Psalm 99

The Lord is king:
Let all earth sing,
The nations bring
Their praises to his temple.
The Lord is high, and reigns above,
But rules with mercy and with love—
O praise his holy, great, and awful Name.

The Lord is just,
And surely must
(Indeed, thou dost)
In all the earth do rightly.
No punishment shalt thou forego
But sinners shall thy justice know
And magnify thy holy, awful Name.

But unto all
That own their fall
And to thee call,
Thou freely dost forgive them.
O Christ, that took on all our sin
And stamped thine image deep within,
We praise thy holy, great, and awful Name!

—Zachary Pletan

Thoughts

I got started on this about two years ago after finding an unrhymed versification that was ill-paired to the tune it was with. I then made absolutely no progress until one night last October, on the road in Carlsbad, NM, and simply made up my own meter with no tune in mind. If any of the musically-minded Internets have any ideas, I welcome them.

As for the Psalm, the first thing I found out when I started looking at it those years ago was that the OT is rife with the Gospel—you just have to know what you're looking for. Ps 99 is, as I have endeavored to reproduce, a three-part reflection on grace. Part 1 (vv. 1–3) treats God's lordship, part 2 (vv. 4–5) deals with his justice and law, and part 3 (vv. 6–9) samples saving grace. Notice especially that "they kept his testimonies, and the ordinance they gave him," but that this was (only) because "thou wast a God that forgavest them."

Like Psalm 51, this psalm shows a facet of the Gospel—God forgives us, not from anything we do, but from his own good pleasure.