Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

We don't know who wrote any of the Psalms we read today, but they're all really

descriptive, picturesque Psalms, so it makes me wonder if they were written by the same person.

Psalm 95 opens with praise and reminds the listener that God isn't just supreme over the earthly realm,

he's supreme over the spiritual realm as well. He's worthy of worship, and especially the worship

of his people. It's not entirely evident in the English version of verse 6, but in this short verse which says,

Oh, come, let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker.

He's describing three different postures for worshiping God.

Bowing and down are two separate acts, and kneeling is another act. These are humble postures of

honor and submission, which is how we should relate to the one who made us. But then he goes on to

describe another aspect of our relationship with God. It's not contradictory to the humble

bowing toward our maker. It's complementary. He portrays God as our shepherd,

the one who is attentive to us and feeds us and watches over us. He calls us the sheep of his hand.

It's a much more intimate relational picture. And both things are true of our relationship with God.

He's our maker and he's our shepherd. He doesn't just make us and then

leave us on our own. He's with us all the time, watching over us. The psalmist begs the listener

not to harden their hearts to such great truths, and he references the Israelites who did have

hardened hearts. They didn't know God's ways, and they missed out on the beautiful complexity of this kind of

relationship with him, the kind that brings rest and restoration.

Psalm 97 reiterates God's supremacy over everything.

He depicts God as a thunderstorm with lightning that strikes and consumes his enemies.

He also says God melts the mountains like wax, which is a direct affront to all the ancient pagan deities that were believed to live on these mountains.

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