisely because of the fact that the earth has become ordered, like a kingdom, underneath its king. This praise is, therefore, kingdom-praise. It would be tempting to say it this way: creation moves to its apogee of praise not in its contemplation of God, but in its praise of “God is king”. The force of the directive in these verses seems to indicate that the psalmist is directing us toward this vision with his continual and repeated call to “praise”—indeed, four times in two lines!  In Israel, God as “our King” (Yhwh) makes his first step down the ladder to creation, with the final step being “God is king of the whole earth!” His personal election of Israel will fill the entire earth, in the same way that Yhwh will fill out and complete Elyon. This, it could be argued, is why Israel ‘comes first’: if the goal is to provide the world with the intimacy of Israel’s king (Yhwh), rather than with a more abstract relationship, then the particular election of Israel is understood to be the ‘model’; it is not merely a beginning but, in a real way, the end and goal.