Catholic Commentary
A Call to Worship the Covenant God
6Oh come, let’s worship and bow down. Let’s kneel before Yahweh, our Maker,7for he is our God. We are the people of his pasture, and the sheep in his care. Today, oh that you would hear his voice!
Psalms 95:6–7 calls the worshipping community to physically prostrate themselves and bow before God because he is their covenant God who has led and provided for them. The passage emphasizes communal worship with escalating physical acts of submission, grounded in the intimate relationship between the shepherd God and his people.
We bow down not because we are slaves, but because we belong to a Shepherd who holds us in his hand and calls us by name.
Catholic tradition illuminates these verses with particular richness at three levels.
The Theology of the Body in Worship. Catholic teaching has always insisted that the body participates in worship, not merely the soul. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM, §43) mandates kneeling at specific moments of the Mass precisely because the exterior act shapes the interior disposition. St. John Chrysostom wrote: "When you bend your knee, it is not the knee that prays—it is the soul that bows." The triple kneeling gesture of Psalm 95:6 anticipates the Catholic instinct that adoration is somatic—it involves the whole person.
The Covenant Name "Our God." The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2143) teaches that the name of God is holy and that to invoke it properly is already an act of worship. When Israel says "our God," they are not merely identifying a deity—they are renewing the covenant (see CCC §2574 on the covenant bond as the basis of prayer). The Church Fathers, especially St. Augustine in his Enarrationes in Psalmos, read "our God" as a foreshadowing of the Church's relationship to Christ: "He is ours because he took our flesh; we are his because he redeemed us with his blood."
The Shepherd Christology. Patristic and medieval exegetes consistently read the "shepherd of his hand" christologically. St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on this psalm in his Postilla super Psalmos, identifies the hand of God with the Word made flesh—the Good Shepherd of John 10 who holds his sheep so that "no one can snatch them out of my hand" (John 10:28). The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (§16) affirms precisely this typological coherence: the Old Testament is ordered toward and illuminated by Christ.
For a contemporary Catholic, Psalm 95:6–7 confronts a specific temptation of our age: the reduction of worship to performance, preference, or feeling. The psalm does not say "come, if you feel moved" or "bow down, when it feels authentic." It commands. And the command is grounded not in guilt but in identity: he is our God. This changes everything about how a Catholic should approach Sunday Mass or the Liturgy of the Hours.
Practically, this passage is an invitation to recover the lost art of the genuflection—not as a rote habit, but as a daily re-enactment of the truth that we are sheep who belong to a Shepherd. Before entering a pew, before opening a breviary, the physical act of kneeling says what our distracted minds often forget: I am not the center of this. He is.
For those who struggle with the Church's authority or find the liturgy uninspiring, verse 7 offers the anchor: "he is our God." The covenant precedes our feelings about it. We bow not because every moment of faith feels electric, but because the relationship is real—and fidelity to that relationship, expressed bodily and communally, is itself a form of love.
Commentary
Psalms 95:6 — "Oh come, let us worship and bow down"
The triple imperative in the Hebrew original—nishtaḥăweh (worship/prostrate), nikra'ah (kneel/bow down), and nibrekah (bless by bending the knee)—is a crescendo of increasingly physical acts of submission. The Psalmist is not content with interior devotion alone; the body is conscripted into worship. This is not redundancy but intensification: the worshipper is invited to throw their whole self—posture, gesture, weight—toward God. The verb shāḥāh (to prostrate) is the same word used of Abraham falling on his face before the LORD (Genesis 17:3) and of the elders in Revelation casting their crowns before the throne. It denotes the complete self-abasement of the creature before the Creator.
The invitation "Oh come" (lekû, literally "go!" or "let us go!") echoes verse 1's summons and creates an urgent, processional energy. This is a communal act: "let us" worship. The psalm refuses to reduce worship to a private transaction between the individual soul and God. We come together, we bow together, we confess together. This communal dimension is essential—Israel is not a collection of solitary mystics but a covenantal people who stand before God as one.
Psalms 95:7 — "For he is our God"
The connective "for" (kî in Hebrew) is crucial: it provides the reason for the prostration demanded in verse 6. We do not bow out of servile fear or social convention—we bow because of who this God is and what he has done. "Our God" is a shorthand for the entire covenant history: the God of the Exodus, the God of Sinai, the God who fed Israel with manna and led them by cloud and fire. The possessive pronoun "our" is among the most theologically dense words in the Hebrew Bible. It signals belonging, election, and intimacy simultaneously.
Verse 7 continues—in many manuscripts and in the Liturgy of the Hours tradition—with the image of the shepherd and the flock: "and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand." The shepherd metaphor intensifies the intimacy: this is not a distant sovereign who demands obeisance from strangers, but a shepherd who knows each sheep by name, who leads them to green pasture, who holds them in his hand. Kneeling before this God is not humiliation—it is homecoming.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
In the typological reading cherished by the Fathers, the "worship" called for here finds its perfect fulfillment in the Eucharistic liturgy of the New Covenant. The bowing and kneeling of Psalm 95 become, in Christ, the genuflection before the tabernacle, the prostration at the Consecration, the kneeling at the Agnus Dei. The "sheep of his hand" are now gathered not on the slopes of Sinai but into the Body of Christ. The psalm is appointed in the Roman Rite as the —the psalm that opens the Liturgy of the Hours each day—because the Church recognizes that every day of prayer must begin with this act: an acknowledgment that we are not our own, that we belong to the Shepherd, and that belonging begins with kneeling.