“All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God. Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise.” — Psalm 98:3-4
Watch people at a concert, a sunrise, or even just eating brunch. What’s the first thing they do? They pull out their phones. They capture it, filter it, post it, check for likes. We’ve become a culture of beholders who immediately turn what we see into worship and witness. We behold the moment, we worship it by framing it perfectly, and we testify to it by broadcasting it to our followers.
This impulse isn’t wrong in itself. We were made to behold, to respond to what we see, and to make it known. The problem is what we’re looking at. We behold ourselves (how do I look in this light?), we behold our curated lives (will this get engagement?), we behold fleeting moments that will be forgotten by tomorrow. We’re worshiping at a thousand small altars, and our lives have become an endless scroll of testimony to things that don’t ultimately matter.
But Scripture offers us something different. These passages don’t condemn our impulse to behold and worship and witness. They redirect it. They call us to fix our eyes on the only thing truly worthy of our gaze: Jesus Christ, the salvation of God made visible. When we behold Him rightly, worship flows naturally. And that worship becomes the kind of witness that actually changes the world, because it points beyond ourselves to the One who rose with healing in His wings.
The question isn’t whether you’ll behold and worship and testify. You already do, every day, dozens of times. The question is: what are you looking at?
Psalm 98: Remembering What God Has Done
The psalmist looks back at Israel’s history and declares in verses 2-3 that “the LORD hath made known his salvation: his righteousness hath he openly shewed in the sight of the heathen… all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.” This isn’t hyperbole. When God delivered Israel from Egypt, surrounding nations watched. When He brought His people through the Red Sea, established them in the land, and defended them from their enemies, the world took notice. The psalm celebrates concrete acts of rescue that happened in real time and space.
But notice the response in verses 4-6. The psalm doesn’t say, “Therefore, remember these historical facts.” It says, “Make a joyful noise unto the LORD, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise. Sing unto the LORD with the harp; with the harp, and the voice of a psalm.” Worship flows naturally from beholding God’s faithfulness. The psalmist even calls creation itself to join in verses 7-8: let the sea roar, let the floods clap their hands, let the hills be joyful. Why? Because God has acted, and what He’s done deserves a response that involves our whole being and the whole cosmos.
This sets the pattern: God saves, people see, people worship, and that worship announces to the world what God has done. Unlike our endless scroll of self-documentation, this worship points away from the worshiper to the God who acts. Israel’s songs weren’t about Israel. They were about what they had beheld in God’s mighty deeds.
Isaiah 12: Drawing Water from the Wells
Isaiah picks up this same tune. “With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation,” he writes in verse 3. The image is personal and immediate. Salvation isn’t just a historical memory; it’s a present resource. You can draw from it today. You can drink from it.
And what happens when you drink? Verses 4-5 tell us: “Declare his doings among the people, make mention that his name is exalted. Sing unto the LORD; for he hath done excellent things: this is known in all the earth.” Again, experiencing God’s salvation leads directly to proclamation. The one who has tasted can’t help but tell others where to find the well.
Here’s where our culture’s instinct gets redeemed. We want to share what captivates us. We want others to see what we see. But Isaiah shows us what happens when what we behold is actually sustaining, actually life-giving. We’re not posting for likes or documenting for our personal brand. We’re declaring God’s works because we’ve been genuinely satisfied by Him, and we want others to know where to find the same satisfaction.
Malachi 4:1-2a: The Sun That Rises with Healing
Malachi stands at the end of the Old Testament prophets, looking toward something specific. He speaks in verse 1 of a day of judgment, yes, but then in verse 2 of healing: “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.”
This isn’t just poetic language about a better future. Malachi is pointing toward a person. The “Sun of righteousness” will arise. After Malachi, Israel waits four hundred years in silence. No prophets. No new revelation. Just waiting for the promised Sun to rise.
And when He does rise, His name is Jesus. He is the light that dawns in darkness. He is the righteousness of God in person. He is the healing that God promised. Everything Israel celebrated in Psalm 98, everything they drew from the wells in Isaiah 12:3, everything they hoped for finds its focus in Jesus Christ. He is the New Israel, the faithful Son who succeeds where the nation failed. He is the salvation that all the ends of the earth will see.
Here’s where our worship gets properly centered. We stop taking pictures of sunsets and start beholding the Sun. We stop crafting images of ourselves and start fixing our eyes on the Image of the invisible God. Jesus is what our restless, scrolling, searching hearts have been looking for all along.
Luke 21:5-19: Witness Under Pressure
Jesus sits with His disciples, teaching them about what’s coming. In verses 5-6, He tells them the temple will fall. In verses 9-11, wars will erupt. In verses 12-16, they will be persecuted, handed over to authorities, betrayed even by family. Some will be killed. This is sobering, even frightening.
But then Jesus says something remarkable in verse 13: “It shall turn to you for a testimony.” Their suffering will become witness. Their endurance will make Christ visible to the watching world. And He promises in verse 15, “I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist.”
Here’s where worship and witness converge under pressure. The disciples won’t just preach about Christ; their faithfulness in suffering will demonstrate His faithfulness. Their patient endurance will testify that the Sun of righteousness has indeed risen, because they’re drawing strength from a source their persecutors can’t see. The world will behold Christ through them.
This is radically different from our performative culture. Social media trains us to document the highlights, to show our best angles, to curate suffering into inspiration content. But Jesus tells His disciples that their real witness will come through actual pain, actual betrayal, actual loss. And what will make them compelling won’t be their strength or their eloquence. It will be Christ’s presence with them, giving them words and wisdom that couldn’t come from themselves. The watching world will see something they can’t explain, and that something is Jesus.
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13: The Everyday Witness of Work
Paul might seem to shift gears here, addressing the mundane issue of people who won’t work. But he’s actually applying the same principle. In verses 11-12 he writes, “For we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies. Now them that are such we command and exhort by our Lord Jesus Christ, that with quietness they work, and eat their own bread.”
Faithful work is also witness. Paul made himself an example in verses 7-9 so that the Thessalonians would see what Christ-shaped life looks like in ordinary time. Not everyone faces dramatic persecution like Luke 21:12-17 describes. Most of us live in the in-between: we go to work, we pay our bills, we love our families, we serve our churches. And Paul says in verse 13 this matters: “But ye, brethren, be not weary in well doing.”
The watching world sees Christ not only in our singing and our suffering but also in our steady, quiet faithfulness. When we work honestly, love consistently, and don’t grow weary of doing good, we testify that we’re drawing from a well that doesn’t run dry. We’re living in light of the new creation that’s coming, even while we’re still in the old creation that’s passing away.
This cuts against our platform-driven culture. We want the big moments, the viral testimonies, the dramatic transformation stories. But Paul says the everyday matters. When you show up to work and do it with integrity, you’re bearing witness. When you keep loving that difficult person without posting about it, you’re bearing witness. When you persist in faithfulness without an audience, Christ is still on display. You’re beholding Him in the ordinary, and that beholding shapes how you live, whether anyone notices or not.
Isaiah 65:17-25: The Song of Those Who Are Beholding Christ
Now we come to the vision that pulls everything together and forward. “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth,” God announces in verse 17. Verses 20-25 paint the picture: the wolf and the lamb will feed together, there will be no more weeping, God’s people will enjoy the work of their hands without fear of loss. This is cosmic restoration, the undoing of the curse, the world set right.
Notice the verb in verse 17: “I create.” This is future tense, but it’s certain. God will complete what He started. The same God who delivered Israel from Egypt, the same God who sent the Sun of righteousness with healing in His wings, will deliver all creation from decay. And just as past deliverance prompted worship, this future hope also inspires rejoicing now. Verse 18 says, “Be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create.”
This is the song of those who have beheld Christ and know where the story is going. We’re not pretending everything is fine now. We look at brokenness honestly. We face suffering without flinching. We work in a world that still groans under the weight of the curse. But we sing anyway, because we’ve seen the end from the beginning. We know that Christ, who has already conquered death, will return to make all things new.
This is what makes biblical hope different from our cultural optimism or our carefully filtered presentations of life. We’re not curating reality to look better than it is. We’re beholding what God has promised in verses 17-25 and letting that future reality shape how we live in the present. The new creation isn’t just a nice idea we hope might happen. It’s the certain future that Christ’s resurrection has already set in motion. And those who behold this coming reality can’t help but worship now, even in the midst of a world that’s not yet made right.
This is beholding worship at its fullest. We look back at the cross and resurrection. We look at Christ present with us now, giving us wisdom and strength for faithful witness as promised in Luke 21:15. And we look forward to the day when He’ll complete what He started, when every knee will bow and every tongue confess that He is Lord, when all the ends of the earth will finally see the salvation of our God in its fullness.
Conclusion: Looking in the Right Direction
So what does it look like to behold Christ and let that beholding shape our worship and witness?
First, it means we have to put down our phones and look at Him. Not literally always, but spiritually. We have to break the habit of constantly looking at ourselves, our feeds, our metrics, our carefully constructed images. We have to redirect our gaze to Jesus: what He’s done, who He is, what He’s promised. Read the Gospels. Meditate on His words. Remember His cross and empty tomb. Let Him fill your vision.
Second, it means accepting that worship isn’t about us. When we truly behold Christ, the natural response is praise that points beyond ourselves. We stop performing our spirituality for an audience and start genuinely responding to what we’ve seen in Him. The psalms and hymns of Scripture aren’t selfies. They’re declarations of God’s character and works. Our worship should follow that pattern.
Third, it means our witness becomes authentic rather than curated. You don’t have to manufacture a perfect Christian life for display. You just have to let Christ be visible in your actual life—in your suffering, in your work, in your ordinary faithfulness. When you behold Christ, He changes you, and that change becomes visible to others whether you’re trying to broadcast it or not.
The world is watching. They’re watching you the same way you watch your feeds, looking for something real, something worth paying attention to. And when they see steady joy that doesn’t depend on circumstances, when they see hope that survives suffering, when they see faithful love that persists through ordinary days, they’re seeing something that demands an explanation.
That explanation is Christ. He is the salvation that all the ends of the earth will see. Not through our carefully filtered posts, but through lives that have truly beheld Him and can’t help but make Him known.
Points to Ponder
- What do you spend the most time looking at in a given day? Your phone, your problems, other people’s lives? How might you redirect your gaze toward Christ?
- When you share about your life (whether online or in conversation), is your instinct to make yourself look good, or to point toward what God has done?
- In what specific areas of your life right now could your faithfulness serve as testimony to Christ? What would it look like to stop performing and start genuinely living in light of what you’ve beheld in Him?
- How does beholding the promise of new creation in Isaiah 65:17-25 change the way you approach the brokenness you see today?
- If someone watched your life this week, would they see that you’re looking at something they can’t see? Would they be curious about the source of your hope?
Prayer
Father, forgive us for the thousand small altars we’ve built to ourselves and our image. We confess that we’re beholders and worshipers, but too often we’re looking at the wrong things. We worship the approval of others. We testify to our own achievements. We scroll endlessly, searching for something to satisfy us.
Turn our eyes to Jesus. Help us behold Him as He truly is: the faithful Son, the Sun of righteousness, the One who rose with healing in His wings. Let His cross and empty tomb fill our vision. Let His promises shape our hope. Let His presence sustain us in both suffering and ordinary faithfulness.
Make our lives a testimony, not to ourselves, but to You. Whether we face persecution or just the challenges of faithful work, help us live in a way that makes Christ visible. Don’t let us perform for an audience. Instead, change us so deeply that Christ simply becomes visible through us.
We wait for the day when You’ll make all things new, when every tear will be wiped away, when the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of Your glory. Until that day, help us keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.
In His name, Amen.
“Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for the LORD JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation.” — Isaiah 12:2
Josh Cehulik 