Psalm 147:12-20 Commentary

It’s not at all clear why the Lectionary skips the first 11 verses of the 147^th psalm since they contain much of the same sentiments and ideas as the final verses that the RCL does select.  In any event, this is one of a number of psalms and other biblical passages where the psalmist takes delight in picturing God as Someone who himself delights in hurling and tossing about meteorological wonders like snow, hail, rain, wind, and frost.  There is nearly a playful tone to these words and this also comes through in other Bible passages.  God is said to be thrilled to watch the frolicking of whales and according to the final chapters in Job when God finally breaks his silence, God pays close attention to all kinds of animals and birds and their various behaviors and traits and quirks.

Somewhat similar to what happens in Psalm 19, so the conclusion of Psalm 147 makes a sudden pivot from pondering created wonders to a celebration of God’s laws.  Somehow all the majesty, power, and awe that we see as God wields his wonders in the created realm are also part and parcel of his giving of the Law.

Mostly we seem to have an odd human predilection to chafe under various rules and codes of conduct and such.  How often haven’t we heard someone say in a rebellious moment, “I’m not playing by their rules anymore!”  “Their rules.”  The possessive pronoun says it all.  We don’t like having somebody else impose their ideas on us in the form of rules and regulations.  Politicians have often found it a path to electoral success if and when they promise that they will vastly scale back federal restrictions and regulatory rules for industries or environmental protections.  We will decide for ourselves how to live and not have the government dictate the terms to us.

But in Psalm 147 the psalmist celebrates the reception of God’s Law.  In fact, the final sentiment in verse 20 basically says, “Lucky us as Israelites!  God has not given his Law to any other nations except us!  But he did give it to us!  Hooray!”  Again, that is not a terribly common sentiment when it comes to our getting rules and regulations imposed upon us.  We tend to see it as a clipping of our wings, a scaling back of our freedom to choose for ourselves.  But Israel (at its best anyway) recognized that knowing God’s Law is a gift.  It is a grace to have been chosen to be on the receiving end of God’s revelation of his ways and his desires for this creation.

We typically think of grace in the saving sense.  “Saved by grace alone.”  And what is that grace?  What makes it a grace?  Mostly it means that we did not have to do anything or keep any laws or achieve on our own some peerless level of moral achievement in order to be saved.  Indeed, grace blots out all of our transgressions of God’s holy ways and his design for this creation.  So to ponder getting God’s Law as itself a grace seems curious.  Seeing the Law could feel like the equivalent of someone’s saying, “Here is the list of things you as a sinful person cannot do.”  The Law is bad news, then, in the sense that what it mostly does is reveal where we have failed in the past and what we are likely to fall short of again in the future.

Theologically that is all true.  But pondering this opens up a lot of tangled avenues of thought.  Look how mightily the Apostle Paul struggled in places like Romans and Galatians especially to suss out why God ever gave the Law in the first place seeing as it is plain as the nose on your face that you’re never going to get saved by keeping the Law since as fallen beings we simply cannot pull that off.  Paul tries out lots of ideas, including the idea that the Law was all along kind of like a babysitter or nanny whose job it was to keep us as safe as possible until such time as the full revealing of God’s saving grace in Christ Jesus the Lord would happen.  If God knew all along we’d never find salvation by observing the Law, then why give it?  Well, the New Testament does have an answer for that.

Mostly what the Law reveals is nothing short of the heart of God.  Here is what God desires for us so as to put us on a path of delight and flourishing.  As Psalm 147 reflects, if God can do all the poem describes in terms of throwing around hail and snow and the like, then this same powerful God can be understood to know what he’s doing when he tosses also his laws in our direction.  What God’s reveals in the Law is simply the right way to live in the creation that God made and maintains with such splendor and majesty.  Who knows this creation better than the Creator?  So if that Creator says “OK, listen up, folks: Here is the way to behave,” then we’d best sit up straight and pay attention.

For 2025 Psalm 147 is the first Psalm Reading for the new year.  Many of us are looking back on 2024 as a year of significant loss, stress, and controversy.  We have seen altogether too often what happens when people do not follow God’s ways.  Wars break out and innocent children have been getting killed in sickeningly high numbers in place like Gaza, Lebanon, and Ukraine as well as in so many other simmering conflicts in Sudan and Syria and probably a few places many of us have never even heard of.  Most days the headlines scream out a message and a picture of the anti-shalom state of being in this world.  If God’s Law is in part aimed at shalom, at the webbing together of all life in mutually beneficial relationships where each creature makes it their business to care for every other creature, then a world at war and a world of injustice-fueled poverty and oppression is decidedly not that.

So let’s let the conclusion of Psalm 147 be a fond hope and a prayerful wish for the new year of 2025.  Let’s hope and pray that something of this psalm’s sense that God’s Law is to be celebrated as the blueprint for a better life and a better world will take hold more often than not and in more places than not.  And as we do so, let’s fix our eyes on Christ Jesus the Lord who came to fulfill, not nullify, every jot and tittle of God’s Law and who has given the gift of his Holy Spirit to enable all people in now all lands to lean into those kingdom ways of being.

Illustration Idea

This commentary on Psalm 147 mentioned the commonly heard line “I’m not going to live/play by their rules anymore.”  One of the places you can hear that line is in a scene from the comedy film Groundhog Day with Bill Murray.  Murray plays TV weatherman Phil Connors who goes to Puxatawney, Pennsylvania, to cover the annual coming out of a groundhog on February 2.  But something goes cosmically weird and Phil ends up getting trapped there and for what the film suggests is many years’ worth of time, every day Phil wakes up and it’s February 2 again.  But only he knows the day is repeating.  For everyone else around him, it’s just a regular day.  Phil remembers everything that happened on all the previous Groundhog Days but no one else does.

At first Phil is disoriented and frightened by this odd phenomenon.  He even gets depressed and attempts suicide multiple times but even though he does get killed by jumping off a building or dropping a plugged-in toast into his bathwater, he still wakes up unscathed the next morning.  This in turns leads to the next phase: breaking the rules, indulging in sensuality, robbing an armored car because, after all, nothing bad will back up on him anyway.  You can see this encapsulated in the scene you can view here.

Eventually, though, even Phil Connors finds that to be an empty way to live.  Instead he eventually re-embraces the rules, finds ways to live out his endlessly repeated Groundhog Day in ways that serve other people and brings joy to his neighbors.  And it is only after Phil embraces leaning into such better ways to live that the cosmic powers that imprisoned him in an endlessly repeated February 2 allow him to wake up on February 3 at last.

Maybe that is even this secular film’s way of saying what Psalm 147 conveys: embracing God’s better ways is a gift, a grace, and a joy and is flat out the way we all ought to live.