Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary. ⁷Ascribe to the LORD, O families of the peoples, ascribe to the LORD glory and strength! ⁸Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name; bring an offering, and come into his courts! —Psalm 96:6-8
Worship the Lord is the theme of Psalm 96. We are called to worship God because He is worthy of our worship. He is great (verse 4) and He made the heavens (verse 5). Now in verse 6, we see that “Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.”
Holy and Near
This is a glimpse into His holiness—of his blinding purity and incomparable wonder. What does it mean that majesty is before Him? Or that strength is in His presence? It's more than we can fathom. God is transcendent, holy, set apart from all else. He is so much beyond what our intellect can comprehend. And He is astonishingly near.
Consider verse 8. After the glimpse of God’s holiness and the command to praise Him, the psalmist welcomes us into His presence: “bring an offering and come into his courts!” This points to something wonderful about who God is. In all of His holiness He is relational. In all the ways that He is not like anything else, He doesn’t seclude himself in unintelligible riddles far removed from His creatures. He is holy and He is near. He is incredibly different from us and, by grace, He invites us into fellowship. He is high and lifted up, and He dwells with the lowly (Isaiah 57:15).
We perceive God's holiness is in His acts. Theologian John Webster writes, “As Father, Son and Spirit, God is holy in all his works. God is holy; but God is what God does, and so God’s holiness is to be defined out of God’s works” (Holiness, 39). God shows us how His holiness looks so that we would recognize Him and confess His worth, exactly as Psalm 96 commands.
The Clearest Picture
What is the clearest picture of God’s holiness? Answer: Jesus. Jesus said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9; see also Hebrews 1:1–3). God showed us most clearly how He is not like us by becoming one of us in order to bring us to God (1 Peter 3:18). God, utterly unique and inscrutably distinct, became a man. The eternal Son, who had always enjoyed the trinitarian fellowship with the Father and the Spirit before the world began, put on our flesh in order to suffer for flesh. This didn’t diminish His holiness—it vividly expressed it.
Do you see His humility? A God this great going this low. No one else in the universe can do that. No one else in the universe is like this. Praise Him! Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His name.
For Reflection
How does the psalmist call us to worship?
What does it mean for God to be holy?
What is the clearest picture of God’s holiness?