Psalms 146
The Psalter does not so much end as erupt. Its last five psalms (146-150) are a sustained burst of praise, and each one is wrapped front and back in the same word: Praise ye the LORD - in Hebrew, a single shout, Hallelujah. Psalm 146 begins that final cadence. But it is not praise in the abstract. It is a worshipper reasoning with his own soul about where to put his trust, and discovering that the answer is also the reason to sing.
Praise the LORD, O my soul (v. 1), he says - and then makes a vow large enough to fill a lifetime.
That vow comes first: While I live will I praise the LORD: I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being (v. 2). For as long as he exists, he will praise - and the rest of the psalm is the case for why such a vow is wise. He sets two kinds of help beside each other. The first is the help of the great and powerful, and his verdict on it is unsparing: Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish (vv. 3-4).
It is not contempt for rulers; it is realism about mortality. The breath that animates the most powerful man on earth will one day go out, and his schemes go out with it. To lean your whole weight on what breathes is to lean on what will fail you.
Against that, the psalm sets the only help that does not die. Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God: Which made heaven and earth… which keepeth truth for ever (vv. 5-6). And then it does something striking: it proves the goodness of this God not by listing His titles but by listing His actions - and they are all bent toward the weak.
He executeth judgment for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, looseth the prisoners, openeth the eyes of the blind, raiseth them that are bowed down, and relieveth the fatherless and widow (vv. 7-9). This is the God who stoops to exactly the people earthly power forgets. The apostles will hear in that list a portrait drawn ahead of time of the One who came healing the blind and preaching to the poor - and the psalm closes on His unending reign: The LORD shall reign for ever… Praise ye the LORD (v. 10).
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
Psalm 146:1-4Put Not Your Trust in Princes
1Praise ye the LORD. Praise the LORD, O my soul. 2While I live will I praise the LORD: I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being. 3Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. 4His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.
The psalm opens with a command shouted out to everyone - Praise ye the LORD - and then, before anyone else can answer, the worshipper turns the command on himself: Praise the LORD, O my soul. He will not wait to be moved; he summons his own heart to its work. And the vow that follows is breathtaking in its scope: While I live will I praise the LORD: I will sing praises unto my God while I have any being (v. 2).
Notice how it is measured. Not when I feel like it, not when things go well, not for an hour on the sabbath - but while I live, while I have any being. Praise here is co-extensive with existence itself; as long as there is breath in him, there will be a song. This is the deliberate decision of a soul that has settled the question of what its life is for. A vow like this cannot rest on circumstances, because circumstances change by the hour.
It can only rest on the unchanging worth of the One being praised - which is exactly what the rest of the psalm sets out to display. Before he tells us why God is worth a lifetime of praise, he commits the lifetime.
Having vowed a lifetime of praise to God, the psalm now turns to warn against giving that confidence to anyone else: Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help (v. 3). This is not a sneer at rulers, nor a counsel to withdraw from the world. Princes here stands for human power at its most impressive - the people with the resources, the influence, the ability to make things happen.
The warning is against trusting them, against leaning the full weight of your hope on them as though they were ultimate. And the reason is given without softening: in whom there is no help. The margin of many old Bibles renders that word salvation - there is no salvation in the son of man. A prince may pass a law, win a war, fill a barn; he cannot rescue a soul, cannot conquer death, cannot keep a single promise past his own grave.
To trust him as if he could is to build a house on someone else's borrowed time. The psalm is teaching the heart to locate its hope correctly - not in the powerful, who are themselves needy, but in the God who needs nothing and gives everything.
Verse 4 gives the unanswerable reason princes cannot finally help: they die. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish. The picture is stark and quiet. The breath that animated the most powerful man alive simply goeth forth - departs - and the body that held it returneth to his earth, the dust it was taken from. And then the line that lands hardest: in that very day his thoughts perish. Not his memory in others, but his thoughts - his plans, his policies, his grand designs for tomorrow.
On the very day he dies, the whole apparatus of his intentions collapses. The schemes that nations waited on, that careers were staked upon, that seemed so weighty the day before - gone, in an afternoon. There is a deliberate echo here of the dust and breath of the creation account, where man is formed of the ground and given the breath of life; the psalm simply runs the film backward. What was breathed in goes out; what came from the earth goes home to it.
And the point is not despair but reorientation: if even the mightiest are this fragile, then the search for a help that lasts must look higher than any man. The verse clears the ground so that the next word can build something that will not fall.
The psalm does not leave you cynical, though; it redirects you. The cure for misplaced trust is not to trust nothing but to trust the One whose hope is in the LORD his God - the help that does not die. So take the weight off the thing that cannot bear it, and put it where it belongs. And while you are at it, take up the vow that opens the psalm and make it yours for today: While I live will I praise the LORD. A life pointed at that will not be left standing on dust.
Psalm 146:5-10Happy Is He That Hath the God of Jacob for His Help
5Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God: 6Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: which keepeth truth for ever: 7Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners: 8The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous: 9The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down. 10The LORD shall reign for ever, even thy God, O Zion, unto all generations. Praise ye the LORD.
After the warning comes the alternative, and it begins with a beatitude: Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God (v. 5). The contrast with verse 3 is exact - there was no help in the son of man; here is the One who is help. And the name is chosen with care: the God of Jacob. Not the God of the strong, but the God who bound Himself to Jacob - a deceiver, a runaway, a man who wrestled in the dark and limped away blessed.
To call Him the God of Jacob is to name a God who keeps covenant with the undeserving and does not let go. Then verse 6 grounds that hope in the widest possible fact: this is the God Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is. The help the worshipper leans on is not a local deity with a limited reach but the Maker of everything that exists - the sky, the land, the sea, and all their contents.
There is no situation outside His jurisdiction, no power He did not first create. And one more thing is added, quietly load-bearing: which keepeth truth for ever. The Creator is also the Keeper - faithful, reliable, unchanging across every generation. The dying prince could not keep a promise past his grave; this God keeps truth for ever. Here, at last, is a foundation that will hold a lifetime's weight.
The psalm now does something unexpected. Having named God as Maker of heaven and earth, it might have gone on to celebrate His majesty - the stars He flung out, the seas He bounded. Instead it tells us what this infinite God spends His power on, and the list is startling: which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners: The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous: The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow (vv. 7-9).
Read it slowly and notice who is on it. The oppressed, the hungry, the imprisoned, the blind, the bowed-down, the stranger, the orphan, the widow - this is a catalogue of precisely the people earthly power steps over. These are the ones a prince has no time for, the ones with nothing to offer in return. And they are exactly the ones the Maker of the universe bends down to. Six times the covenant name drums through these verses - the LORD… the LORD… the LORD - hammering home that all this stooping mercy belongs to the same God who made the seas.
His greatness and His tenderness are not in tension; the proof of how great He is, the psalm says, is how low He stoops. And the one shadow in the list only sharpens the light: the way of the wicked he turneth upside down. The God who lifts the bowed-down also overturns the proud who do the bowing.
Jesus did not answer with a title or an argument. He answered by pointing at what was happening around Him: Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them (Matt. 11:4-5). That is Psalm 146's list, walking.
The works the psalm ascribes to the LORD - opening blind eyes, raising the fallen, lifting the poor - were the very works Jesus offered as the evidence of who He was. He had said it Himself at Nazareth, reading His commission aloud: he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised (Luke 4:18). The mercies that Psalm 146 says belong to God alone were done, one after another, by a single pair of hands in Galilee - so that John, and we, might know who had come.
And the New Testament takes up this exact note as the final word of history. When the seventh angel sounds his trumpet in the book of Revelation, the great voices in heaven announce what the whole Bible has been moving toward: The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever (Rev. 11:15). The everlasting reign Psalm 146 ascribes to the LORD is the reign the angels proclaim for the Lord and His Christ - one throne, one kingdom that does not end.
The same chapter of Revelation closes with the elders falling down before God, saying, We give thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty… because thou hast taken to thee thy great power, and hast reigned (Rev. 11:17). So the psalm that began by warning us off mortal princes ends by handing our allegiance to the one King who will never die - and tells us where the citizens of His city belong, and what we are to do there: Praise ye the LORD.
You are not beneath His notice; you are precisely the kind of person these verses are about. The God who raiseth them that are bowed down is bending toward you, not away. Second, a calling: a heart that truly praises this God will start to love what He loves. You cannot worship the One who relieveth the fatherless and widow and remain indifferent to the people in front of you who are hungry, lonely, forgotten, or bowed down.
The psalm does not let praise stay in the throat; it sends it into the hands. So this week, find one of the people on God's list - someone overlooked, someone with nothing to offer you back - and be, in some small way, the help they have been waiting for. That is what it looks like to praise the LORD with your whole being, the way verse 2 vowed to.
Where this echoes in Scripture
Put Not Your Trust in Princes
- Psalm 118:8-9It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in man. It is better to trust in the LORD than to put confidence in princes.The same choice as verses 3-5 - the LORD set over against the prince as the only sure trust.
- Isaiah 2:22Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?The mortality of verse 4 - breath in the nostrils, here as there the reason not to lean on man.
- James 4:14For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.The vanishing breath of verse 4 - the fragility that makes mortal help no foundation for hope.
- Psalm 103:1Bless the LORD, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.The worshipper summoning his own soul to praise, as in verse 1 - Praise the LORD, O my soul.
Happy Is He That Hath the God of Jacob for His Help
- Matthew 11:4-5The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk... and the poor have the gospel preached to them.The works of the LORD in verses 7-8 reported by Jesus as the proof of His own mission.
- Luke 4:18he hath sent me... to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind.Jesus reads His commission off the same list - loosing prisoners, opening blind eyes (vv. 7-8).
- Psalm 121:1-2My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.The help (ezer) of verse 5 grounded, as here, in the LORD who made heaven and earth (v. 6).
- Revelation 11:15The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever.The everlasting reign of verse 10 announced as the climax of history.
- Isaiah 61:1he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.The prophet's portrait of the same liberating mercies - prisoners loosed, the bound set free (v. 7).