Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:
4A generation to a generation
will praise Your works and they will declare Your acts of might.
5The splendor of the glory of
Your majesty and Your amazing words I will ponder,
6and they will speak of Your
powerfulnesses to be feared and I will recount Your greatnesses.
7They will pour out the remembrance
of Your great goodness and joyfully shout Your righteousness.
I have been pondering these verses for at least a couple of
weeks and I have to confess I find their meaning somehow elusive. On the surface
they appear to be simple statements of truth: God is great and we’ll all talk
about it. However, my soul senses that such an understanding grossly
underestimates the enormity and depth of what the Lord is telling us here. But
I don’t seem to be able to see beneath the skin of it all.
I fear I will have to do a Habakkuk, ask the Lord to help me
understand, then “stand at my post and see what He will answer me.” We’ve been
here before (often) – studying through the Bible, these words of the living
God. Sometimes He’s ready to teach me something and sometimes I can only scratch
at the words and accept that I’m sitting at the feet of a Mind utterly beyond
my own.
There are a couple of things that do strike my feeble
observation and which I find helpful. First of all, verse 4 begins with “A
generation to a generation shall praise Your works…” I found it fascinating to
realize the Hebrew word for “generation” possesses the idea of a circle.
Interesting. Human existence and really all of life itself is in reality a
circle. Babies are born and grow up and marry and have more babies who grow up
and marry and have more babies. Each generation is born and grows old and dies.
The rain falls from the sky, runs down the rivers to the sea, evaporates and
does it all again. Spring finally comes, only to become summer, followed by
fall, followed by winter, until finally spring comes again!
I’m thinking it does my soul well to recognize this. It’s
humbling. We’re not that important. We’re part of an endless circle. Our “generation,”
as important as it may have been to us, is only one of many, many, many.
And as our universe spins and spins and spins through its
endless circles, our great unchanging God sits above it all, the same yesterday
and today and forever. He is the Rock.
But then, that realization leads me to another thought from
this passage – as our generations come and go, the Lord will always have His
witness. “One generation shall praise Thy works to another.” I suppose in every
generation, we believers fear that Truth itself may die with us. We wonder, “Will
anyone carry on? Does anyone care? Will our children and grandchildren forget
that God even exists?” I sense that fear in my own heart, and yet what do the Scriptures
tell us? “One generation shall praise Thy works to another.” Yes, the
circle will be unbroken.
What these four verses would assure us is that Martin Luther
was right: “The body they may kill: God's truth abideth still, His
kingdom is forever.”
Each of us should humbly realize we are part of a very great
circle of reality of which we are only a very, very tiny part. Our generation
comes and goes. God’s kingdom will go on. What must matter is that, while we’re
here, that we should ourselves rightly love Him and beg to be a part of
whatever it is He is doing in our generation – that He might allow us to be a part
of passing on His praises to another generation. It will happen. It’s
just a question of whether we’ll be a part.
Lord, open our dull minds, enflame our cold hearts and, while
the circle goes on and on, may we have been a part of the great work You are
doing, even as we come and go.
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