In the 1980s, the derogatory term “happy clappy” was applied to evangelicals. Proper church services ought to be restrained, the thinking went, and there was something not quite British about all this Graham Kendrick Shine Jesus Shine malarkey.

So I come to Psalm 47, and it turns out that the Bible itself is in favour of people clapping. It starts:

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. 
He subdued nations under us,
peoples under our feet. 
He chose our inheritance for us,
the pride of Jacob, whom he loved.

And why are followers of God encouraged to clap? Well, this psalm reflects back on God’s activities recorded in Joshua.

It brings together two big ideas.

1. God is sovereign

The idea of sovereignty does not mean that God is responsible for every act that occurs – he has delegated by giving people free will. But he is the only being infinitely powerful over creation.

David G. Firth, in his book Joshua (in the Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary series), says:

In these [first Psalm 47] verses, the importance of Yahweh’s reign over all the peoples is affirmed, with the gift of the land to Israel as particular evidence of his sovereignty. The claim of verse 8 [below], that God reigns over the nations, is thus particularly rooted in the experience of Israel receiving the land.

Verse 8 and 9 read:

God reigns over the nations;
God is seated on his holy throne. 
The nobles of the nations assemble 
as the people of the God of Abraham,
for the kings of the earth belong to God; 
he is greatly exalted.

Earthly leaders may seem very powerful, but they are not compared to God.

2. God is faithful

A major part of the plot in the 1999 movie The Matrix is about a betrayal by a character called Cypher. He decides life would be easier if he sold out his side and was allowed to forget the truth of his situation.

But God is never like that: he shows faithfulness to his followers. In Joshua, God implements a promise made to Abraham hundreds of years earlier about the land of Canaan. God repeated the promise, including to Jacob.

Jacob was travelling north from Beersheba, in the Negev desert in what is now southern Israel. And God told him (Genesis 28, NIV):

I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land.

So in the psalm, we read:

He chose our inheritance for us,
the pride of Jacob, whom he loved.

The CSB Study Bible, talking about an entirely different passage, suggests that “the pride of Jacob” is sometimes a reference to Yahweh himself. So we might interpret this section as the idea that God loved Jacob and Jacob loved God.