Catholic Commentary
Theological Foundation: Yahweh Alone is God
3Know that Yahweh, he is God. It is he who has made us, and we are his. We are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
Psalms 100:3 commands recognition of Yahweh as the sole God through emphatic declaration. The verse establishes that God created humanity and claims Israel as his people and pastoral flock, grounding monotheistic faith in covenantal relationship rather than abstract theology.
To know that Yahweh is God is not to assent to a doctrine but to enter a living relationship — the difference between knowing about someone and knowing them as shepherd, father, and Lord.
At the moral/tropological level, the verse is a rebuke to every subtle form of practical atheism — the life lived as if God were not God. Knowing Yahweh is not an event but a discipline, a daily act of re-recognition.
Catholic tradition reads Psalm 100:3 as a cornerstone of revealed monotheism and of the relationship between knowledge, worship, and belonging. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "God, who 'dwells in unapproachable light,' wants to communicate his own divine life to the men he freely created, in order to adopt them as his sons in his only-begotten Son" (CCC 52). The verse's command to know is therefore not a merely human act but a response to God's prior self-disclosure.
Saint Augustine, in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, comments on the Jubilate Deo (Ps 100) as a song addressed ultimately to the whole Church — indeed to all nations — calling them into the sheepfold of Christ. For Augustine, "knowing that Yahweh is God" is the precondition of authentic praise: one cannot rightly glorify what one does not truly know. Disordered worship — idolatry, in any of its forms — flows from this failure of knowledge.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, following the Augustinian tradition, situates the knowledge of God at the summit of the intellectual virtues, but he insists (Summa Theologiae I, q.1, a.1) that revealed knowledge (sacra doctrina) exceeds philosophical knowledge of God's existence. To "know that Yahweh is God" in the biblical sense is to receive a gift — fides illumined by intellectus — that is inseparable from the Church's Tradition and Scripture together.
The First Vatican Council's Dei Filius (1870) affirms that God can be known with certainty by natural reason from creation, yet Revelation lifts this knowing to the order of saving truth. Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est (§1) grounds Christian life in precisely this experiential knowing: "Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person." Psalm 100:3 anticipates this Christological fulfillment: to know that Yahweh is God is, for the Christian, to know it in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 4:6).
In a culture that prizes spiritual eclecticism — the "spiritual but not religious" posture that treats all gods as interchangeable expressions of a vague transcendence — Psalm 100:3 is a bracing challenge. The verse does not say "acknowledge that something divine exists"; it names a name: Yahweh. This particularity is not narrow-mindedness but the precondition of a real relationship.
For the contemporary Catholic, this verse calls for an examination of practical monotheism. Do I actually live as though Yahweh — the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of Jesus Christ — is the God? Or do I unconsciously enthrone other lords: financial security, social approval, ideological identity? The Hebrew da'at demands more than Sunday assent; it demands the integration of belief and life.
Concretely: praying the Divine Office (especially the Laudate psalms), beginning each morning with the deliberate act of acknowledging God's sovereignty, or incorporating Eucharistic adoration as a sustained act of "knowing" — these are all participations in the command of Psalm 100:3. The sheep know the shepherd's voice (John 10:4); this knowing is cultivated, not assumed.
Commentary
Verse 3: "Know that Yahweh, he is God."
The imperative da'at (דְּעוּ) — "know!" — opens with a command that is deliberately cognitive, relational, and covenantal all at once. In biblical Hebrew, yāda' does not designate the detached knowledge of a philosopher; it is the knowing of a husband and wife, of a shepherd and his flock, of a people shaped by lived encounter with their God. The Psalmist is not inviting speculative theology but demanding a total reorientation of the self toward divine reality.
"Yahweh, he is God" (יְהוָה הוּא אֱלֹהִים) — the syntax is emphatic. The pronoun hûʾ ("he") is inserted for emphasis, functioning as an exclamation: He — no other — is God. This is Israel's ancient monotheistic confession, echoing the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4 and the battle-cry of Elijah's contest on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:39), where the people fall on their faces crying, "Yahweh — he is God!" The Psalm's verse thus activates the entire history of Israel's struggle against idolatry and its hard-won monotheistic faith.
Verse 3 continued: "It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people and the sheep of his pasture."
(Note: while the annotation cluster focuses on the opening declaration, the verse is inseparable from its completion in most manuscripts.) The declaration immediately gives its basis: he made us. Creation ('āśāh) and covenant are braided together. The claim is not only cosmological — God made all humanity — but ecclesial and particular: "we are his" (lô ʾănaḥnû, "to him we belong"). The phrase "his people and the sheep of his pasture" employs the Shepherd metaphor so central to Israel's self-understanding (Ps 23, Ezek 34), locating the knowing-community within an intimate, providential relationship.
Typological and Spiritual Senses:
At the typological level, this "knowing" finds its fullest expression in the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ, humanity is given not merely a commandment to know God but God Himself made knowable — in a body, a face, a voice. The Fathers saw in every Psalm a movement toward Christ; here, the knowing of Yahweh is recapitulated in the gnōsis of Christ (John 17:3: "This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent"). The making ('āśāh) is fulfilled in the New Creation: those who belong to the Church are not only creatures of God but, through Baptism, a new creation in Christ (2 Cor 5:17).