Psalm 147:12-20 Commentary

In Michigan where I live, since Thanksgiving Day we have already endured our share of snow spreading out like wool and some serious icy blasts as well.  One good thing about winter is that it gives you a leg up on understanding the various psalms that, like Psalm 147, use winter weather as imagery for the power and majesty of God (I suppose Californians have to use their imagination a bit more on this one!).  Though I admit that when my hands ache from being so cold, God is not foremost on my mind!  But the psalms consistently hale meteorological events as heralds of the power and the presence of God.

All of Psalm 147 witnesses to God’s power though not mainly because of what God can do with snow, hail and icy blasts but because of what God has done for Israel in settling God’s people back in Jerusalem.  Jerusalem is almost a character onto itself in songs like Psalm 147.  We don’t always notice this since we are so accustomed to reading such lines but just think of how odd we’d find it if today someone said, “Praise the Lord, Chicago!”  We don’t typically think of cities as being entities you can command to do something.  But Jerusalem is nearly anthropomorphized in the psalms, as though it were a conscious entity.  Its wellbeing is synecdoche for the wellbeing of God’s people, Israel.

But here’s the thing: following the destruction of the city by the Babylonians, the city never really got back into good shape until the occupying Romans gussied it up centuries later.  The Book of Psalms was probably compiled and edited into its more-or-less final form sometime after the exile into Babylon.   In other words, after the time when Jerusalem proved to be not so well fortified after all and when there was zero peace within Israel’s borders.  This is also striking because it was Israel’s singular failure to observe God’s ordinances and statutes and laws that led God to punish them in the first place, even though Psalm 147 celebrates in its final stanza what a great gift it is to have God’s Law and no other nation had gotten that outside of Israel.

In short, Psalm 147 is celebrating an idealized portrait of God and Israel but as it turns out, this happy picture of security and obedience never really happened.  Or at best it happened in fits and starts now and again in Israel’s history but was never a sustained reality for very long.  Surely a song like this must have stuck in people’s throats after 587 BC.  Even those who returned to Jerusalem years later under the leadership of Ezra and Nehemiah never came anywhere close to seeing Jerusalem restored to its old glory.  And the people of Israel would remain in an occupied state from that time all the way up to the diaspora after Jerusalem’s second destruction in 70 AD.

What do we do with a poem like this given the historical and spiritual realities we know only too well?  Well, this is a psalm assigned in the Year A Lectionary for the very first Sunday of a new calendar year of 2026.  The just-finished holiday season is receding in life’s rearview mirror and we are all gearing up for a new year.  Or maybe “gearing up” is the wrong way to put it.  More like “bracing” for a new year given that a lot of people found 2025 to be challenging on multiple socio-political and economic fronts.

All things being equal, we cannot easily see Psalm 147’s portrait of happy serenity—spiritually or otherwise—applied to our own lives just now.  Even so, is there a way to view this poem as aspirational?  Or can we view it as the reality we as Christians really do now have in Christ if only we have the eyes of faith to see it?

I suspect there is something to this.  “In the world you will always have trouble” Jesus said to his disciples on the most troubling night of his own life.  “But take heart: I have overcome the world.”  In other words, Jesus assured his disciples that no matter what was roaring all around them in society at any given moment, within the citadel of Christ’s love and Easter resurrection power, there would be a chance for spiritual calm, for hope, even for joy.

That ought to provide us with no small measure of comfort no matter what our circumstances.  What’s more, Christ revealed himself to be the end of the Law—not the “end” in the sense of its coming to an end but “end” in the sense of Jesus’ being the very purpose and culmination of all that the Law of God had all along been aiming at: the flourishing of God’s people in God’s creation.  The Law was the Owner’s Manual for creation and by following it, people had a chance to experience the delight in this world that God intended (even as they—as part of that delightful living—are warned off from doing things that would be spiritually and physically perilous).

It is perhaps no coincidence that throughout Psalm 147—including in the first 11 verses that are technically not part of this lection—it is God’s mighty power in creation that the psalmist points to over and over as proof of God’s love and grandeur as well as his ability to do whatever he promises.  Rain, snow, hail, winds, the scattering of the frost with which God paints the trees and fields like a skilled artist: it’s all testament to God’s majesty.  And this is the God who loves us, who loved Israel enough to give them the gift of the Torah, of the Law that would keep them safe while at the same time helping them to flourish.

It’s all part of one grand package of loving revelation to God’s people.  And it has all culminated in Jesus Christ now.  This is the Savior, the Lord and King of Creation, in whom we now dwell through baptism.  Indeed, the New Testament reveals we have been made “a new creation” already.  We lean into and participate already now in all the goodness that is yet to come in God’s kingdom.  Whether we begin 2026 with a sense of optimism or of pessimism, we know that our ultimate hope does not depend on external circumstances in whatever society we call home.  As believers we embrace the God who we believe really does want the best for us and for all creation.  All we can do is cling to the Savior Jesus Christ who has overcome the world and will one day soon renew this world too.  We have to do what we can to cling to that hope.  True, hope can break your heart.  But hope can help us keep standing too.

Illustration Idea

Christians always are striking a balancing act.  On the one hand, we do not want to so identify our Creator God with the creation itself that we fall prey to pantheism.  We don’t even want to go the route of panentheism which does not fully identify God with the universe but makes God part of it, as though God is inside the creation.  On the other hand, we cannot put too much daylight between God and creation lest we drift in the direction of Deism.  We need to see God in creation, we need to identify aspects of the world with the abiding presence and actions of God in all things without mixing things up.

Psalm 147 is an example of many biblical psalms and other passages that celebrate how active God is within his own creation while never blurring the lines in idolatrous or Deistic ways.  God and creation are at once distinct and yet God is intimately involved in it, taking delight in it, directing the rain and the snow, superintending the care of animals and of all creation.  It’s a balancing act.  Like so much else in theology, orthodoxy tends to lie in the territory of both/and rather than that of either/or!