Ps. 89.1 (on earth as it is in heaven)

I want to sing forever / of Yhwh’s deeds / of loyal-love
sing of them / to one generation / after another
use my mouth / to make known / your faithfulness. 

There are several notes struck in these opening lines that are going to reverberate throughout the psalm. 

The liturgy of deeds. The psalmist wants to engage in a liturgy to God, not simply as to his presence, but as it is enacted in his covenant fidelity to David the king. This act of praise will be mirrored in verse 5. There, the heavens sing to Yhwh, praising and proclaiming the exact same attributes of Yhwh that are sung on earth. The difference is that the heavens are proclaiming Yhwh’s faithfulness and loyal-love as it pertains to Yhwh, king of heaven. The psalmist, on the other hand, is proclaiming Yhwh’s faithfulness and loyal-love as it pertains to his installing of David, king of earth. It is important to see this similarity as it will be developed much more fully later on—David is the ‘image of God’ on earth (the “adam” of God), the one who enacts Yhwh’s heavenly shalom on earth. The ‘praise’ that is spoken of here, as we will see, is actually a petition due to the fact that it appears that the covenant with David has been abrogated and the earth is returning into chaos. In a sense it is type of “thy kingdom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”. The psalmist wants the earth to enter into the liturgy of heaven by and through a renewed Davidic covenant that will establish on earth that reality that exists in heaven.  

Forever. We see this often, this desire for the ‘forever’ of God. This forever, though, has a particular ring when applied to David. The Davidic covenant’s very heart is the fact that it will remain forever. When applied to a king in particular, the ‘forever’ of God looks toward something concrete: the shalom of God established on earth; the stilling of the chaos of the nations; the establishment of the ‘kingdom of God’. It is that which fully establishes the realm in harmony and abundance. This perpetuity is envisioned generationally—the ‘forever’ is parallel to ‘generation after generation’, but now it is a perpetual liturgy. This reality is not just reflection on something exterior to the psalm. Verse 4 says: “I will establish your offspring forever, and sustain your throne for one generation after another.” There is a clear parallel here to verse 1’s ‘singing forever’ of Yhwh’s deeds and ‘singing them’ ‘generation after generation’. This is the ‘forever’ of the heavenly liturgy—that realm where Yhwh is king. Again, that forever of heaven is now made present on earth in the Davidic covenant. 

Loyal-love and Faithfulness. These terms crop up over and over again in the psalm, often side by side. In nearly every single other reference they apply to the Davidic covenant. In particular, the term ‘faithfulness’ is referred to seven times, alluding to the profound point that the Davidic covenant in some way perfectly embodies Yhwh’s faithfulness. In other words, to truly contemplate and enter into Yhwh’s faithfulness one does not (as we explored yesterday) look to a generalized disposition of Yhwh but to the entirely particular covenant he established with David (the more we move into the Davidic covenant the more we move into Yhwh’s faithfulness; it is a deepening, perhaps, more than a broadening). We will explore this more as we proceed