Psalm 66 Feb. 5 For the Chief Musician. A song. A Psalm.  1Make a joyful shout to God, all the earth! 2Sing to the glory of His name! Offer glory and praise! 3Tell God, How awesome are Your deeds! Through the greatness of Your power, Your enemies submit themselves to You. 4All the earth will worship You, and will sing to You; they will sing to Your name. Selah. 5Come and see God’s deeds— awesome work on behalf of the children of men. 6He turned the sea into dry land, they went through the river on foot. There we rejoiced in Him. 7He rules by His might forever, His eyes watch the nations. Don’t let the rebellious rise up against Him. Selah. 8Praise our God, you peoples! Make the sound of His praise heard, 9who preserves our life among the living, and doesn’t allow our feet to be moved. 10For You, God, have tested us. You have refined us, as silver is refined. 11You brought us into prison, You laid a burden on our backs. 12You allowed men to ride over our heads. We went through fire and through water, but You brought us to the place of abundance. 13I will come into Your temple with burnt offerings. I will pay my vows to You, 14which my lips promised and my mouth spoke, when I was in distress. 15I will offer to You burnt offerings of fat animals, with the offering of rams, I will offer bulls with goats. Selah. 16Come and hear, all you who fear God; I will declare what He has done for my soul. 17I cried to Him with my mouth. He was extolled with my tongue. 18If I cherished sin in my heart, the Lord wouldn’t have listened. 19But most certainly, God has listened. He has heard the voice of my prayer. 20Blessed be God, who has not turned away my prayer, nor His grace from me.   

Commentary

66:1,2 Often the Psalms invite the Gentile world to join with Israel in their praise of God as their saviour (also :5). Israel were intended to be a light to the Gentiles around them, and to bring them to faith and covenant relationship with God. They failed in this, for the most part, despite these faithful Psalmists who sought to do so through the medium of producing songs which they hoped would penetrate into the surrounding nations. The great commission bids each of us to take the same message into the Gentile darkness around us. 
66:6 We rejoiced in Him- Often in the Psalms we are invited to consider ourselves as Israel in Egypt, subsequently rejoicing at the Red Sea deliverance; hence the Psalmist speaks of “us” as having gone through Israel’s experience of suffering and salvation (:11,12). The New Testament likewise invites us to see our baptism as a passing through the Red Sea, and our lives today as like their wilderness journey towards the Kingdom (1 Cor. 10:1-4). We are to as it were play ‘Bible television’, imagining the events as if we were there historically; for spiritually, it is all equally true for us in our salvation from this world of sin.