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Enter His Gates

           Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations. (Psalm 100:4-5)

          Have you ever really thought about the Psalms? I mean, we’re talking about 150 chapters, one of which is 176 verses long (Psalm 119). Psalm 14 and Psalm 52 are similar enough that one might think one or the other is plagiarized, and I doubt this is the only case of repetition. Sometimes, they call on us to praise God. Other times, they call on God to shatter the teeth of our enemies. They can be an emotional rollercoaster, at the highest of highs one moment, and inconsolable the next. One will proclaim the blamelessness of the psalmist, and the next will confess his sins. To say that they’re all over the place is not an exaggeration. But perhaps more to the point, so are we. It seems as if, perhaps, most of the rest of the Bible is history and instruction, while the psalms are pictures of what trying to live with those instructions looks like.

       In Psalm 100, it looks like overflowing excitement. On the one hand, it seems like a victory procession, with the king and his soldiers parading into his city. Two other possibilities come to mind within the “king and his victorious warriors” theme. One is that the city they are entering is one that had been the king’s, but had been captured by an enemy, and the king has rescued them. The other is that the song is being sung by those who had been defeated, the enemy army and their families, being led into the city after having been told that they would not be killed, enslaved, or mistreated, but would be considered as full citizens of the king’s land.

          Yes, the second and third are flights of fancy on my part. But imagine how you might want to enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise. How much would you want to thank him if you were in those circumstances? Or, suppose your city had been saved or you had been made a citizen twenty years earlier, and the king was returning for a visit. What would it take for you (or me) to join in on this Psalm? 

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