Psalms 117

Stop at the very first word, because everything depends on it: praise. The whole psalm is a summons to do one thing, and in two verses it is sounded four times - praise the LORD… praise him… Praise ye the LORD. There is no argument to follow, no lament to work through, no petition to bring; the psalm is pure summons, a call to lift up the LORD and nothing else. But it is the second word of the address that startles. The call does not go to Israel, or to the temple, or to the devout. It goes to all ye nations. In a book where so much turns on one small people chosen out of the world, here that people throws its arms wide and calls the rest of the world in. The psalmist is not asking the nations to admire Israel; he is summoning them to praise Israel's God as their own. Read it slowly and the scope of it grows: every land, every language, every people group on the face of the earth, addressed in a single imperative and bidden to worship the one true God. The shortest chapter in Scripture opens with the widest possible audience.³

It is worth pausing on how unexpected this address is. Through long stretches of the Old Testament the nations appear as something to be feared, resisted, or judged - the powers that oppress Israel, the idolaters at her borders, the peoples whose gods are no gods. Yet running beneath all of that, from the very beginning, is another note: that the LORD is not a local deity bound to one territory but the Maker and Lord of the whole earth, and that the blessing given to one people was always meant to spill out to all people. It is there in the promise to Abraham - in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed (Gen. 12:3); it is there when Solomon dedicates the temple and prays that the stranger from a far country may come and pray toward it, that all people of the earth may know thy name (1 Kings 8:41-43); it sings out across the Psalter - all nations whom thou hast made shall come and worship before thee, O Lord (Ps. 86:9). Psalm 117 gathers that whole undercurrent into two lines and makes it the entire song. This is the missionary heartbeat already pulsing in the Old Testament - the conviction that the proper response of every people to the living God is the same: praise.

Lest anyone in all the wide world should slip the net, the psalm widens its call a second time: praise him, all ye people. The first line had said nations; this one says people - and the doubling is not mere repetition but the way Hebrew poetry presses a point home, saying the same great thing twice from a slightly different angle so it cannot be missed. Between the two lines every human grouping there is - every nation, every people, every tongue and tribe and family on earth - is swept into the summons. No one is too foreign, too distant, too late, or too unlikely. The God who is being praised is not the private possession of one nation; He is the God of all, and so the praise is owed by all. This is the same generous reach the prophets glimpsed when they saw the day that many nations shall come, and say, Come, and let us go up… to the house of the God of Jacob (Mic. 4:2). The psalm does not merely permit the nations to praise; it commands it, as the only fitting response of every creature to its Maker.

The summons of verse 1 would be only a fine sentiment if it had no reason behind it. Verse 2 gives the reason, and the little word for is the hinge: For his merciful kindness is great toward us. Here is the ground of all the praise - not the worthiness of the worshippers, not the beauty of the song, but the character of God Himself. And notice the size of it. His merciful kindness - His covenant love - is not merely present but great: the Hebrew carries the sense of a love that prevails, that is strong and mighty over us, that rises and overflows. It is abundant, more than enough to go around the whole world it has just been offered to. And it is aimed: it is great toward us. Here the psalmist's own people, who know this love by long experience, become the witnesses who can vouch for it to the watching nations. It is as if Israel says to the world: we can tell you from the inside that His mercy is not small or grudging; it is great, and it has been great toward us - so come, and find it great toward you. A small or rationed love could never be flung open to all the earth. A love this great can be, and is.³

The second pillar under the world's praise is set beside the first: and the truth of the LORD endureth for ever. If the mercy answers the question how great is His love? - the truth answers how long will it last? The truth of the LORD is His faithfulness, His reliability, the dependability of a God who keeps His word; and it does not flicker out with a generation but endureth for ever. Set the two lines together and see what the psalm has built. The mercy is great - big enough for all the nations it has just summoned. The truth is for ever - lasting longer than any of them. A love wide enough to take in the whole world, and a faithfulness long enough to outlast it. Between those two - the size of the love and the duration of the faithfulness - every people on earth has both an invitation and a foundation. And here is the quiet genius of the verse: it does not ground the world's worship in the worshippers at all. It says nothing of how anyone feels, how worthy anyone is, how steady anyone's devotion may be. It grounds the praise entirely in God - in a mercy that is great and a truth that does not end. Feelings rise and fall; nations come and go; the reason to praise stays exactly where it was, because it rests on who God is, and He does not change.³

The psalm ends as it began, with a single ringing imperative: Praise ye the LORD. The Hebrew behind it is one word - Hallelujah, “praise Yah,” praise the LORD - and with it the briefest chapter in the Bible closes the loop, ending on the same note it opened. There is no Amen to seal it shut, no winding down; the last word is the first command repeated, as though the praise it calls for has only just begun and is meant to swell and carry on. Notice, too, how the whole little psalm is framed: it opens with the call to praise, names the two reasons in the middle - mercy and truth - and shuts again with the call to praise, so that the reasons sit cradled inside the summons like the kernel inside the shell. That is the whole gospel-shaped logic of worship compressed into four lines: praise the LORD, because His mercy is great and His truth endures, therefore praise the LORD. There is nothing here to learn but this, and nothing left to do but obey it. The smallest chapter in Scripture leaves the reader holding the one command the whole of Scripture is finally aiming at - to praise the LORD - and the two reasons that will still be true when everything else has passed away.