Psalms 150

The psalm opens without preamble, on the same word it will repeat to the end: Praise ye the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary. There is no working-up to it, no setting of the scene; the summons simply begins, as though the praise has been going on already and the poet has merely thrown open a door onto it. And notice at once where the call locates the praise: first in his sanctuary, then in the firmament of his power. The two together draw a line from the smallest holy room to the widest reach of the sky.

The sanctuary is the holy place, the dwelling God set apart, the spot on earth where heaven touches down and His people gather to worship. The firmament of his power is the great vault of the heavens overhead, where His might is openly displayed for all to see. Between those two - the inner room and the outer cosmos - the whole of creation is gathered into one act of worship. Praise is not confined to the altar, and it is not confined to the open sky; it belongs in both at once, rising from the place of worship and from the works of God together.

The last psalm begins by leaving nowhere out.

The second line lifts the eyes from the holy room to the open heavens: praise him in the firmament of his power. The word firmament reaches all the way back to the opening page of Scripture, to the great expanse God set above the earth on the second day - the vast arch of sky that the ancient eye saw stretched overhead like a canopy. To praise God in the firmament of his power is to call the heavens themselves into the chorus, the very place where, as another psalm says, the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork (Ps. 19:1).

And it is called the firmament of his power - not a neutral sky, but a sky that is itself a display of might, the high and shining evidence of what God can do. So the opening verse sets the two great theatres of praise side by side: the sanctuary, where God's presence is known, and the heavens, where God's power is seen. The worshipper in the holy place and the stars in their courses are summoned to the same song.

There is no altitude at which praise becomes inappropriate, and none too high for it to reach.

Having named where praise belongs, the psalm turns to why: Praise him for his mighty acts. The word reaches for everything God has powerfully done - the great deeds of strength by which He has made Himself known. The whole memory of His people is folded into that phrase: the world brought into being, the sea split open, a captive nation set free, the dead and the desperate raised up and rescued. To praise God for his mighty acts is to praise Him for a track record, not merely for an idea - for the things He has actually accomplished in the world, the deeds that can be remembered and recounted and leaned upon.

There is something steadying in this. The praise the psalm calls for is not rooted in the worshipper's passing mood but in what God has done, which does not change with the weather of the heart. When feelings run dry, the acts remain; one can always praise Him for what He has already done, even on a day when little else feels sure. The deeds of God give the praise of God its ground - a reason outside ourselves, fixed in what He has accomplished, that no bad day can erase.

The reasons for praise come in a pair, and the second completes the first: praise him according to his excellent greatness. If His mighty acts are what He has done, His excellent greatness is who He is - not merely His deeds but His very nature, the surpassing greatness that no work can fully measure. And mark the small word according to. It sets the standard of our praise impossibly high: praise Him to the measure of His greatness, in proportion to how great He actually is.

By that standard no praise can ever be too much, because His greatness has no ceiling against which praise might finally be called excessive. The deeds and the nature of God belong together and cannot be pried apart: we praise Him for what He has done because of who He is, and we know who He is by what He has done. His acts reveal His greatness; His greatness explains His acts. So the psalm gives the worshipper both an anchor and a horizon - the solid memory of what God has done, and the boundless measure of what He is - and tells us to let our praise rise to the full height of both.

Now the psalm opens into music, and the first instrument named is the loudest and most public of them all: Praise him with the sound of the trumpet. This was not a melodic instrument but the shofar, the ram's-horn trumpet whose single piercing blast summoned Israel to worship and to war alike. Its sound announced the new moon and the great feasts, called the assembly together, and rang out on the Day of Atonement and in the year of jubilee.

It is the sound of summons, the note that gathers a whole people and turns every head - and so it is fitting that it should open the orchestra of praise. After the trumpet come the psaltery and harp: the stringed instruments of the temple singers, the lyre and the larger harp that David himself played, the gentler voices that carried the melody of Israel's songs. So the list begins with a deliberate breadth - the blaring horn that summons the crowd and the sweet strings that accompany the song, the public call and the intimate melody, set side by side.

From its first notes the praise of Psalm 150 refuses to be only one kind of sound.

The list quickens and broadens, gathering up the whole range of human music: the timbrel and dance… stringed instruments and organs… the loud cymbals… the high sounding cymbals (vv. 4-5). The timbrel was the hand-drum, the tambourine Miriam took up when she led the women in dancing after the sea was crossed - and here, beside it, is dance itself, the body caught up in the praise so that the worshipper is not a still spectator but a moving participant.

Then the breath instruments and the organs (a pipe), and finally the percussion brought to its peak: cymbals named twice over, the loud and the high sounding, the great crashing climax of the temple orchestra. Run your eye down the catalogue and notice what it is doing. It is not a precise inventory; it is a sweep meant to leave nothing out - strings, winds, percussion; the loud and the soft; the hands, the breath, the whole body in the dance.

Every family of instrument, every manner of making a sound, is called to the same task. The point is totality: there is no kind of music that cannot become praise, no sound humanity has learned to make that is shut out of this song.

The instruments build to their loudest at the very end of the list: Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals (v. 5). Cymbals are named not once but twice, as if a single mention could not carry the volume - first the loud, then the high sounding, the crash and clash of bronze that was the great percussive climax of the temple orchestra. The whole catalogue has been rising toward this: it began with the summoning blast of the trumpet, moved through the strings and the dance and the pipes, and now it arrives at the crashing cymbals, the biggest and most exuberant sound the assembly could make.

There is no restraint here, no anxious throttling-back of joy. The praise of God is allowed to be loud - full-throated, unembarrassed, swelling to a crescendo. And then, the instant the cymbals reach their peak, the psalm widens past every instrument altogether. The crashing climax of the orchestra is not the summit after all; one more summons remains, larger than any sound the temple could produce - and the next verse will reach for it.

At the peak of the music the psalm leaps past all of it: Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD (v. 6). Every instrument has been named, the orchestra has crashed to its climax - and now the summons outruns the whole temple, reaching out to take in every breathing thing. Not the musicians alone, not the assembly alone, not Israel alone, not even humankind alone, but every creature that draws breath. The single qualification is the simplest one imaginable: to have breath is to be called.

And then, in five plain words, the whole book of Psalms comes to rest: Praise ye the LORD. It is the same shout the psalm began with - the great Hallelujah - and the book ends precisely where this psalm started, on the word it was named for. Yet notice that it does not so much conclude as open outward. There is no final image to settle on, no last petition answered, no story tied off. There is only the command, hanging in the air, handed on to whoever reads it next.

The Psalter ends with a summons that has no period - an unfinished song, waiting for one more voice to take it up. The only question the last psalm leaves is whether the reader will be that voice.