Psalm 113
We celebrate events and people every day. We celebrate many of the good things that our Lord gives us. We celebrate our accomplishments, whether this is finishing school as some here will shortly do, or finding a job, or a promotion at work. We also celebrate sporting triumphs (or just competing), people getting married, a new baby’s arrival, birthdays, Christmas, a new year and many other deserving milestones. These occasions are a time of celebration and we gather together with excitement. Recently our daughter Josie passed her driving test (and I have asked for her permission to mention her), this was a great source of joy and thanksgiving in our household. Josie (and Larissa and I) were rewarded for all of that hard work and 120 plus hours of driving.
We celebrate when our kids do well, we are happy to plan and get ready for parties to celebrate life’s significant moments. No one has to tell us to do this, we want to do it, we desire to celebrate. We see these things as important and important enough that we would make a deal out of them.
Yet I suspect that when it comes to worshipping and celebrating Jesus together, we often wait for someone else to lead the way. Do we come to church on Sunday already celebrating the fact that we will shortly be with God’s people and filled with excitement and eager anticipation? Are we ready to celebrate with our brothers and sisters in Christ the most important person that there ever was or could be and his death and resurrection that gives life to us and all who believe? Is Sunday the highpoint of your week, as we join together in praising Jesus, in joyful praise of what he has done?
The Bible has much to say about what it means to come together, and as a one off, I have the privilege of preaching through a psalm this morning. Psalm 113 is a song, but it is also a picture. A picture of what we should be thinking when we gather here each week as the body of Christ. A Picture as we remind each other who we follow, who we serve and why. And finally, a picture of God at work in this world, bringing about His purposes, for His glory.
I pray this morning that Psalm 113 will proclaim to us the Glory of God.
Background
The book of psalms is made up of 150 songs. For at a psalms heart they are songs. They are there to be sung, or at least to be recited, to be read. Can I encourage you to read them out loud at home.
Now these songs or psalms have different styles, what the scholars would call genres.
There are four main types of Psalms. The lament psalms, for when things are looking bleak. This is when the psalm writer, through their words cries out to God for help in the difficult situation in which they find themselves. These psalms are a wonderful resource for us when we are in hard times, we can cry out to God using these words.
There are the Psalms of Trust. These normally happen in a situation that has some sort of crisis. This is where the writer remembers God’s promises, what God has done before and who God is. In this way we are able to trust in God’s goodness, even in the hardest of times.
There are also Songs of thanksgiving. These psalms are often set with the writer looking back and being thankful for how God has brought them through a crisis.
Finally, there is the type of Psalm that we are looking at today in Psalm 113, which is the Hymn of praise psalm.
Psalms 111-118 are known as the ‘hallelujah psalms’. In fact, psalms 113-118 are also known as the Egyptian Hallel psalms. This is because these six psalms were sung at Jewish festivals, particularly the Passover as God’s people remembered God saving them out of Egypt. If you have a chance later today or during the week, why not have a read of these six psalms together as this is likely how they would have been read or sung.
Psalm 113
Psalm 113 is used by Rolf and Karl Jacobson in their book invitation to the Psalmsas a textbook example of a hymn of praise. This isn’t why I choose this psalm that was just God’s mercy to me in my sermon preparation. It is a textbook case because it follows the three-fold pattern of call to praise, reason for praise, followed by a repeated call to praise.
- The call to praise v1-3
Verse 1
Praise the Lord.[a]
Praise the Lord, you his servants;
praise the name of the Lord.
Verse 1 starts with a repeat of the opening phrase Praise the Lord at the beginning of the psalm. The Israelite gathering and indeed ourselves here today should be under no allusion as to what we need to do. We are called to praise the Lord, in fact we are instructed to praise the Lord. In the Hebrew, which I personally haven’t studied, but have read the words of others who have. Praise the Lord is actually in the form of ‘Hallelu Yah’ with the ‘Yah’ being the shortened form of Yahweh (YHWH). So, Praise God! or Praise the Lord as most of the English translations of the Bible have it. I don’t know about you, but I find it hard to say Hallelujah without it making a change in me demeanour for the better. Especially with the knowledge that I know it means Praise God! Now while I’m not going to make us sing the psalm, we can at least say Hallelujah together as a gathered people of God. 1, 2, 3 Hallelujah!
The Psalmist is calling the people together to worship. We have God’s people being called together to praise him and this entails the worshippers of God to celebrate. For that’s what they are doing when they sing or call out Hallelujah! Now this psalm is talking about the God of Israel and being sung in a Jewish gathering by Jews. We know this as the phrase ‘you his servants’ makes it clear. For in these three words the community of believers is the one being brought together. This is the gathered worshippers of the one true God, of Yahweh. Indeed, for them to be servants they naturally would attest to Yahweh being their Lord, their master and them being his people. This psalm shows that part of the goal of praising God, is to do this in community, and as this happens a community of disciples is formed.
So, it is God’s people who cry out Hallelujah and they are to Praise the name of the Lord, which is the last line of this verse. It is easy to just pass over this idea of ‘praising the name of God’. However, doing so would miss what the writer had in mind when he wrote these words. We might ask the question what’s in a name, for many of us our name (or part of it) will show our family name. But most of the time this won’t tell us that much about who we are or what our character is like. However, for someone living in the Ancient Near East (the time and place that this psalm was written, more than 2500 years ago), name was not just a label, but spoke of the nature and the character of the person, or in this case God himself. So, what is God’s name? Well Exodus 3:13-15 gives us the information that we need:
13 Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”
14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.[a] This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
15 God also said to Moses, “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord,[b] the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’
“This is my name forever,
the name you shall call me
from generation to generation.
In his commentary on the Psalms, James Boice explains how these verses in Exodus tells us four truths about God. Firstly, he speaks to Moses and reveals himself, God is real, he exists. Secondly, God exists independently of any cause, nothing made God or brought him into being. Thirdly, God needs no external assistance, he doesn’t want for anything and doesn’t need anything. Fourthly, God is eternal, he always was and always will be. For an Israelite, the name of God would have immediately brought these things to mind. For us here today, we work a little harder, but it is worth it. Another helpful way of thinking about this, is that Yahweh is God’s proper name in Hebrew. Yahweh occurs 6228 times in the Old Testament.
John Piper reminds us that when we praise the name of Yahweh, we are turning to God, focusing on God and this means that we are not praising other gods, or celebrating other people or things, but we are praising the one true God.
Verse 2
Let the name of the Lord be praised,
both now and forevermore.
Now if we had missed this in verse one, that’s okay as we are then reminded straight away at the beginning of verse two through the use of parrellism, which is a distinctive feature of Hebrew poetry where a thought is repeated, not exactly the same words, but with the same idea in view. This can be seen when verses 1 & 2 are read together.
Praise the Lord.[a]
Praise the Lord, you his servants;
praise the name of the Lord.
Let the name of the Lord be praised,
both now and forevermore.
So, the people of God are to praise God. Then the rest of verse two and three fill in the when. Verse two says, Let the name of the Lord be praised, both now and forevermore. Now forevermore is a bit of an old-fashioned word if you ask me. So even though I have been around for a few years, I headed to dictionary.com to see what it had to say, and it said that for evermore was a ‘more emphatic way of saying forever’. Not completely helpful. But the word forever was much more helpful. Here we had the idea of without ending, eternally, continually, and lasting for an endless period of time. That made sense. Now I have sung Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah (Better with the word Redeemer), throughout my school days and beyond, and to be honest I always missed the idea of continually in this. When we look on the screen at the words to the song, it should be obvious, for ‘feed me now and evermore’ must mean continually, otherwise the feeding wouldn’t be very nourishing. The use of ever is similar and is better understood as constantly, continually, without end. You can see this at the end of verses two and three of the hymn on the screen.
I think we have the idea, and if we don’t then verse three of Psalm 113 tells us that this is something that we are to do all day, indeed
Verse 3
From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets,
the name of the Lord is to be praised.
Verse three not only adds the idea of praising God while we are awake, and that we do this for all of the time that we are awake, but also the idea of place. That wherever we are we are to be praising God. Even if we travel the length and breadth of the world we are to praise God wherever we are.
The second part of the Hymn of praise is all about who God is and what he has done.
- Reason for Praise is v4-6
We know from God’s name that he is the always and forever. In this next section, the psalmist invites us to remember, proclaim and sing of the greatness of God.
Verse 4
The Lord is exalted over all the nations,
his glory above the heavens.
I’m not sure what you think about when you read these words. For the reader in the Ancient Near East, they didn’t have the banks of high-powered telescopes called arrays that we use today and I’m sure they couldn’t have imagined being able to see the stars, galaxies and planets that we are able to observe today. But, even though they could only see the night sky with the naked eye, their thinking wasn’t that different to ours. They saw the greatness of God as being universal. Not only is Yahweh greater than all the nations, he is above anything that has been created. He is the creator. There is nothing that is comparable to God. He is the greatest.
Verse 5
Who is like the Lord our God,
the One who sits enthroned on high,
Verse five rhetorical question posed by the Psalmist, for he knows that there is no one. He knows that nothing on heaven or earth or under the earth can compare with Yahweh. He is not only greater than anyone or anything, but Yahweh rules over all as he is the one who sits enthroned on high. Not like the monarchs that we have today, or even King David or King Solomon. Yahweh is the sovereign ruler of all and he rules from where we can’t go, or even imagine. There is no one like the Lord our God.
Verse 6
who stoops down to look
on the heavens and the earth?
If we haven’t yet figured out that God is great, then a third picture helps us further remember that God is so BIG, so incomparable, so utterly magnificent that he indeed has to stop down. Maybe the ESV translation of the bible is more helpful for us today at this juncture. ‘Who looks far down on the heavens and the earth’ (ESV). The power, glory, majesty, dominion, authority, sovereignty are all on display in these verses.
The following quote by Boice is helpful in the transition to the remembering God’s deeds.
“What amazes the psalmist is that God is exalted so high that he has to stoop low to see not only the earth but also the heavens, and yet at the same time he cares for the lowly.” (Boice)
- What God has done v7-9a
V 7 & 8
He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
8 he seats them with princes,
with the princes of his people.
God shows that he cares, and not only cares, but acts. This verse also shows that we need him. The poor have no way of lifting themselves from the ground, or from the position that they are in. Their only hope is God. As was said at the beginning of this talk, these psalms were traditionally sung at Passover, so these verses would have reminded the Israelites of their ancestors plight in Egypt and how they called out to God and God had mercy on them and saved them (Exodus 2:23-25), he brought them out of Egypt and into the promised land. Likewise, from a spiritual viewpoint, are we not all poor, well worse than poor, without God we are dead. Only God can save. For us as followers of Jesus these words in verse 7 & 8 point us to Ephesians 2:1-7.
As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, 2 in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. 3 All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh[a] and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. 4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
We see in these verses firstly that God raised us up with Christ, and secondly that he has seated us with him.
Then verse 9
9 He settles the childless woman in her home
as a happy mother of children.
Once again the Psalmist shows that what is impossible for us, with God is possible. Not only possible, but the Old Testament has shown this very thing in action. Charles Spurgeon says it well. “Sarah, Rachel, the wife of Manoah, Hannah, Elizabeth, and others were all instances of the miraculous power of God in literally fulfilling the statement of the Psalmist.” For while God is so highly exalted and the creator and sustainer of all things. For while he needs nothing from us and there is nothing we can do for him. Yet, he loves us and is merciful to us.
Verse 9b
Praise the Lord (or should we say Hallelujah!)
This really does bring us full circle. Starting and ending with praise is how this great Psalm is set up.
The reason that I picked this psalm to speak about today was that I believe in these short nine verses we can see God’s glory and why we should praise him continually. My prayer in speaking through this passage today is that we would all grow together in our praise of God. That we would remember this Psalm as we gather at church on a Sunday and be celebrating together as we are called to sing and shout Hallelujah together in this place.
