Sing to Our Father
An invitation to sing and kneel that turns sharply into a warning. Since our Father made us and we are his flock, today's voice matters: do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, where a whole generation lost the rest waiting for them.
95 1Come, let us sing for joy to our Father; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation. 2Let us come before him with thanksgiving; let us shout to him joyfully with songs of praise. 3For our Father is a great King above all gods. 4In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the peaks of the mountains are his. 5The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land.
6Come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before our Father, our Maker. 7For he is our Father, and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his hand. Today, if you would hear his voice, 8do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, a a v8 Meribah and Massah: places in the Sinai wilderness where Israel demanded water and tested God (Exodus 17:1–7).
9where your ancestors tested me; they tried me, though they had seen my work. 10For forty years I grieved over that generation, and I said, "They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways." 11So I swore in my anger, "They will never enter my rest." b b v11 The book of Hebrews takes up this warning and shows that the rest our Father offers is found fully in Jesus — a rest from striving, entered by faith and never by hardened hearts.
