Psalms 113

The psalm does not ease in; it begins at full voice with a single Hebrew word that the translators render in five: Praise ye the LORD - Hallelujah. Everything in the psalm flows out of that one imperative. And notice at once what we are summoned to praise: not first God's gifts, not His acts, but His name - three times over in the opening verse. Praise the name of the LORD… praise the name of the LORD. A name, in Scripture, is never a mere label; it is the person made known, the character that can be called upon. To praise the Name is to praise God for who He has revealed Himself to be. The psalm will spend the rest of its lines unfolding what that Name means - a God higher than the heavens who stoops to the dust - but it begins by simply lifting the Name itself, as though the right response to God is first to say His name with wonder before we say anything else about Him.

The call to praise is aimed first at a particular company: Praise, O ye servants of the LORD (v. 1). Not the powerful, not the impressive, not the free and self-sufficient - the servants. A servant is someone who has handed over the right to run his own life, who lives under another's authority and at another's disposal. In the world's reckoning that is the lowest of stations; in this psalm it is the company called first to sing. There is a fitness in that which the whole psalm will make clear. The God being praised is the One who stoops to the lowly, who lifts the poor from the dust; and so it is the lowly - those who know themselves to be servants - who are placed at the front of the choir. The proud have little to sing about a God who lifts the humble; but the servant, who knows what it is to be raised and given a place, has every reason. To call yourself a servant of the LORD is not a demotion. In this song it is the truest dignity there is, and the first qualification for praise.

Two phrases stretch the praise of the Name to its furthest limits - one of time, one of space. First time: Blessed be the name of the LORD from this time forth and for evermore (v. 2). The praise has no expiry; it runs out past the end of every calendar, on into for evermore. Then space: From the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same the LORD'S name is to be praised (v. 3). East to west, the whole arc the sun travels across the sky - there is no longitude where the Name is not to be praised, no land the sun touches that is exempt. Put the two together and the claim is total: at every moment that will ever be, in every place the light reaches, this Name deserves praise. It is a deliberately boundless statement, and it quietly bursts the borders of one small nation. The God of Israel is not a local deity of one hill and one temple; His Name is to be praised across the entire reach of the daylight world - a hope the prophets carried forward when they foresaw the day when from the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same the Name of the LORD would be great among the Gentiles (Mal. 1:11).

Verse 4 sets the Name as high as language can reach: The LORD is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens. Two measures of height, each greater than the last. First He is high above all nations - above every empire and power and people, above all the kingdoms whose rise and fall fill the history books; none of them sits where He sits. Then higher still: his glory above the heavens. Not merely above the earth, but above the sky itself, above the highest thing the eye can see or the mind can picture. The whole of verses 1 through 4 has been a single, steady ascent - praise the Name, bless it through all time, praise it across all space, lift it above the nations, lift His glory above the heavens. By the end of verse 4 the psalm has climbed as high as a song can climb. There is, it seems, nowhere left to go but to stay there, gazing up. And it is exactly here, at the unreachable summit, that the psalm turns and does the one thing no one expects.

At the very top of the climb the psalm turns and asks a question: Who is like unto the LORD our God, who dwelleth on high (v. 5). It is the great question of the whole Bible, and it expects no answer, because there is none. No one is like Him. But watch why the psalm says He is incomparable. We expect the reason to be His height - He is matchless because He dwelleth on high, enthroned above all. And that is true; but it is only half of what makes Him unlike every other. The wonder the psalm is reaching for is not simply that He is high, but that the One who is this high also stoops this low. Plenty of gods were imagined as exalted and remote, too lofty to be troubled with the small and the suffering. The God of this psalm is incomparable precisely because His exaltation and His tenderness are not at war. He dwelleth on high - and in the same breath He bends down to the dust. That combination is what has no parallel. The question who is like unto the LORD? is answered not by His distance from us but by the astonishing direction He moves: down, toward the lowest.

Hold the full weight of verse 6: Who humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven, and in the earth! The sentence is staggering once you slow down over it. We are not told that God stoops to look at the dust of the earth - that would be wonder enough. We are told that He must stoop, must humble himself, even to behold the things that are in heaven. The heavens - the stars, the sky, the highest things human beings have ever gazed up at in awe - are so far beneath Him that for God to regard them at all is already an act of condescension. He looks down to see the heavens. And then, in the same motion, He looks lower still, all the way down to the earth. The verse measures the distance God crosses by setting the highest created thing we know - the heavens - as merely the first step of His stooping. If He must humble Himself even to notice the heavens, what shall we say of His attention to a poor man in the dust? The greatness of the condescension is the whole point. The higher He is, the further down His tenderness reaches - and there is no floor to it.

Now the psalm names exactly how far down that stooping goes: He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill; that he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people (vv. 7-8). The two places named are the lowest a person could sink to. The dust is where the destitute sat - on the bare ground, stripped of everything, the posture of mourning and shame. The dunghill is lower yet: the ash-heap and refuse-pile outside the village, where the outcast and the diseased were left, the very edge of human life. These are not metaphors for a mild slump in fortunes; they are pictures of total ruin, the bottom of the bottom. And it is from there - the dust, the dunghill - that God lifts a person, and not merely to his feet. He sets him with princes. The distance God moves the lowly is the full span of the social order: from the refuse-heap to the royal court, from the place of utmost shame to a seat among the honoured. This is not improvement; it is reversal. The God who must stoop even to see the heavens reaches past them, past the earth, down into the ash-heap, and lifts what He finds there up to a throne.

The psalm ends, surprisingly, not with a king or a nation but with a single woman in a single house: He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be a joyful mother of children (v. 9). To grasp the weight of this, you have to feel what barrenness meant - not only private grief, but, in that world, public reproach and a future that seemed to have no door in it. The barren woman sat under a particular kind of dust. And God, the psalm says, reverses even this: He maketh her to keep house - to be settled, established, at home - and turns her into a joyful mother of children. The whole sweep of the psalm comes to rest here, in the most intimate possible scene. It began by lifting the Name above the heavens; it ends with the sound of children in a house that was empty. That is no anticlimax. It is the psalm's entire argument in miniature: the God whose glory is highest is known, finally, not by some distant display of power but by the joy on the face of a woman who thought her arms would always be empty. And it is no accident that the great women of Scripture - Sarah, Hannah, Elisabeth - were given children against all hope, each birth a small enactment of this verse, and each pointing toward the day God would bring His greatest gift through the womb of a humble woman of Nazareth. The psalm closes as it opened, with the only fitting response: Praise ye the LORD.