toy' joH'a' tlhej tIvtaHghach. ghoS qaSpa' Daj Daq tlhej bomtaH.
Serve the LORD with gladness. Come before his presence with singing. Psalm 100:2
Serve the LORD with gladness. Come before his presence with singing. Psalm 100:2
On my planet, in the hemisphere where I live, it is summer: the time of year for vacations and enjoying times of leisure. Except - if you are a student of a certain age, it is often the time to find a summer job.
Work can be a necessity. Work can be a mission, work can be many things - but most do not do it "with gladness," as this psalm commands. That may be why the current best-seller Joy at Work catches people by surprise - "what, I can have JOY... at WORK?"
Yet an older book talks about the same thing - here in Psalm 100 we're called to a special kind of work - a joyful work, to "serve the Lord." Too often we have the impression that the Bible is a book of doom, when it is far more about joy - the joy that God intends for his people. In the WEB translation alone, the word "joy" occurs over 160 times, compared to "sorrow" which occurs fewer than 50 times. Or look for "glad" (nearly 90 times) compared to "sad" (15 times).
God is hiring. And the work he's calling us to do, is a joyful one to be done tlhej tIvtaHghach with gladness. The word here "gladness" is simchah, and carries the idea of gladness, joy, mirth, and pleasure : hardly a call to drudgery. As Jesus told his followers - it was his intention "that your joy may be made full." (John 15:11, 16:24)
In this verse we can see another case of parallelism, the poetic structure used in the Bible to emphasize an idea, in this case "serve the Lord," and "singing" drives home what our work is to be: delight in worship. By the way, the Hebrew word here translated "toy'" or "serve," abad, is familiar to many: you see it in the name Obadiah and Abdullah, which both mean "servant of God."
This IS our work. In fact, the term "liturgy," used to refer to services of worship, is Greek for "the work of the people": it is our job. And this joyful work isn't a summer job: we're talking about eternity. To serve God, by delighting in his gifts and love toward us. We will serve him, and celebrate - forever - what he has done.
toy' joH'a' tlhej tIvtaHghach. ghoS qaSpa' Daj Daq tlhej bomtaH.
Serve the LORD with gladness. Come before his presence with singing. Psalm 100:2
Serve the LORD with gladness. Come before his presence with singing. Psalm 100:2
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