The Bible Study Podcast, episode 374.

Today, the Bible Study podcast continues the study of Psalms with Psalm 33.

Welcome to the Bible Study podcast.

I'm your host, Chris Christensen.

Today we continue on with Psalm 33, the author

Unknown, and this is a song of praise. It goes like this. Sing joyfully to the Lord,

you righteous. It is fitting for the upright to praise him. Praise the Lord with the harp,

make music to him on the 10-stringed liar. Sing to him a new song, play skillfully, and shout for joy.

A couple thoughts here. One is that the psalmist here is clearly asking for the people to praise

God with music, which is not surprising because most Christian traditions have used music as a form

of worship. Although the Puritans

were known to melt down their organs and turn them into pewterware for the poor, but in most

traditions, music has played a very important part in worship. One of the things we should be

aware of, of course, is that the selection of musical instruments would be different at the time.

You would have a smaller set to choose from.

Harp and lyre and drums and flute would probably be about all you would have, at least of the

instruments that we would recognize. So no organ, no piano, no electric guitar. And then one of the

other things that strikes me with this is that there isn't one instrument to play, but David

is naming all of the different instruments that are instruments of his time, and there's no one way

to praise the Lord. If you're a harpist, you can praise the Lord with a harp. If you play the

liar, you can praise the Lord with a liar. And I think the same is true today, and I think it's also true, and this is going to be a little more controversial for some of you with different styles of music.

I personally believe you can praise the Lord with Gagorean chants.

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