"The Lord reigns; let the peoples tremble!
He sits enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake!
2 The Lord is great in Zion;
he is exalted over all the peoples.
3 Let them praise your great and awesome name!
Holy is he!
4 The King in his might loves justice.
You have established equity;
you have executed justice
and righteousness in Jacob.
5 Exalt the Lord our God;
worship at his footstool!
Holy is he!
6 Moses and Aaron were among his priests,
Samuel also was among those who called upon his name.
They called to the Lord, and he answered them.
7 In the pillar of the cloud he spoke to them;
they kept his testimonies
and the statute that he gave them.
8 O Lord our God, you answered them;
you were a forgiving God to them,
but an avenger of their wrongdoings.
9 Exalt the Lord our God,
and worship at his holy mountain;
for the Lord our God is holy!"
Psalm 99
We continue in the Enthronement Psalms. The last one (Psalm 98) was one of unalloyed praise, celebrating the accomplished victory of the Lord, and its consummation in the End-time, and a consummation that embraces the whole of the created order. Here, as one commentator puts it, we pass beyond the event of the Divine victory, to grasp the eternal principle of that victory, viz. holiness. The Psalm has three stanzas, each ending with an almost identical phrase, 'He is holy', or 'holy is He'. In 1-3 it is the enthronement of holiness: in 4, 5, the integrity of holiness; in 6-9, the encounter with holiness. The theme, then, is the holiness of God. Perhaps one of the best modem comments on this is to be found in the conversation recorded in C.S. Lewis's 'The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe':
'Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he is good. He is the King, I tell you.'
Not safe, but good. He is the King! This is an important emphasis, and one that tends to be discounted and played down today, when the idea of fear is replaced by that of love: instead of 'the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom', we have 'the beginning of wisdom is the love of God'; instead of the phrase 'In the faith and fear of Christ', we have 'the faith and love of Christ'. There is a sense in which the message of the Psalm for us is the timely reminder of the holiness of God, and that He is a God to be feared. We may not presume upon Him. This is the true biblical emphasis and it is completely consonant with the equally biblical note of the love of God, for another Psalm (Psalm 130) says, 'There is forgiveness with Thee, that Thou mayest be feared'.