The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): David contributed much to the Psalter, and he often used his poetic aptitude to cry out to God for help in the face of his enemies. But in this, the last of David's Psalms, he had another very specific purpose in mind.

Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Psalm 145 is a praise psalm, one that looks back over the experiences of a lifetime lived with the Lord and one that forms a pattern that we might use in our own praise and worship. Let's join Dr. Boice as he examines the last of David's contributions to the Psalter, an acrostic psalm of praise to a faithful and wonderful God.

Dr. James Boice: We're getting close to the end of our study of the Psalter, studying Psalm 145 today. We only have five more after this. So it's not surprising as we come toward the end, to come toward the last of a number of things. This is the last of David's Psalms in the Psalter. It's possible that others might be written by him, but they don't claim to be. This is the last one that is. It's also the last of the acrostic psalms.

An acrostic psalm is a psalm in which the verses in sequence begin with the various letters of the Hebrew alphabet in sequence. So the first verse or a group of verses, as in the case of Psalm 119, begins with Aleph, and then the next verse or group of verses begins with Beth, and then Gimel, and so on.

Now, in most of the Hebrew manuscripts, the letter N or Noon is missing, which is why this Psalm only has 21 verses instead of 22 for 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. But in some of the manuscripts, in the old Syriac manuscripts, in some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a few late Masoretic manuscripts, the N is supplied. It appears in our Bible as the second half of verse 13, which says, "The Lord is faithful to all His promises and loving toward all He has made."

I don't know whether that actually belongs there, whether it was there in the earliest text or not, but if you're going to add a verse, those are not bad truths to have included. The Lord is faithful to all His promises and loving toward all He has made. We know it's biblical because a little later on, in verse 17, you have virtually the same thing, except for the change of one word to provide for the letter.

Now, if this is the last of David's Psalms, let me ask the question: what do you think David will be making the subject matter of his Psalm? These are the last words he's leaving with us. What do we expect David to be saying? If we know anything at all about David's life and the kind of man he was, that answer is not very hard to find. You would expect David to be praising God. And of course, that's exactly what David is doing.

That's the way the Psalm is introduced. It's called a Psalm of praise. And so what David is doing here is looking back over his experience with God over a lifetime, and he's reflecting on the kind of characteristics he has found to be in God. And so he provides a pattern for us on how we might praise God too. This is an appropriate Psalm not only to close the collection of the Psalms that we have by David, but also an appropriate Psalm to introduce the last exclusively praise Psalms of the Psalter, all of which begin and end with the word Hallelujah, which as you know means, "Praise the Lord."

How does David begin? He begins by an opening statement in which he salutes Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament, as my God and my King. That would be a significant statement for any of us, but it was particularly a significant statement in the mouth of David, who was Israel's great king. David was the king, but Jehovah is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. And so this great king of Israel, as he offers up his final word of praise, acknowledges that God is his King or his Lord.

Now, that causes us to ask at the very beginning whether God is our King as well, whether Jesus Christ is our Lord. That's the starting point. You can't praise God for His greatness toward you if you're not acknowledging that He's your King and your Lord. You can say, "Oh, well, I praise Him as my Savior." That's a wonderful thing, but the one who is the Savior is also the Lord. So if He is not your Lord, He's not your Savior. If He is your Savior, He is your Lord. And it's because He's Lord and because He's King, because He's great and gracious and all these things that are going to be mentioned in the Psalm, that you and I gather together and praise Him.

Now we ask the question: what does this great king deserve? It was a custom in the ancient world, I suppose it may even be true today in many places, that whenever you came into the presence of a king, you brought a present. And we say, here we are, coming into the presence of our King and our Lord, and we ask the question: what kind of present can we give Him? We can't give Him anything. He owns all things. Even we ourselves are His possession. What can we possibly offer up as a gift to our great King? There's only one answer: it's praise.

And that's exactly what David says he will do. "I will praise Your name forever and ever. Every day I will praise You and extol Your name forever and ever." Now, those are three more or less parallel lines. It's a characteristic of Hebrew verse that it moves by way of parallel lines and parallel ideas. And yet at the same time, generally speaking, those lines vary slightly, introducing new elements. And here we have three different statements about the kind of praise that David's going to offer up to God.

First of all, he says, "I will praise You." That's the simple statement. Secondly, he says, "I'll praise You daily," that is every single day. And then thirdly, and rather strikingly, he says, "I will praise You forever and ever." Now, let's just take them one at a time. First of all, "I will praise You." What does that mean? He means he's going to worship God because that's what praise is. That's what worship means. Worship is based on the old English word worth, and it means to ascribe proper worth to somebody.

In the old sense, you could worship a king that way because you acknowledged that the king was worthy of honor. He was a great man. But in biblical language, it's restricted to God because only God is worthy of all our praise and all our honor. And that's what David says he's going to give Him. Worship is not coming to God to get things from Him, though we are expected and able to do that as well. Worship is not even coming to God to confess our sins or to plead for His grace, though we have to do that.

But worship is praising God. So when we come to him confessing our sins and pleading for his grace and find forgiveness of our sins and discover his grace, then we praise him as a gracious and forgiving God, and that's what our worship is all about. That's what David's doing. And secondly, he says he's going to praise God daily. When do you praise God? Some people say, "Well, that's what Sunday's for." And I guess in the old dispensation, someone would have said, "That's what the Sabbath is for."

On the Sabbath, all the people of God get together and praise God. And that's true, we do. God's given us one day a week to set apart to praise Him. One of the sad things today is that so many don't praise Him any day of the week, or that Christians when they come give such a little portion of Sunday to God. But David goes beyond that. David doesn't merely say, "I'm going to set aside one day a week to praise God from morning till evening." He says, "I'm going to praise God every single day."

Now, that doesn't mean, of course, that he never did anything else. He was a king. He had to administer a kingdom. He was a warrior. He had to fight battles and he had to do that well and give his attention to that. But when he says, "I will praise You daily," he means everything I do is going to be done in the context of the worship of my God. It's a little bit the same way the Apostle Paul speaks about prayer, where he says that we're to pray daily and pray without ceasing.

He doesn't mean that we're never to do anything else, but that everything we do is to be as it were bathed in prayer. And then thirdly, and as I said, most strikingly, David says, "I will praise You forever and ever." That doesn't merely mean to the end of my days until I die. That's not what forever and ever means. It means forever and ever, eternally. So you have a little indication here of the faith of the greatest of the Old Testament saints who looked beyond the moment of death to spending an eternity with God.

He said, "It's going to be my privilege as well as my duty to praise God in heaven, in His presence, forever and ever and ever." And so we need to ask the question of ourselves. Are we aware that that's what God has called us to do? That we are creatures made in His image with the capacity for relating to God, finding His salvation in Jesus Christ, and praising Him for that, not just here, though we must do it here, but forever and ever and ever. That's what we're called to do.

Let's not wait for heaven. Let's get busy doing it now. Let's practice what it really means to worship God now. So let's do it. What should we praise God for? How should we worship? Well, in this Psalm, David, stanza by stanza, speaks of four main things. First of all, we should praise God for His greatness. He's a great God, verses five through seven. And then secondly, for His grace. God is a gracious God. We should praise Him for that, verses 8 through 13a, the first half of that verse.

And thirdly, we should praise God for His faithfulness, because He's a faithful God, verses 13b through 16. And finally, we should praise God for His righteousness. It means His uprightness, verses 17 through 30. Now verse three starts by praising God for being great. "Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise. His greatness no one can fathom." Now, what's in mind in that verse becomes clear in the following stanzas where David begins to speak about God's mighty works or acts.

We can hardly miss that because the word works occurs three times in that stanza, and the synonyms acts and deeds occur one additional time each. It's worth pointing out here, I think, that verse three is the verse with which Saint Augustine began the best known of all his works, his *Confessions*. He took the first half of verse three from this Psalm and combined it with the second half of verse five from Psalm 147, just two verses on. So his *Confessions* begins, "Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise; His understanding has no limit."

Well, we should pause at that point and we should say, what are the great works or the mighty acts for which we should praise God? When we read here of mighty acts, glorious splendor, wonderful or awesome works, great deeds, it's natural to think of God's works in nature, and probably that's where we should begin. If you can look at the surge of the ocean or the glory of the mountains or the splendor of the heavens on a starry, cloudless night and not be moved to praise God, you are greatly to be pitied. You are spiritually without sight.

Some years ago, I read in something that Chuck Colson wrote of a time he was in one of the prisons and he had given a moving address on the grace and mercy of God and forgiveness found in Jesus Christ. And when he was done, the man that was the head of that work in the particular prison stood up and said to the inmates that were gathered there, "Now, if that don't move you, you ain't got no switches." And I suppose that's true. If you can look at nature in all its splendor and you don't praise God, it's because the grace of God has not yet made itself known to you in Jesus Christ.

And yet let me say that wonderful as God's works of creation are, a person who has come to know of God's goodness and grace in Jesus Christ can hardly stop there because the greatest of all God's works are His salvation works. In the case of Israel, this was God's delivering them out of Egypt from their bondage, physically as well as spiritually, bringing them to Sinai where they were given the law, and then eventually leading them into the Promised Land.

In our case, living on this side of the cross, those saving works are what God accomplished in Jesus Christ, where He bore our sin on the cross that we might not have to suffer the penalty of the sin, and which because of that enables God also to offer us the righteousness of Jesus Christ in its place. So we stand before Him as justified men and women, not on the basis of anything we have done, but on the basis of what God has done in Jesus. That is splendor.

Here in this stanza, we find the words goodness and righteousness, and we ought to remember that these were both displayed and preserved in the death of Jesus Christ because it's in Jesus' death that God showed Himself to be good and righteous at the same time. You see, He was righteous because He punished our sin in Christ, and He was good, gracious, or merciful because it is by that means that He was able to forgive us from our sin. Neither of those two things are seen in nature.

So you can praise God in nature and see His splendor, His majesty, His strength, His glory, His wisdom, but you find His righteousness and His goodness only in Jesus Christ. There's one other point here. David speaks of one generation commending Your works to another. I suppose that means in part that each generation passes on the story of what God has done in the past, and we do that. That's why we study the Bible. It's the record of God's dealings with His people in the past. That's part of our history. We tell it over and over again. We need to be reminded.

But I think it also means more than that because each generation also has a personal experience of the mercy and the righteousness of God. And so as we repeat the past, we add to it, "Yes, indeed, and we have found that also to be true in our experience." That as I see it is what history is all about. It's why things go on from year to year and decade to decade and century to century, as God brings people out of one position and another to faith in Jesus Christ.

And those people say, "Yes, everything that was written about God in the Old Testament and in the New Testament we also have found to be true." And we invite people to come and find God in Jesus Christ and worship Him along with us. Certainly, that's what David is doing. Now the next stanza talks about God being gracious or good. It's probably his reference to goodness in verse seven that led him to move on next to deal with God's compassion, patience, and rich love in stanza three.

Now, this verse, the verse that begins it, "The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love," is the verse of the Old Testament that is most often quoted in the Old Testament. It comes from the book of Exodus, and it has to do with that time when Moses asked to see the glory of God. He wanted to see the face of God, and God replied to him, "Nobody can see My face and live. You can't do that."

But God said, "I'll do the next best thing. I'll reveal Myself to you in a special way." And so God hid Moses in a cleft of the rock, He covered him with His hand, and then He passed by. And as He passed by, Moses heard the voice of God. And the voice of God said this: "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness and rebellion and sin."

The essence of this revelation is the definition of God's name. Moses at one point wanted to know what the name of God was, and God said, "My name is I AM. I AM THAT I AM." But if we go beyond that and say, yes, but what is the great I AM like? The answer is here. I am compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin. As I say, that's the verse from the Old Testament that's most quoted in the Old Testament, and why not?

There are a large number of verses where we find that. You find it in Numbers 14, in Nehemiah 9, you find it four times in the Psalms, it's there in Joel and it's also in the book of Jonah. God is merciful. Why shouldn't we focus on that? You see, there are lots of things about God that we just should understand naturally. God has to be sovereign to be God. God has to be all-wise and all-powerful to be God. We have every right to expect that, but we don't have any right to expect His mercy.

And yet what we find is that in addition to being sovereign and powerful and all-wise, God is also a gracious and compassionate God. And that's what David is celebrating. Look, in that stanza, verses 8 through 13, he emphasizes mercy by speaking of gracious once and compassion twice and love once and goodness once. The latter half also speaks of God's kingdom. It's caused some of the commentators to say, yes, that's really the theme of the Psalm. It has to do with the reign of God, especially because David starts at the beginning, "My God and my King."

I don't think that's the best way of looking at it. I think he's actually rehearsing the attributes of God, but if you put the compassion of God together with God's rule, as David does in this stanza, what we have to say is that God's rule is a compassionate rule. You see, one reason why people think they might be perhaps willing to have Jesus Christ as Savior without having Jesus Christ as their Lord is that they don't really trust Him to be their Lord. They're afraid that somehow He's going to be mean as Lord, force them to do all kinds of things they don't want to do.

Well, it is true He's going to set a different standard before us. It's quite different from the things that we would do apart from His grace. But you see, His rule over us is a gracious rule. His rule is a compassionate rule. Our God is love. His very name is mercy. And so you never surrender to the reign of God without finding Him to be far more gracious, far more loving, far more compassionate than you had ever dreamed. And you never find anything like that in the world. The only place you find it is in God and His Son, Jesus.

Now, it's hard for us sometimes to see that. Certainly, the world doesn't see it. I've very often referred to the case of Nebuchadnezzar, who couldn't see it because he wanted to rule his own life, and he certainly didn't want to acknowledge the reign of God. He came in his experience to a great climax that's recorded in the fourth chapter of Daniel. As he looked out over Babylon and he took the glory of the only all-powerful God to himself, he said, "Is not this the great Babylon that I have built, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?"

He was taking credit for it all to himself. He said, "I'm the one that should be worshipped. I'm the one that should be praised." And we're told in the text that while the words were still on his lips, God spoke from heaven to bring a judgment. His judgment had to do with insanity because anybody who can think that he's the center of everything is out of his mind. And he was driven out to live with the animals because people who think that way become beastlike in their treatment of other people.

But even in Nebuchadnezzar's story, you see the fascinating thing is not that God judged Nebuchadnezzar for his pride, but rather that God humbled him in order that He might show to him His mercy. And at the end of the time of the judgment, Nebuchadnezzar, by the grace of God, actually, as we would say, came to his senses and recognized that God is God and that His kingdom is eternal. Here's the way he put it: "I praised the Most High. I honored and glorified Him who lives forever. His dominion is an eternal dominion. His kingdom endures from generation to generation." When a person has learned that lesson, the person has learned a great deal.

Now the next section, the third of these main stanzas, talks about God's faithfulness. He says He's faithful to His promises. Derek Kidner, whom I've often referred to as one of the best modern commentators on the Psalms, calls this section "God the Provider." He notes four ways in which God provides for His creation: He helps the inadequate, He gives food to all His creatures, He answers those who pray, He protects those who are His.

Well, all of that's accurate. I think that might be a good way of doing it, but I actually prefer the divisions that the New International Version supplies when it links verses 13b through 16 to God's faithfulness, which is mentioned and introduced in verse 13, and God's righteousness or upright way of acting to verses 17 through 20, which is introduced in verse 17. Now we ask when we consider this matter of faithfulness, how it is that God actually demonstrates His faithfulness?

Well, He does it by keeping His promises and for caring for His creation. Here are the things David mentions: when we fall, He lifts us up. Have you ever fallen? Of course you have. We all have. And hasn't God lifted you up? Does He kick you when you're down? He doesn't do anything of the sort. God delights in lifting up the fallen. And if you've been down and God has lifted you up, you have a great cause of praise for that. You ought to be able to come to church and say, "Praise be to the God who lifts up those who have fallen down."

He says when we're bowed down by distress, He restores us. Haven't you ever been overcome by distress? Something has bothered you so much, you simply feel oppressed by it. You hardly know which way to turn. But in the midst of that experience, you've found the grace of God who has restored you to a better frame of mind. If you've experienced that, then you can come to church and you can say, "Praise be to God! He restores those who are bowed down by distress."

Have you ever been hungry? Well, maybe not much, at least not in the sense of those who are starving, but we get hungry from time to time and we would if God were not providing. What we're told here is that He provides food. You can praise Him for that. That's a very important thing just because we get food so naturally in our kind of society doesn't mean that we should forget that God is gracious in that way too. And when we look to Him with our hands open, empty and held out, He satisfies us with all good things.

Now God does that for human beings, of course, but what David seems to have in mind here as one evidence of the grace of God is that He does it for all creation, that is for the animals as well. Because look, he talks about all He has made, verse 13, and every living thing, verse 16. I suppose that means that one of the promises that David has in mind in verse 13, when he says God is faithful to His promises, is the promise God made to Noah at the time of the Great Flood.

God said, "Never again will I destroy all living creatures as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." And so we read that and we say, that's a great promise. Isn't it wonderful that God is faithful to His promises through generation after generation after generation? There's a wonderful universality in these last verses. It goes the whole way through verse 20. It's seen in the word *all*, which is repeated 11 times. Can you notice that as you read it carefully?

David writes about all His promises, all He has made, all those who fall, all who are bowed down, all look to You, all His ways, all He has made, all who call upon Him—he mentions that twice—all who love Him, and all the wicked. Well, that means, if it means nothing else, that because God is good to all, all ought to praise Him. All don't do it. Billions of people out there in the world of our day who hardly have a thought for God at all.

But certainly, the people of God who have come to know Him ought to do it. We should be praising Him for all of these things. The Psalm says, "Let every creature praise His holy name forever and ever," and the Psalter ends, we're going to come to it in a few weeks, it ends by saying, "Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord," and the last word is, "Praise the Lord." Now the last stanza refers to God being righteous. "The Lord is righteous in all His ways and loving toward all He has made."

Now, righteous here doesn't mean morally upright, though God is that. He's the only upright source of all morality. It means rather that God is upright or just in responding to those who have needs and who call upon Him, those who are in peril, and those who seek salvation. And verse 18 says that God is near to all who call on Him. It means that He answers their prayers. When verse 19 says that He fulfills their desires and saves them, it means the same thing.

Verse 20 adds, "The Lord watches over them." In other words, what He's saying here is that throughout our entire lives, God shows Himself to us to be a good, caring, saving, and persevering God. And from our enemies too. In verse 20, for the first time in the Psalm, the wicked come into the picture. "The Lord watches over all who love Him, but all the wicked He will destroy." It's interesting, isn't it, that David hardly has a Psalm that he doesn't mention his enemies, those who are trying to destroy him. But what he says is that in the final analysis, God will destroy them.

Well, it's a reminder that while we're praising God, we nevertheless do it in a very wicked and sinful world, and we need God's protection. Franz Delitzsch makes an interesting observation on the reference to those who fear God in verse 19 and those who love Him in verse 20. He says those two belong together, and it goes like this: fear and love of God belong inseparably together because fear without love is an unfree, servile disposition, and love without fear is bold-faced familiarity. The one dishonors the All-Gracious One, and the other dishonors the All-Exalted One.

You want to praise God? Want to know what worship is? That's enough to keep us busy for a lifetime. And speaking of a lifetime, isn't it interesting that this is David's last Psalm? That these are David's last words? You might call it David's last will and testament. If David had said nothing else in his long, long life, this would be in itself a marvelous legacy to pass on to the people of all generations until Jesus comes again. And what does he do? He praises God himself, and then having praised God himself, he calls upon others to join him and praise God too.

The last verse says, "My mouth will speak in praise of the Lord. Let every creature praise His holy name forever and ever." What will your legacy be? You leave money, that will be used up. You leave houses, they'll decay. You leave a reputation, but people will forget about that. The greatest legacy any one of us can ever leave is exactly what David left, and that is praise to God. Because others will hear it. Others will come to praise God too.

And even if they don't, remember that the angels are looking on. They're looking on according to that third chapter of Ephesians to see the manifold wisdom of God displayed in the church. And as you and I with our experience of the greatness and the goodness and the faithfulness and the righteousness of God say, "Yes, He is that, and we proved it to be so in our own experience," the angels say, "Yes, and we will praise God too because God is all of those things and even more." So don't wait, praise God now and get others to praise God along with you.

Let's pray. Our Father, we are thankful for this great Psalm of David's, which is such a model for us of how we might worship You in a pleasing and effective and meaningful way. We don't always do it, but we would like to do it more, and we pray that You'll use that to provide the kind of instruction we need so that we might be increasingly a praise to the honor of our God. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

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