Psalm 148 Commentary

Psalm 148 gives us a lot of movement.  The first four verses have us moving in a downward direction.  We begin in the heights above, in the heavens.  Then we move down a rung to see angels and heavenly hosts.  Continuing the descent we arrive at the sun, moon, and stars.  Finally we get to the firmament as part of how ancient Israelite cosmology imagined the structure of the universe with those “waters above the skies” in verse 4.

Following verses 5-6 once more insisting on universal praise of God and the need to praise God on account of God’s being the One who made everything, we turn to the earth and in this case we seem (mostly) to move upward instead of downward.  We begin in the depths of the oceans (and the psalmist had no idea of what we now know in terms of just how deep those depths really are—the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench goes down to almost 36,000 feet or nearly 7 miles.  That is as much distance below sea level as commercial jets fly above sea level!).  Rising from those depths we look up and see the sky and lightning and hail and snow and clouds. Mountains are next and flying birds.  And then with a glance downward this time we see ground creatures as well as people including kings and princes.

But whether we start high and go low or start low and go higher the message is the same: Praise Yahweh!  Hallelu Yah!  There is an implied merismus here from the heights of heaven where Psalm 148 begins to the depths of the oceans.  And as is always true with a merismus, that means everything in between the highest and the lowest points is in the picture too.  This is the cosmos from A-Z, the whole kit-n-caboodle.  No one is off the hook when it comes to offering up proper praise to God.

Of course this implies that praise takes many forms.  At one point in her novel Gilead Marilynne Robinson imagines her novel’s narrator, Rev. John Ames, observing the actions of some chickens following some kind of disruption in the hen house.  Ames wonders why they were acting the way they did but in the end concludes it’s just chickens being chickens.  In Psalm 148 we encounter the seemingly odd phenomenon of the psalmist barking out orders for praise to creatures or phenomena who strike us all things being equal as being incapable of praise the way we usually think of it.  Lightning?  Birds?  Mountains?  The moon?

How do we make sense of this?  Well, perhaps in God’s sight and in God’s ears chickens just being chickens is somehow an act of praise.  Snow being snow, fruit trees swaying their branches in the wind, mountains just being their majestic selves: maybe to God any creature or piece of creation that simply does what it was created to do counts as an act of praise to the Creator God who fashioned all those things in the first place.

Perhaps just that is the key to understand all of the Bible’s—and most particularly the Book of Psalms’—calls to praise Yahweh, the God of Israel.  Why should this command, this praise imperative, get issued so broadly to kings and princes, to people old and young, to men and women many of whom had no connection to Israel or to God’s covenant people?  Because what the psalmists are asking in all those instances is for those people to be the creatures God created them to be.

God made us in the divine image.  That means a great many things but among the actions that get enabled by that image is the human ability to do something of which few if any other conscious creatures we know are capable.  Specifically, we take note of otherness.  As I write this, it is spring and in my part of the world that means the return of so many birds.  Within the past week the stunning bright orange of the Northern Oriole has lit up my bird feeders as has the brilliant magenta splotch of wild color on the breast of the Rose-Breasted Grosbeak.

As a birdwatcher, I observe all the birds I see, keep a Life List of species seen, consult physical bird field guides or the online ones now available to identify birds when I am not sure what type it is, etc.  We humans made in the image of God catalogue everything: wildflowers, fish, beetles (a friend recently noted to me there are 350,000 known species of beetles on Earth!), weeds, stars.  No other creatures we know do this.  The White-Tailed Deer near my house co-exist in the forest with a host of other animals and critters and birds but they take no particular note of them unless they pose a threat.  The deer surely do not keep track of creatures they encounter or the sub-types and species of the grasses they eat and then generate lists or catalogues.

Humans made in God’s image do this and it is in part this ability to note the then celebrate creatures not like ourselves that motivates us to praise God for the wild and generous creativity of the divine imagination.  When we are asked to praise Yahweh, we are simply being invited to be the very creatures God created us to be.

Psalm 148 concludes by saying God has raised up a horn for his people, and this was a symbol of strength in the Ancient Near East.  But no sooner is that horn mentioned and we are told it consists of the praise of all God’s faithful servants.  Our proper and due praise of God is a source of strength to us.  But also to God.  As one of my former professors John Stek liked to note, God is enthroned on the praises of God’s people.  God being God means God does not need anything external to God’s own Self.  God does not need more strength.  He is enthroned on glory whether we praise God or not.  And yet God desires this praise and both we and God are somehow strengthened by it.  When we simply exist as the people we were made to be, then the cosmos somehow comes into alignment in ways that lead to glory.

Illustration Idea

We expect it in children’s books.  In the Margaret Wise Brown classic pictured above, we are not startled when the little bunny at the heart of the story systemically goes around his bedroom to say goodnight to each object in turn.  (We are also not surprised to find it is a rabbit who seems capable of speaking in the first place!)  Goodnight to the moon but also to a telephone, a red balloon, a picture of the cow jumping over the moon.  Stuffed animals, actual kittens, mittens, a dollhouse—all of it is directly addressed with a goodnight wish.  And just for good measure we conclude with a goodnight to “noises everywhere.”

We expect this in a book for children but less so in the Bible as we encounter something very similar in Psalm 148.  Maybe we are tempted to chalk up the address in the psalm to hail and snow and birds and fish as just poetic license, as strictly a metaphor.  But what it if it is actually more literally meant than just that?  What if, as suggested above, all those non-human creatures and objects and things really do have a role to play in the wider economy of praise to God?