Chapter Ninety-Seven

This psalm, almost repeating Psalm 95, presents a song of praise and thanksgiving to God for some mercy of His. According to Ps 97:2 this mercy is presented as already granted (“the Lord revealed His salvation, opened His righteousness before the eyes of the peoples”), but according to Ps 97:9 this righteousness, the restoration of which the writer desired and about which he prayed in Ps 95, is here depicted as expected only good, but not yet arrived (“He comes to judge the earth... He will judge... the peoples”). Probably, the writer of the psalm was so confident in the inviolability of God’s promises and penetrated by the expectation of the nearness of the coming of the kingdom of the Lord that the future appeared to him as if already being realized.