BackstageThere is a phrase in the psalms so worn smooth by repetition that we have stopped hearing it: make a joyful noise unto the Lord.
It sounds so mild in our language. So tidy. A pleasant suggestion for a Sunday — go on, make a nice cheerful sound. But the Hebrew under that gentle English is not mild at all. It is ferocious. The word carries the roar of a charging army, the blast of a war horn, the shout a whole people lets loose when something so enormous is happening that silence becomes physically impossible. We were handed a battle cry, and somewhere along the way it got translated into good manners.
Let me give it back to you the way it was written.
Teruah: the shout that means something is happening
The word behind "joyful noise" belongs to a family built on the Hebrew rua — to raise a shout, to blast, to make a great and sudden noise. Its noun is teruah, and teruah is one of the loudest words in the language.
Follow where the Scriptures use it and you will feel its weight. Teruah is the shout an army raises as it goes into battle. It is the great roar the people of Israel let loose around the walls of Jericho — the shout that brought the fortifications down into the dust. It is the blast of the ram's horn, the alarm, the signal that the moment has come and there is no more holding still. This is not a background hum. This is the sound a people make when everything is on the line and the King has taken the field. It is the noise of a decisive moment.
And that same word — the war cry, the wall-shaking roar — is the word the psalms reach for when they call the whole earth to worship. Make a joyful noise. Raise the teruah. Shout to God with the voice of triumph. The psalmist is not asking for a polite murmur of appreciation. He is calling for the full-throated roar of a people whose God has shown up, taken the field, and won — a battle cry aimed not at an enemy but at the heavens, in sheer overwhelming gladness.
The shout that once brought down walls did not disappear. It changed direction. The same ferocity a people spent on war, they learned to spend on praise.
There is even an appointed day named after this very sound — a sacred day of teruah, a day of blasting and shouting, built into the calendar so the people would have a set time to lift the roar together. Yahuah did not merely permit the shout. He scheduled it. He gave His people a day whose whole assignment was to be loud before Him.
Why a people cannot always keep it in
Here is the thing about teruah that the tidy translation hides: it is not a technique. You cannot manufacture it. A war cry is involuntary — it is what comes out of a body when the moment is too big to contain. The shout at Jericho was not a performance the people worked up. It was the natural sound of a crowd standing at the edge of an impossible victory. When God is genuinely on the field, keeping quiet stops being an option.
That is why I get suspicious of the idea that reverence must always be silent. There is a holy silence, yes, and I honor it — there are moments before the Presence when the only faithful thing is to hush and tremble. But silence is not the only holy sound, and anyone who tells you it is has never stood in a crowd the moment the deliverance broke. When something overwhelming happens — when the news is impossibly good, when the rescue actually comes — a person does not whisper. They shout. The body overrides the manners. The teruah comes up out of you because there is simply too much joy to fit through a closed mouth.
The psalms understand this about us. They know that a people who have really grasped what God has done cannot be counted on to stay dignified about it. So they do not scold the noise. They command it. Shout to God. Raise the roar. Make the joyful blast. The Scriptures are giving permission — no, giving orders — to the part of you that has always wanted to be loud about Him but was afraid it would be too much.
Let the roar come up
So I want to talk to the ones who have spent their whole lives keeping it in.
Maybe you were taught that loud is the same as irreverent. Maybe you are simply built quiet, and the very idea of shouting makes your shoulders climb up around your ears. I am not going to bully you, mi gente — the God who made the whisperer loves the whisper. But I do want to loosen something in you, because I suspect that under the carefulness there is a teruah that has never been let out, a roar of gladness you have been swallowing for years because nobody ever told you it was allowed.
It is allowed. It is more than allowed. It is written into the songbook of God as a command and onto the calendar of God as an appointment. The shout is not a failure of reverence; it is one of reverence's oldest and most honest shapes. When the wall came down at Jericho, the appropriate response was not a thoughtful nod. It was a roar. And the God who won that day is the same God who has done immeasurably more for you — who took the field in the person of Yeshua, went down into the worst the enemy had, and came up on the far side with the victory in His hands. If Jericho earned a shout, what has that earned?
So here is my invitation, and I am grinning as I give it. Somewhere this week, when the gladness rises and the moment is too big for a closed mouth, do not swallow it. Let the roar come up. Shout to God with the voice of triumph — clumsy, cracked, off-key, it does not matter — because the teruah was never about sounding good. It was about being unable to keep quiet in the presence of a God who wins.
The war cry did not die. It just found its true target. All that ferocity we were ready to spend on our enemies, the Lord has redirected into a festival roar — the full-throated, wall-shaking, whole-street shout of a people so full of what He has done that silence finally gives up. You were built to make that sound. Do not hold it in one moment longer than you have to.
