▼99:1 Some Bible students translate verse 1 as: ‘The LORD, the One Sitting on the Cherubim, is king! People will be afraid and the earth itself will shake!’ This makes ‘One Sitting on the Cherubim’ another name for the LORD. The LORD is a special name for God. His servants that love and obey him use it. Once this was only the Jews but now it is anyone that loves and obeys him. Cherubim are not people. They are special servants of God that live with him. They are very powerful. When people see that God really is king, they will be afraid. Even the earth itself will shake. (Something shakes when it cannot keep still.) Zion, in verse 2, is another name for Jerusalem. Really, Zion was the hill in Jerusalem where they built the temple.

▼99:3 Verses 3, 5 and 9 tell us that he is holy. Who is holy? The LORD our God. Really, we can translate verse 3 better as ‘they must praise your name – because it is holy.’ But the name of God means everything about God: his love, his power, his anger (when he is angry) and that he does what he has promised. He does not forget his people. But most important, God is holy and righteous. These are difficult words to understand. We say that holy means ‘never does anything wrong’ and righteous means ‘always does what is right.’ But both words mean much more than this. Because God is holy, he makes us feel afraid. This is because we are only people. But he is so much greater; he is God! That is part of what being holy means. Even when we love and obey him, we feel a bit afraid. There is a special word for this. It is ‘awe.’ We feel awe when we remember that God is holy. And so, we want to praise him (tell him that he is a great God). Also, we want to worship him. To worship him means to kneel in front of him. And tell him that we love him. ‘Kneel’ means ‘get down on our knees.’

▼99:5 ‘Kneel before him’ in verse 5 means ‘get down on our knees in front of him.’ But where is he? In the psalm, ‘him’ is really ‘at his footstool.’ A footstool is something that you rest your feet on. To the Jews it was a special place in the temple in Jerusalem. Sometimes the Jews said that the whole earth was God’s footstool! Isaiah 66:1 says ‘Heaven (the sky) is my seat and the earth is my footstool.’ So where is God? Everywhere, because the whole earth is his footstool. Also, the temple in Jerusalem has gone. In verses 1-5, the Jews (called ‘Jacob’ in verse 4) are special to the LORD, but we can all learn from these verses.

▼99:6 This is the only place in the Bible where it says that Moses was a priest. So some Bible students translate verse 6 as: Moses (a great leader), Aaron among his priests, and Samuel, were among those that prayed to him. Priests were God’s special servants in the temple at Jerusalem. They all came from the family of Aaron, who was Moses’ brother.

▼99:7 The column of cloud, verse 7, led Moses and Aaron from Egypt to Israel. A column of cloud is tall and thin. Perhaps there was a small column of cloud in the temple at Shiloh when Samuel lived there. The important thing about these great men was this. ‘They prayed to the LORD and he answered them’, (verse 6).

▼99:8 Verse 8 is perhaps the most important verse in Psalm 99. Even when God forgave his people, he still punished them! ‘Punished’ means ‘hurt them because they did not obey him.’ This is still true today. We may take something that is not ours. God will forgive us, but we may still have to go to prison. When God forgives us, it means this. We may have done bad things. But that will not stop us going to heaven (God’s home) when we die. When God forgives us, he gives the bad things that we do to Jesus. Jesus took them away when he died. But we must ask God to forgive us, and promise to try to obey him in the future.

▼99:9 When God has forgiven us, then verse 9 becomes the most important verse in the psalm! ‘Praise the LORD our God and kneel before him, because the LORD our God, he is holy.’