Biblion Bible Commentary
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Enter His Gates With Thanksgiving
Psalms 100:1-5
1 A Psalm of thanksgiving. Shout for joy to Yahweh, all you lands! · WEB
Five verses of pure invitation, and the one thing the worshipers are told to know is that they did not make themselves.
Shout for joy to Yahweh, all you lands! Serve Yahweh with gladness. Come before his presence with singing Psalms 100:1–2.
The shortest and most quoted call to worship in the collection, and it closes the group of enthronement psalms. Seven imperatives in five verses, and every one is an invitation rather than a demand.
Serve Yahweh with gladness. The manner is specified. Service was expected of subjects everywhere in that world; the adverb is what distinguishes this one.
Know that Yahweh, he is God. It is he who has made us, and we are his. We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture Psalms 100:3.
The one thing the worshipers are told to know, and it is a fact about their own origin. Not that God is powerful or good — that he made them, and that they therefore belong to someone.
The middle clause is where the Hebrew tradition itself divides, between we are his and not we ourselves, and the two readings amount to the same claim from opposite directions. Either way the sentence denies self-manufacture, which is the assumption underneath most refusals to worship anything.
Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise Psalms 100:4.
The movement is architectural — through the gates, into the courts, each stage with something brought. Nobody arrives empty.
Give thanks to him, and bless his name.
For Yahweh is good. His loving kindness endures forever, his faithfulness to all generations Psalms 100:5.
The reason, given last and in three parts. Goodness, loving kindness and faithfulness — the same covenant vocabulary that runs through the eighty-ninth psalm, here stated without any crisis attached to it.
And the durations are worth noticing. The loving kindness endures forever; the faithfulness runs to all generations. One is measured against eternity and the other against people, which is the difference between what God is and what he has been to a succession of families who each had him for a lifetime.
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