Psalm 145:8,9 “Him”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

⁸Gracious and compassionate [is] the LORD, slow to anger and great of love.

⁹Good [is] the LORD to all, and His compassions [are] upon the all of His doings.

Finally, something exploded in my brain! These two simple verses are utterly profound. My head is spinning.

Verse 8 is very similar to the Lord’s declaration about Himself in Exodus 34:6, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.” There begins the “profound.”

As I’m studying Psalm 145, I’m slowing reading through a book by A.W. Tozer, which is itself utterly amazing. One of his chapters is entitled “Gazing at God.” First of all, I was blessed to read of someone who has also found that he can “see” God. I have known that for some time and can honestly say that I enjoy looking into the Lord’s eyes all day every day. I don’t know that I’ve ever told that to anyone but my wife, figuring they’ll just think I’m crazy.

But I do. It’s not a matter of seeing a face, per se, but rather the same spiritual experience we all have when we actually look someone else “in the eye.” You can look at their eyes but it is something infinitely deeper and personal (and I believe spiritual) that happens when you actually look them in the eyes. That is what I mean that I don’t “see” a face. I’m not looking at the Lord’s face. I’m not looking at His eyes. I’m looking in His eyes. I’m experiencing the same spiritual reality of looking in His eyes without the necessity of having eyes to look at.

But Tozer takes it a step further. He encourages people to see the Lord in His beauty. As I read that, I realized I did not. I see Him, but not necessarily His beauty. So I asked Him to show me His beauty, to help me “see” it. Now, of course, I am already convinced He is beautiful. My whole life He’s been showering Me with His kindness and I can safely say, anyone who knows Jesus would quickly agree they know Him as beautiful. But I couldn’t say I “see” His beauty, though I do “see” Him. His beauty was more something I knew about Him – kind of like looking at His eyes, not in them.

I want to inject that I have known for years that He is beautiful specifically because to me my wife is beautiful utterly beyond words. Next month we will have been married 37 years and I still am utterly moonstruck by how beautiful she is. As far as I am concerned, the Lord gathered up everything that is beautiful in this world and brought it all together in my wonderful bride. Just looking at her is rapturous to me. But, what I realized long ago is that all of that amazing beauty is only borrowed from the Lord. She can be beautiful because He is. We’re made in His image and any beauty we see anywhere is simply a reflection of His. And, of course, earthly beauty can only be some very, very small expression of His infinite beauty. What will it be like to actually see Him? Earthly beauty (like Joan’s) is mesmerizing. What will it be like to see His??? It’s a good thing Heaven is forever – that’s probably how long we’ll need to just stand there mesmerized by His beauty!

But back to my experience – I was struggling as usual with this Psalm, feeling like I just don’t “get it.” The words are amazing but I just didn’t “get them.” Tozer had encouraged people to get somewhere alone and just concentrate on the Lord. I tried to do that but nothing happened, then I told myself, “I don’t agree with this.” I don’t believe the Lord is hard to find. I know lots of people write about all the great lengths they go to in order to get alone, fast, pray, etc., etc., etc., and that’s all well and good, but, again, I do not believe He’s like that. He doesn’t make Himself hard to find. “In Him we live and move and have our being.” He is the very air we breathe. So, I just went on about my life, knowing somehow he would answer my prayer.

And He did. This morning when I came back to these verses, they finally “hit” me. This is it: “The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and great in love.” I suddenly realized, this is the God I “see.” This is who He is. If we would know Him, if we would desire to know about Him, if we would desire to understand who He really is, you can sum it all up in these simple words, “The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and great in love.”

Is that not “beautiful?” Would you not agree that, in those few simple words, are the truths we humans most desperately need to know, to believe, to embrace, to live, …to breathe??? We have a God who is what we most desperately need. He is all our wildest dreams come true!

The Hebrew words themselves are beautiful. He is gracious. The word expresses the idea of a superior showing kindness to an inferior, with no regard whatsoever to whether that inferior deserves it. Then the Psalm tells us He is compassionate. It is a word derived from the same word for a woman’s womb. The idea is the same very strong emotional love a woman feels for the baby in her womb – God loves you and me the same way. It isn’t just a fact that He loves us. He loves us with the deepest possible love straight out of the depths of His heart. Then it says He is “great in love.” Hallelujah for us fallen sinners. He doesn’t just love, He is great in love! And “greater love hath no man than this, than that he should lay down his life for his friends.” And “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us!”

Grace, compassion, love. That is who He is. I have known it was true for a long time, but I’ve never “seen” it before! Somehow, I do now. When we look into His eyes, there He is, filled with grace and compassion and love!

And what does it go on to say? “The Lord is good to all and His tender compassions are over all His works.” He is good to all. To all. His tender compassions are over all His works. This is truly amazing. The Lord filled the earth with sunshine. It is all around us. It shines on everything, whether it be a gorgeous vista of the Rocky Mountains or a garbage dump – still His sunshine sparkles on it all. So is His goodness. It fills all His creation just like His sunshine. The most vile, disgusting creatures live enjoying His goodness. The most violent, cruel, godless people live enjoying His goodness. Though they do not deserve it at all and, in fact, force Him in a million ways to withhold the goodness He would have shown them, yet they live and breathe, plant crops and harvest them, get married, have children, enjoy times of happiness – all because they literally swim in the ocean of God’s goodness.

Oh, may we not fail to enjoy that goodness. May He grant us repentance for all the sins in us which might frustrate that goodness from reaching our hearts. Somehow may the joy of knowing Him so fill us that it shines out of our hearts and into the lives of the people around us. “Beholding His image” may we be “changed into that same image, from glory unto glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord!”

Psalm 145:4-7 “Circles”

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.

Use us, we pray.

Psalm 145:3 “Greatness”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

³Great [is] the LORD and One being praised greatly, and to His greatness [is] not a search.

This is at first glance a very simple, very familiar statement of praise: “Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable.” However, as I’ve stopped to ponder it, I think rather it is a profound statement of faith itself. I’ll try to explain.

“Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised.” We humans love “greatness.” We are enamored with “celebrities.” We fill our minds with people who are amazingly beautiful, amazing athletes, amazing musicians – anyone who for almost any reason “stands out” or stands “above” the rest of us. I read once that someone had calculated and determined that Patrick Ewing of the New York Knicks basketball team made an average of $100,000 for every basket he scored over his career. The paparazzi torment celebrities because we’ll pay them a fortune just to see a picture of someone “great.”

What the simple verse before us explains is the root of this almost unfathomable fascination. Why are we so enamored with “greatness?” Is it not because of that “God-sized hole in our hearts?” “Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised!” He IS the greatness our hearts long to be filled with. One of the realities we deal with is that we usually mustn’t dig too deeply into the lives of “great” people lest we find out they aren’t all we’ve imagined them to be! How often has our world been suddenly disappointed when the truth about someone is exposed?

Yet, this can never be true of the Lord. To know Him better is only to love Him more, to be more amazed. He is the Great One. We humans only exhibit greatness as a reflection of His. If we would worship greatness, our journey must find its way to Him.

I’d like to say here that this has been one of the delights of my Bible study through the years. It seems like every passage I ponder gives me clearer visions of just who He is, clearer understandings of His amazing kindness and grace and wisdom and power. It’s one of the things that keeps me studying. “For this is eternal life, that they might know Thee…” “Call unto Me and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things which thou knowest not!” He fills the “God-sized hole in my heart.”

I suppose too it’s worth pausing to ponder what this means as I see myself. He is the Great One – not me. I would suggest one of the problems we all have is that we want to be “great.” We want to be “important.” The Lord has to tell us, “Let another man’s lips praise you and not your own.” “Boasting” is a huge human problem. Perhaps a lot of us would say, “I don’t think I’m a boaster,” but what about our hearts? While our mouths may have enough sense not to say it, are not our hearts still longing to put ourselves forward, to impress others, to be seen as admirable? That foolish festering in our hearts has led all of us to say and do really stupid and embarrassing things down through the years.

What this verse tells us is the answer – God’s greatness. He is the Great One, not me. If I would but accept that and live it, then I don’t have to be “great” any more. I can just be me. I can do well at the things I do well and then be completely transparent to allow others to realize I’m not great. I can honestly own the reality that you’d best not look too closely or dig in my life too deeply, or I promise you will find out I’m not great – because I’m not. God is.

The other thing I want to record is that I think there is an atom bomb contained in the second phrase of the verse: “…and His greatness is unsearchable.” Paul marveled at this truth in Romans 11:33, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!”

God is not only great, He is infinitely great! That means in short that, being ourselves finite, we can study God forever and ever and we’ll never see the end of His greatness. As I sit here typing, I like saying I “know” God. I enjoy rehearsing the ways I can say with Isaiah, “Mine eyes have seen the King!” As I’ve said before, it seems hardly a week goes by He doesn’t show me some new nugget of who He is. Yet what will it be like when we’ve been in Heaven for one million years??? My “knowledge” of Him here will have been so incredibly shallow. And yet, even then, we will only have begun to know Him! Our wonder at His greatness will be new every morning and continue to be new and fuller and deeper for ever and ever and ever!

Here’s the “atom bomb” to me: This explains the inadequacy I always sense in my attempts at worship. Even as I was studying verses 1 & 2, I found my heart struggling. I wanted to echo those words, “I will extol Thee, my God O King, and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever.” And yet, as I tried, I felt this underlying inadequacy. Somehow, I just can’t do it. I can’t work up a “worship” that feels like it’s getting the job done. I don’t like that. I want to. But I can’t. No matter how I try to say, “I worship You,” somehow it falls flat, falls short.

Verse 3 explains why – because His greatness is unsearchable! Of course my praise is inadequate. No praise I could ever offer could be sufficient. It is an atom bomb of truth to me to realize it is okay that my praise feels insufficient. In fact, the insufficiency is part of the praise itself! I come to the Lord to praise Him, realizing even my praise itself gets lost in His greatness! That is awesome. I should feel inadequate!!! The recognition of my inadequacy is a part of the praise I offer Him! That is precisely why I need Him! He is great and I am not!

Charles Spurgeon actually came to the same conclusion. He said, “No chorus is too loud, no orchestra too large, no psalm too lofty for the lauding of the Lord of Hosts…The best adoration of the Unsearchable is to own Him to be so.”

I guess what it comes down to is that this simple finite man will need all eternity to speak the praises of Him whose greatness is unsearchable. And that’s called “Heaven.”

Psalm 145:1, 2 “Quiet”

Here’s my fairly literal translation of these verses:

¹A song of praise to David.

I will extol You, my God the King, and I will bless Your name to ages and always.

²In all of a day I will bless You, and I will praise Your name to ages and always.

This is a Psalm that has been near and dear to my heart practically ever since the Lord saved me.  Before then, I had terrible insomnia and had a very difficult time falling asleep each night. A fellow pointed out to me my problem was that I needed to learn to “turn off my mind.” He said I was keeping myself up thinking about “awake” things – that I needed to stop it and focus my mind instead on peaceful, quieting thoughts. He advised me to begin memorizing this very Psalm and, every night, beginning with verse 1, just rehearse it over and over as far as I had memorized, to focus on the meaning of the words, and to let it “lull” me to sleep.

One other very helpful thing he recommended was to keep a notebook next to my bed, so, if I thought of something I really needed to do, I could write it down to remind myself in the morning. Once it was written down, I was to “forget” it for now and get back to Psalm 145.

It didn’t take long and I could fall asleep in a train station! It’s been that way ever since. I am sooooooooooooo thankful. Ever since then, I rarely have any trouble falling asleep at night. If I do, it’s almost always because I had coffee too late or something like that. Even when I have “enormous” disasters cooking at work, I know now how to “turn it off” and just go to sleep. Sometimes I will wake up in the night and have to use the same attack to get back to sleep, and sometimes I’m just plain “awake,” so I’ll finally get up, usually do some Bible study, then go back to bed and finish off the night.

So, I’ve been pondering this Psalm for a long, long time!

Finally, I get to spend some time actually studying it!

As I wade into David’s words, probably the biggest thing that amazes me is how, in a sense, I feel I’ve never really read them before. “I will extol Thee, my God, O King, and I will bless Thy name forever and ever.”

It’s interesting that the book of Psalms ends with six psalms, all of which are simply praises. No requests. No complaints. No nothing. Just praise. Many of the old reformed pastors note this and suggest it is no coincidence. A life lived with God moves more and more to a life of unbroken praise, they suggest. Psalm 145 itself is believed to have been written late in David’s life. I would certainly concur with the sentiment.

I suppose when I first knew the Lord, I thought He was Someone to be served, Someone to be obeyed, Someone to trust with my mountains of fears – and He certainly is all of those things. But I find the words of this Psalm seem to echo a very gradual change filling my heart – a desire simply to praise Him. It’s almost as if I want to say those words, “I will extol Thee, my God, O King, and I will bless Thy name forever and ever,” and then just be done with it. No fears, no struggles, just stay here in this praise, just stay here in this awe of who He is, this glow of love and peace.

It seems, as my mind steps away, I step back into this awful noisy world of conflict and confusion and complete insanity. I wish, as I live in that world, I could keep this state of serenity, this quiet confidence, this love and peace, this simple unbroken praise filling my heart.

And I feel as if I can.

This is what I was born for. I was born to need Him, but, I feel it is so much more true, I was born to praise Him! I do need Him. I want to need Him. I enjoy needing Him. But as He so completely meets my needs again and again and again, I find myself wanting more and more to just praise Him. Of course He’ll take care of me – He is my amazing God! My Rock, my Fortress, my Strength, my Defender, my Savior, my God, my King, my Father, my Shield and my exceeding great Reward!

No wonder David says, “I will praise Your name forever and ever!”

It is nice that he says, “Every day will I bless Thee.” Every day. Days seem to come in a variety of colors! We certainly have good ones and bad ones! But the heart that has learned to look above the days and see the One who ordained them, begins to rise above the “good and the bad,” to find that place of peace regardless.

It seems like my soul wants to be done with all the anxiety and stewing and regretting and fretting and just settle into the Everlasting Arms and stay there. I’m reminded of old Simeon’s words as he saw the baby Jesus, “Lord, lettest now Thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.” Old Simeon was ready to die. What is wonderful is to think it really is possible to “depart in peace” and yet still live in this world!

May the Lord help me today to live in His peace. May we all learn to “turn it off” and just enjoy His praise!