“Clap your hands, all you nations;
shout to God with cries of joy.
For the Lord Most High is awesome,
the great King over all the earth.” (Psalm 47:1-2, NIV)

I don’t believe in coincidences; nor do I believe in “fate.” I believe in the sovereignty and providence of God over all things and all people. The reason for that is simply because of what I read in the Bible.

I’m required to make a rational decision: either see the world and my life as governed by coincidences and “fate” or (and this is a big OR) see the world and my life as governed by God. I can’t live in the in-between, and if I choose coincidence and “fate,” then I must leave God behind. The thing is, if I leave God behind, then I have to leave the Bible behind and that gets to be a real when I read things like Psalm 47:1-2.

In this Psalm, the psalmist is calling for his hearers and readers to do something. He’s calling on them to “clap their hands and shout to God with cries of joy.” The question you or I should be asking after reading something like that is: why?

Why, psalmist, writing thousands of years ago, should I clap and joyfully shout to God?

The reason is given in the rest of the psalm, but we can see where he’s going just by looking at the next verse. The psalmist writes, “For (or because) the LORD Most High is awesome, the great King over all the earth.”

Your God, the LORD—Yahweh—is king; he is the King, which means, if Yahweh is King, then there is no other king. True enough there will be people, and countries, and powers, and viruses, who say they’re king. But, if Yahweh is the King, then they are not. No matter what they say or do.

Therefore, you can clap your hands and shout to God with cries of joy right now, wherever you are. In the midst of incredible pleasure or incredible suffering, God is still King and this King is loves you.

Do you need more?

Give yourself to reading the rest of the psalm.