Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21 Commentary

The RCL had us in the heart of Psalm 145 a scant month ago for its July 9, 2023, psalm lection.  Why we are looping back to some of these same verses so soon is not clear.  In any event, I refer you to that sermon commentary and will not here repeat everything I said about the key Hebrew words in verse 8 of gadol chesed.  But suffice it to say that you should look at that in the previous commentary as all of that applies to the brief commentary I will make here on what we find in especially verses 14-21.  What we see in also these verses is a working out of the implications of Israel’s having a God characterized by that kind of great grace and mercy.

With that as the immediate context, we encounter beginning in verse 14 one of those extremely sunny patches that you sometimes run across in the Psalms.   For this Hebrew poet at the time of the writing of this psalm, everything was obviously coming up roses.  All people—and indeed all creatures—who come under the sway of this God are well taken care of and then some.  This generous God of Great Grace opens his hand and, voila, everyone gets the food and sustenance they need.

If you fall down, this God picks you back up.  And if you need anything, all you need to do is call on the Lord and he is right there to take your call.  You get the sense from this psalm that God is very nearly at the beck and call of his people.  It’s as though God is like a doctor who is “on call” for his practice for a given weekend and so when his pager goes off or his phone rings, he has to pick up the call immediately because that’s his job for that particular weekend while the other physicians in the practice have some time off.  That is the portrait of God that gets sketched here: he’s on call.  And if there are any wicked and cruel people hanging around, God will take care of them too.  No problem.

Here then in this last part of Psalm 145 is a portrait that is the polar opposite of what you find in so many other psalms, including most certainly the Lament Psalms but to a degree also what we can call the Imprecatory Psalms.   Because in those expressions of faith in this same Psalter, God is often depicted as being anything but “near” to his people.  He is far off.  He seems deaf.  He lets the phone ring (and doesn’t appear to check his voicemail).  And the wicked?  They prosper all too often.  Injustice is rampant and at times seems to be all the psalmist can see when he surveys the world.  God has to be almost commanded to deal with the wicked, to thwart them and bring forth some semblance of divine justice in the world.

Let’s just admit that if the life of believers really were always this good as Psalm 145 described it all, it might be easier to attract outsiders to come to the faith.  Who wouldn’t want a life neatly sequestered from hunger, hurt, pain, and rampaging injustice?   The life that gets described here is a charmed life indeed.  Sign me up!

Of course, the presence of all those other psalms to which I just made reference is testament to the sad fact that even for the people of God, life does not go just this smoothly in every season through which we pass.  Yes, we may have goodly patches of our lives that feel pretty Psalm 145-like.  And when we experience such providential care from God, such protection from harm, such deliverance from nasty people, it is good to be reminded (as Psalm 145 is designed to do) to whom to direct our thanksgiving and to whom we give the credit for all that goodness.  It’s not random.  It’s not just that some people are lucky in life and some are flat out unlucky.  When good things happen, they happen because of our good God of Great Grace.

But when now and again life is not quite this sunny-side up, when the light does not seem to shine on us and when the nasty keep getting away with it again and again, then the wider Psalter is here to remind us that it’s ok to complain to this same God just as loudly as Psalm 145 shouts out God’s praises and tells of them from one generation to the next (to evoke words from earlier in Psalm 145).  God can take it when for whatever the reason we need to complain that he’s not quite living up to the Great Grace celebrated in this particular Hebrew poem.  There is more than a little comfort in that idea.

Psalm 145 concludes with a call for every creature to praise God’s Name forever and ever.  It’s the right thing to urge of course even if there are times in all our lives when words of praise stick in our throats.  But how grand and glorious it is to know that at the end of the cosmic day when all of our questions as to why bad things happen to good people have either been answered or rendered otherwise irrelevant, praise forever and ever will be the one thing that remains.  And praise from every creature as well.

As the Apostle Paul will later write in Philippians 2—or was he quoting one of the earliest Christian hymns?—the day will come when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord of all.  That kind of praise from every creature under heaven is the bottom line of Psalm 145.

It’s also the bottom line for all creation.

Illustration Idea

In one of the Chronicles of Narnia, specifically The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis depicts for us how Aslan created all of Narnia.  Consider this the Genesis 1 of the Narnia tales.  If you have ever read it—and if you haven’t you need to—then you remember that what is most striking about this depiction of Creation is the fact that Aslan sings the creation into being.  The character of Digory gets this displayed before his mind and Lewis describes it this way:

“In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it…” 

How lyric it is to think of God singing all creation into being.  Maybe when the Book of Job claims that in the beginning “all the morning stars sang for joy,” they were actually just singing along with God.  Perhaps.  In any event, the thought of Creation beginning in song bookends nicely with the idea mentioned in this sermon commentary that Creation and in the New Creation, it will also conclude with a song that will in fact never conclude but go on and on, forever and ever.