In Ezra, chapter three, verse eleven, the people sang praise to the Lord when they saw the temple laid because it represented God’s answer to their prayers and His goodness. Biblical praise exalts God and His work and is an element of worship in which all the people are to participate. There was a remarkable mixture of affections upon laying the foundation. Those who only knew the misery of having no temple praised the Lord with shouts of joy. To them, even this foundation seemed great.
We ought to be thankful for the beginnings of mercy, though it is not yet perfect. But those who remembered the glory of the first temple and considered how far inferior this was likely to be wept with a loud voice. There was reason for it, and if they bewailed the sin that was the cause of this melancholy change, they did well. Yet it was wrong to cast a damp upon the joys. They despised the day of small things and were unthankful for the good they enjoyed. Let not the remembrance of former afflictions drown the sense of present mercies.
They sang together in the course. Literally, “They replied (to each other),” or sang antiphonically; the burthen of their song is that God was good, and his mercy towards Israel everlasting, as in Second Chronicles five, verse thirteen, and chapter seven, verse three, where the Levites of Solomon’s time reported to have praised God similarly. All the people shouted with a great shout. Shouting on occasions of secular joy and triumph has been practiced by most nations, both in ancient and modern times. But religious yelling is less common. Still, we hear of such jeering when the ark of the covenant was seized into the Israelite camp near Aphek in First Samuel four, verse five, and when David solemnly brought it up from Kirjathjearim to Jerusalem, as in Second Samuel six, verse fifteen. Shouting appears in Psalms forty-seven, verse five, and Zechariah four, verse seven.