Ps. 68.4 (praise reserved for the righteous)

Sing to God / praise his name / in song 
lift up praise / to the Rider of the Clouds
Yah is his name / celebrate before him. 

When victory is achieved, praise issues. This is the jubilation of deliverance and it largely book-ends the psalm: prisoners are brought out with music (vs. 6) and in an ecstatic gathering of tribes, a processional victory hymn full of minstrels and instruments, appears in verses 24-27; finally, in words close to our verse, the “kingdoms of the earth sing to God, sing praise to the Lord” (vs. 32).  And, important for our purposes in light of the previous reflections, the praise here is made “before him”. Further, he is designated as the “Rider of the Clouds” and while this will have dual functions in our psalm it is, here, taken to be a military image of a coming Warrior King/God. Once again, the image of movement on the part of God is employed while his righteous ones sing ‘before him’. This movement of God will, in the following verses, take the form of a benevolent shepherd-king who cares for his flock and, in particular, the orphans (fatherless), widows and dispossessed (homeless). We will see, there, how his conquering ‘arising-forth’ battles not only against his enemy-haters but against all forms of chaos that seek to disrupt the force of vitality that is communicated by and through his presence. Here, as to the element of praise, we can point out that the only words spoken in the psalm are those of God’s messengers (perhaps doves) and the righteous who are, always, in praise. The wicked and enemy-haters are entirely silent. Their rebellion, unlike in many other psalms, is never auditory. The song is reserved to the righteous.