Psalms 135

The psalm does not ease into its subject; it begins at full voice and stays there: Praise ye the LORD. Praise ye the name of the LORD; praise him, O ye servants of the LORD (v. 1). Three times in the first breath the call goes out, and it is addressed to servants - those who stand in the house of the LORD (v. 2), who have a place near Him and know Him by name. But notice that the psalm refuses to leave the command bare. It gives a reason, and the reason is not duty but delight: Praise the LORD; for the LORD is good: sing praises unto his name; for it is pleasant (v. 3). Two grounds are laid side by side. We praise because the LORD is good - the object of praise deserves it, being good at the root of His being. And we praise because it is pleasant - the act itself is sweet, fitting, the thing the soul was made to do. There is no grudging worship here, no praise wrung out by obligation. The psalmist has discovered what the servants of God always eventually discover: that to praise the One who is good is not a burden laid on the worshipper but a gladness opened up to him. The command and the joy turn out to be the same thing.

The psalm makes the great claim - whatsoever the LORD pleased, that did he - and then immediately points to the evidence hanging over the worshipper's head: He causeth the vapours to ascend from the ends of the earth; he maketh lightnings for the rain; he bringeth the wind out of his treasuries (v. 7). The sovereignty just confessed is not an abstraction kept in heaven; it is at work in the weather. The mist that rises off distant horizons, the lightning that splits a storm sky, the wind that comes from nowhere a man can name - the psalmist sees all of it as the doing of God, drawn out of His treasuries as a king draws supply from his storehouses. The image is worth pausing on. To the ancient world, weather was the special turf of the storm-gods, the very thing the idols were supposed to control. The psalm quietly hands all of it back to the LORD: He, and no carved image, sends the rain and rides the wind. There is comfort in this for anyone who has felt small under a vast sky. The forces that seem most impersonal and beyond all human reach - cloud and storm and wind - are not random and not masterless. They rise and break and blow at the bidding of the God who is good, the same God who chose a people for His treasure. The weather, rightly seen, is one more reason for the praise verse 1 commands.

Having confessed that God does whatsoever he pleased (v. 6), the psalm now shows it - not in theory but in the history that made a nation. Who smote the firstborn of Egypt, both of man and beast. Who sent tokens and wonders into the midst of thee, O Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his servants (vv. 8-9). The praise is not built on a vague sense that God is mighty somewhere; it is anchored in particular acts on particular days. The sovereignty of verse 6 has a face, and the face is the exodus - the night the firstborn of Egypt fell, the tokens and wonders that broke the grip of the greatest power on earth and brought a company of slaves out free. This is how the Bible characteristically grounds its worship: not in abstract attributes but in remembered deeds. Israel did not praise a God of mere ideas; it praised the God who did something, who acted in the open where it could be seen and told and handed down. There is a discipline here for every worshipper. Faith is fed less by trying to feel reverent in general than by recalling, specifically, what God has actually done - in Scripture, and in one's own life. The psalm praises by remembering, and the remembering keeps the praise from floating free of solid ground.

The roll-call of God's acts moves from rescue to inheritance: Who smote great nations, and slew mighty kings; Sihon king of the Amorites, and Og king of Bashan, and all the kingdoms of Canaan: And gave their land for an heritage, an heritage unto Israel his people (vv. 10-12). The named kings - Sihon and Og - were not symbols but real rulers who stood in Israel's way, and the psalm remembers them by name because the deliverance was concrete. But the weight of the passage falls on the last line, and on one word repeated: an heritage, an heritage. The land was not seized as plunder; it was given, and given as an inheritance - the settled, lasting possession a father hands down to his children. This is the language of belonging, not of conquest for its own sake. The God who chose Israel for his peculiar treasure (v. 4) now gives that treasured people a home of their own, a place to live and rest and pass down through the generations. Underneath the military memory is a tender intention: God was not merely defeating enemies; He was settling His children. And the doubling of the word presses the point that this was no temporary loan but a true inheritance - the kind of secure, given-for-keeps gift that the New Testament will take up and stretch into an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away (1 Pet. 1:4) for all who are made God's own.

The recital of the mighty acts rises into a confession about the One who did them: Thy name, O LORD, endureth for ever; and thy memorial, O LORD, throughout all generations (v. 13). The acts belong to the past - Egypt struck, kings slain, the land given long ago - but the name does not fade with the events. It endureth for ever. A memorial is what keeps a thing from being forgotten, and the psalmist's point is that God's renown is not a monument that crumbles but a living memory carried forward by all generations. Each generation hears the deeds, learns the name, and hands both on. This is precisely why the psalm has spent its verses rehearsing old history: the remembering is the memorial. To praise God for what He did in Egypt is to keep His name enduring into one more generation. And then verse 14 turns the eternal name toward the present and the future: For the LORD will judge his people, and he will repent himself concerning his servants. The God whose name endures is not finished acting; He will still vindicate His people and relent in compassion toward His servants. The same God who moved in the exodus is moving still - which means the praise the psalm commands is not nostalgia for a closed chapter but confidence in a God who is the same across every generation that remembers His name.

Against the living God who smote Egypt and gave a land, the psalm now sets the gods who can do nothing at all, and the contrast is merciless. The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the work of men's hands (v. 15). That single phrase, the work of men's hands, settles the matter before the satire even begins: a god you manufactured cannot be greater than the hands that made it. Then comes the catalogue, organ by organ: They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; They have ears, but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths (vv. 16-17). The idol is built in the shape of a living thing and possesses not one of its powers. It has the mouth of a speaker who cannot speak, the eyes of a watcher who cannot see, the ears of a listener who cannot hear, and - the final, damning detail - neither is there any breath in their mouths. No breath: the very mark of life, the thing God breathed into the first man, is precisely what the idol lacks. The wit is sharp, but the point underneath is deadly serious. To worship such a thing is to pour out prayer and fear and hope on something that cannot return a single one of them. It cannot hear the prayer, cannot see the need, cannot lift a finger to help. Set this beside verse 6 - the LORD who did whatsoever he pleased - and the difference is simply the difference between the living and the dead.

Having exposed the dead idols and the deadness they breed, the psalm turns back to the living God and ends as it began - with a summons to praise, now widened to take in everyone. Bless the LORD, O house of Israel: bless the LORD, O house of Aaron: Bless the LORD, O house of Levi: ye that fear the LORD, bless the LORD (vv. 19-20). The call goes out in widening circles: first the whole nation, the house of Israel; then the priests, the house of Aaron; then the wider tribe of temple servants, the house of Levi; and finally the broadest circle of all, ye that fear the LORD - a phrase that reaches past Israel to anyone, of any background, who has come to reverence the true God. No one near to God is left out of the summons, and the gate is opened wide enough to include the God-fearer who was never born into the household at all. Then the psalm gathers every voice into one closing blessing: Blessed be the LORD out of Zion, which dwelleth at Jerusalem. Praise ye the LORD (v. 21). It ends on the same two words it began with - Praise ye the LORD - so that the whole psalm is enclosed, front and back, in the single cry of hallelujah. Everything between the two shouts - the goodness, the sovereignty, the mighty acts, the folly of the idols - has been one long argument for the praise that frames it. The psalm does not merely command worship; it builds the case for it, and then lets the case break out, at the last, into the simple, fitting word it started on.