After reading Spurgeon’s commentary and then the psalm itself, I’m reminded that we read the Bible all wrong — as progressive textualists, not as conservative originalists. We fool ourselves into thinking that The Holy Bible — like The Constitution — was written with Americans in mind.
When — as with this psalm — the psalmist writes, “Sing to the Lord, all the earth” and “the Lord made the heavens,” his ideas of the land and sky are much different from ours. His world — his entire universe, in fact — was much smaller, more compact, less well rounded than ours is now.
Even Spurgeon interprets those references in terms of his limited 19th-century knowledge when the preacher declares that “National jealousies are dead” and “All the earth Jehovah made” and “the sun shines on all lands….” Neither the State of Israel nor the late great USSR existed then.
But in Old Hebrew times, Copernicus and Galileo and all of those other great lookers and big thinkers weren’t even glints in their distant ancestors’ eyes, so the heavens and the earth to King David and King Solomon — and millennia later even the Rev. Spurgeon — were so much different than now.
And what about in this day and age with all the new wonders we’re seeing and coming to know, whether virtually or in person? Isn’t it ironic that many conservative thinkers now — originalists, they call themselves — interpret a wrong-headed holy writ like beat poets but our most vital rights like flat-earthers?