The Bible Study Hour

Dr. James Boice: Sometimes the Psalms ask questions, and the Psalm we're looking at today does. It asks us what God is like. Who is God? How do you describe God? It's a very good question. It's an important question. It's the most important of all questions in some ways, but the problem is it's unanswerable, at least in the fullest extent, because God is unlike anything else. He's in a category of his own. He's unique.

The only way we have of talking about him, and it's an inadequate means, is by analogy. We can say God is like a good father, or we can say God is like a great and glorious king. But we realize when we say that, that we haven't exhausted God by calling him a father or a king, or by anything else that we can compare him to.

Another way of talking about God is to talk about what he's done. We can say God is the Creator. He's the one who made the heavens and the earth. And that's important, too, but again, it quite obviously doesn't exhaust the subject. Now, our Psalm today, Psalm 113, does both of these things. It describes God by analogy somewhat, and more directly, it talks about what he has done, and yet all the while, it knows that God can't be fully described.

The key verse is right in the middle. The Psalm has nine verses. This is verse five. It asks the question, and the question continues into verse six, and it goes like this: "Who is like the Lord our God, the one who sits enthroned on high, who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?" The answer quite clearly is no one. No one or no thing is really like God.

Now, this Psalm is the first of six Psalms, Psalms 113 to 118, that were commonly sung by Jews at the time of the Passover and on some other occasions as well. They're called the "Egyptian Hallel." Now, the "Hallel" means praise, and the reason they're called the "Egyptian Hallel" is because of the second in the series, which mentions the Exodus, Psalm 114: "When Israel came out of Egypt," and so on.

These Psalms were sung at the feasts. Because that is a tradition that goes back a very long way, these are probably the Psalms we're to understand that Jesus and his disciples sang in the upper room at the time of the Last Supper, before our Lord's arrest and crucifixion. We're told that they did that in several of the Gospels, and these would be the Psalms that they sang. Apparently, the way it was done, the first two were sung before the Passover feast, and then the last four were sung afterwards.

Although it's only the second in that series that mentions the Exodus, the series is appropriate for an occasion like that. Derek Kidner, I mention him many times, one of the good commentators on the Psalms, says that although only the second Psalm speaks directly of the Exodus, the theme of raising the downtrodden, which is what we have in the Psalm today, the note of corporate praise in Psalm 115, personal thanksgiving in 116, world vision 117, and festal procession 118, make it an appropriate series to mark the salvation which began in Egypt and extends to all the nations.

We're among the nations. We're the Gentiles, and so it's a series that also extends to us. A number of Psalms and hymns have been based upon this Psalm. One of them we're going to sing at the very end of the service. It's the best known by far, by Frederick Faber, and it begins, "My God, how wonderful thou art, thy majesty how bright, how beautiful thy mercy seat in depths of burning light." Through the reading of the Psalm itself and through the singing of this and other hymns, the Psalm has been a great blessing to the people of God down through the centuries.

Now, the starting point is the recognition that it's a Psalm of praise. As a matter of fact, it's a superb example of what a praise Psalm should be. It begins with the words "Praise the Lord." It ends with the words "Praise the Lord." The first stanza tells us to praise the Lord, and then the second and third stanzas actually do it. So, if you want a little study of how you should praise God, certainly this Psalm is a good one.

There's an important emphasis upon the name of God in the first stanza. If you follow that in your Bibles, I ask you to look at that. That very word "name," n-a-m-e, occurs three times, and you have it in each verse. Now, we don't normally pay much attention to names today. Generally speaking, names for us are unimportant. They don't signify much. But they did in ancient times and in biblical times. Names were understood to convey something of the character of the one possessing them.

Giving a person a name or recognizing a name was important. If you gave a person a good name, it was a way of blessing the person, saying you trust they would be like what the name represents. If you gave a person a bad name, it was the equivalent of cursing the person. You want them to turn out badly. That's the way names were considered.

Now, here we're talking about the name of the Lord. That's important because it has to do with the revelation of what God is. In other words, when this Psalm calls us to worship the name of the Lord, it's making clear that we're not being called to worship just any god, a god of our imagination, whatever we may assume God to be, but we're called to worship the God who has revealed himself by name and whose name embodies certain characteristics.

The Lord did that. He revealed himself by name on Mount Sinai to Moses when Moses asked what his name was. Then he revealed himself more fully in the giving of the law, which is an expression of the character embodied in the name. Then he has revealed himself most fully, of course, in Jesus of Nazareth, the very Son of God.

Now, we have to give special attention to this revelation given on Mount Sinai because certainly that's what these first three verses are referring to. I mentioned a moment ago that the word "name" occurs three times in the opening stanza, but the name itself, that is Jehovah or Yahweh, it's translated "Lord" in our version, actually occurs many more times than that. Can you see it? You have it in the opening and closing "Praise the Lord," but you also have it again and again in the first stanza, four times there, and you have it also in verses four and five.

So, the name of the Lord is that name Jehovah or Yahweh. It's a name that has presented significant problems for commentators and scholars as they've tried to understand it and explain what it means, and there are a number of reasons for that. One small problem we have is that we don't even know how it was pronounced. That's why a moment ago I said Jehovah or Yahweh.

The reason we don't know how it was pronounced is interesting. You know, when the Hebrew text was originally written, it was written without vowel pointings. Hebrew doesn't have vowels, but the vowels in modern Hebrew are indicated by little dots and dashes that are added above and below the letters. In the original text, there weren't any of those dots and dashes. So, all you had was the consonants.

You know what the consonants are. We understand that much about the name. Scholars call it the Tetragrammaton, which means four letters, because in the Hebrew, you have the letters Yod, He, Waw, and He. We would write it out in English Y-H-W-H. Without the vowels, you don't know quite how to say it.

Now, the vowels came into the Hebrew text in the Middle Ages because at that time spoken Hebrew was changing and the Rabbis of the time, the Masoretes, wanted people to be able to remember how Hebrew should be pronounced. So, they began to add the little vowel pointings to the Hebrew text, but when they came to the name of God, they didn't add the proper vowels because by that time the name of God was considered too holy or distant or sacred to be pronounced.

They didn't want you to say, as you were reading along through the Hebrew text, the name of God. So, what they did instead was add the vowel pointings for a different name, the name Adonai, which means Lord. It's not the title, Jehovah or Yahweh, just the word "Lord." So, when a Hebrew would come along and read that in the text, instead of saying Jehovah or Yahweh, he'd say Adonai.

The way we get the name Jehovah is by using the vowel pointings from Adonai with the letters of the name of Jehovah, but that's probably not the way it was pronounced. Now, scholars think, because of comparisons with other ancient versions like the Syriac, it probably was Yahweh, but they don't really know. So, that's a first problem.

Then there's an even greater one. The letters are in one form or another a variation of the basic Hebrew verb "to be." But there's a question even then of how it should be taken, what particular tense of the verb "to be" is involved. Hebrew tenses aren't quite like ours. It could be what is called in Hebrew a Hiphil tense. It indicates causality. If that's the case, the verb "to be" should be translated "he who causes to be" or "he who brings into existence."

There's a great Jewish scholar, Noel Freedman, who insists that that's the way it has to be taken. Of course, that's perfectly good theology. God is the one who brings all things into being. Everything comes from him. That's true enough. Or, the name could be understood, it could be pointed with its vowels to give the most basic of all Hebrew verb forms, the Qal, which would just be translated "to be" or as we have it in Exodus, "I AM" or "I AM THAT I AM."

You can't decide that question on the basis of the pointing because you don't have it, but you have to remember that the only place in the whole Bible where the name is explained is back in the third chapter of Exodus. There it's taken in the simplest way, "I AM THAT I AM." For that reason, when we come to a passage like this, where we're to extol the name of the Lord, probably it's that that we're to think about.

If you want to praise God, if you want to honor him, well, you're to honor him as the great "I AM." If you're going to meditate upon that, you want to think about what that really means. Now, let me suggest some of the things that it means. First of all, it tells us that God is a Person because when God reveals his name to Moses, he's revealing that which is characteristic of individuality or personhood.

In other words, when we're dealing with the biblical God, we're not dealing with the abstract God of the Greek philosophers, something that is there at the end of a long process of reasoning. We're not dealing with what the British physicist and scientist of a former generation, Sir James Jeans, called a "great mathematical something." To bring it up to date, we're not even dealing with the Star Wars idea of God, "the Force" that's somehow there in the universe.

This is a Person that is revealing himself and whom we're called upon to worship. You can't worship a mathematical equation or an abstract force or something that's the product of reasoning, but you can worship a Person, and that's what our God is.

Secondly, that name also indicates that God is self-existent because when he says "I AM THAT I AM," he's saying that he always is, and he exists in and of himself, and he doesn't need anybody else to bring him into being. He's just self-existent. Now, that means among other things that God as he is in himself is ultimately unknowable. It's what I started out to explain.

When we talk about knowing something, one of the things we mean by that is we explain how it came to be. We deal with origins. Here's an object, and we want to explain it, get to know it, we have to tell how we got the object, where it came from, who created it, and so on. But when you're dealing with God, you're dealing with one who isn't susceptible to that kind of an analysis.

How did God get to be God? There's no answer to that. God is, "I AM THAT I AM." If you read the books of A.W. Tozer, as I trust many of you have, you know that in his very popular book, *The Knowledge of the Holy*, he suggests that's one reason why scientists have so much trouble with God because you can't explain him. It might even explain why some Christians have so much trouble actually thinking about God. It's hard to think about God because you're thinking about one who is self-existent and ultimately unknowable, and yet that's what we're challenged to do.

Here's a third thing that's implied in the name: God is self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency means that God has no needs, just as self-existence means that God has no origins. When we say that God is self-sufficient, we mean that he doesn't need us. He doesn't need a creation. He doesn't need worshippers. He doesn't need defenders. He doesn't need soldiers. He's quite well off all by himself, thank you.

Now, it is our glory that he has chosen to create people such as you and me, and bring us to faith in Jesus Christ, and give us worthwhile tasks to do taking that Gospel to the world that needs to hear it, but he doesn't have to do it that way. You know what John the Baptist said in his day. He said, "Don't say to yourselves," he was speaking to the Jews, they were proud of their ancestry, "Don't say to yourselves we have Abraham as our father. God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." So, God doesn't need us. He's self-sufficient. It begins to humble us, doesn't it, as we begin to reflect on the character of God?

When we do, we begin to realize one reason, at least, why the Bible is so serious when it talks about faith and why unbelief is such a sin. Because if God really is the self-sufficient one, the only one therefore who can be ultimately trusted, but as a matter of fact, we end up disbelieving him and trusting something else instead, we're saying that that other thing is more important than God, the all-sufficient one. It's an insult to the character of God. Faith is the only reasonable thing, and unbelief, of course, is very unreasonable.

Here's a fourth thing. If God is the eternal "I AM," as his name suggests, then this fourth characteristic of God would be everlastingness, perpetuity, or eternity. It's very hard to get that idea in one word, which is why I use several of them, but what it really means is that God is. He has always been, and he always will be, and he's always going to be the same in his eternal being.

That's beyond our full comprehension, I suppose, because we live in time. We always think in time categories. We can't imagine anything that has always been and always will be, and yet there's a spark of interest in us when we begin to think along these lines because we have a God-given sense within that we are made to be immortal. It's why people basically, psychologically, deep in their makeup, are dissatisfied with the idea of death itself unless they have some expectation of something that lies beyond.

We sense that there's more than this, that we're meant to be eternal beings, and yet we don't have that everlastingness or eternity in ourselves. So, if we're going to find it, the only place we can possibly find it is in God. That's involved in the revelation.

The final thing is this: God is unchangeable because what this means among other things is that God never differs from himself. What he is today, he's going to be tomorrow, and he's going to be forever. Now, that has several important consequences for us. It means we can trust him to be as he is. God's not going to change on us somehow. The God who has revealed himself in one way as he did at Sinai in the law and in the history of Israel in the Old Testament and in the character of Jesus Christ is not going to change.

God is always going to be the same as that God who revealed himself on Sinai, and he is always going to be the same as the God who has revealed himself in Jesus of Nazareth. He will always be sovereign, holy, wise, gracious, just, compassionate, and everything else that he has revealed himself to be. Nothing is ever going to change God. So, that's the first consequence.

The second is this: God is inescapable. God isn't going to go away. I remember seeing on the cover of one of the news magazines this week a cover story on Princess Diana, and the headline read, "Why she won't go away." That's the situation we have with God. God will not go away. We in our sin wish he would. We say, "God, just get out of my face. Let me do my thing. I want to go my way." But God doesn't go away.

God is there. He always has been, and he always will be. If you don't face up to him now, you're going to face up to him in eternity. He's inescapable. So, when we talk about the character of God, if we remember the name of God, which is what the Psalm is calling upon us to do, "Let the name of the Lord be praised," we have to realize that this is not a patsy we're dealing with. This is the great omnipotent, omniscient, powerful, holy, demanding, unchangeable, but nevertheless also loving and compassionate God. It is this God that the Psalm goes on to praise.

Now, as I said, having called upon the servants of the Lord to praise him, which you have in stanza one, the second and third stanzas actually go on to do it, extolling him, first of all, as the God who is exalted over all the nations and whose glory is above the heavens. It's interesting to note that that's almost a direct quotation from one of the minor prophets, or the minor prophet quotes from the Psalm, one way or the other. It's in Malachi, the very first chapter of Malachi, verse 11. What Malachi says is this, he's quoting God: "My name will be great among the nations, from the rising to the setting of the sun. In every place incense and pure offerings will be brought to my name because my name will be great among the nations, says the Lord Almighty." Now, that's what you have reflected here.

Verse five asks the question with which we began. It's an important question, and that also occurs at other places in the Bible, particularly in the Old Testament. It is, for example, the meaning of the name Micah, who was another one of the minor prophets. The very name Micah means "who is like God?" In the midst of Micah's prophecy, he asks the question particularly in chapter seven, verse 18: "Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy." So, Micah asks the question "who is like God?" and what amazes him is that God is compassionate and forgives sin.

Then you find the same kind of question asked in a long passage in Isaiah, which I won't read, but if you look it up, it's Isaiah 40, verse 12 through Isaiah 41, verse 4. Now, what amazes the psalmist here, in the Psalm we're studying, anything about God amazes us if you begin to think about it, but what amazes the psalmist here is that although God is exalted so high that he actually has to stoop to see the heavens, not to mention the earth, God is nevertheless a God who cares for the lowly.

Another one of the commentators, a German named Leupold, a Lutheran, says God has done two things, each of which seems to make the other impossible. He has taken his seat so high that no one can match him, and yet he has regard for the lowliest of the low, in that he looks down so far. Now, whenever you come across a passage that talks about God looking down, it's hard not to think about the story in Genesis, in the Tower of Babel.

You know, in that passage, the people of the earth in those days wanted to make a name for themselves, and so they decided the way they would do it would be by building a great tower that would reach to the heavens. So, here they are, putting all of their intellect and muscular effort together, not to mention their financial resources, and they're going to build this great, great tower that's going to make a name for themselves and reach to heaven.

You read in the passage several times over that God actually has to stoop down from heaven to see what puny little thing they happen to be doing down there way, way, way down below him on the earth. Well, it's a very dramatic picture, isn't it? But what you have here in the Psalm is even greater than that. Here the psalmist talks about God stooping down to see what? Not merely the earth, but the heavens!

It's not a question of God out there with the quasars somewhere looking down to see what's happening on Planet Earth. God in the heaven of heavens looks down on the heavens that we see, and even that is infinitely below him. So, you have a great, great God. You see how the psalmist is working to increase our awareness of the greatness and the majesty of our God? And it's that God, so high exalted, who comes down to see what we're doing.

And yet, there's something even greater than that, even greater than God stooping to see the heavens. You see, what the psalmist is saying here, Psalm 113 is a step beyond Genesis. There he stoops down to see the earth. In Psalm 113, he's stooping down even to see the heavens. You come to the New Testament, you get to the book of Philippians, that great description of the Lord Jesus Christ that Phil Ryken has been preaching about Sunday evenings, and I encourage you to come and hear that. He's dealing with these very verses here in December, these three Sunday nights now and in the next two weeks.

What it describes there is Jesus Christ, being in very nature God, tells us he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross. You see, there's nothing more marvelous or incomprehensible than that. Jesus is the second person of the Godhead, the great exalted God who has to stoop even to see the heavens, and yet this great God has not only stooped, he's come so low that he actually was born on earth as a human being and in that form, being made a man, emptied of the outward evidences of his divine glory, he obeyed the Father even to the point of dying on a cross.

So, we say, who is like our God? And the answer is no one. No one's like our God. No one is like the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, that brings us to the last stanza because what it tells us here is that God has stooped low in order that he might lift the lowly up. Understand how that works? The great exalted God who's beyond our understanding or full comprehension, who has nevertheless come to earth in the form of Jesus Christ, has done it in order that he might lift up the lonely.

There's a parallel between those two stanzas. God is exalted over the nations, so he exalts the poor, raising them from the dust. God is enthroned on high, so he raises the poor to sit with princes. And here's the way it reads: "He raises the poor from the dust, he lifts the needy from the ash heap, he seats them with princes, with the princes of their people."

Notice interesting echoes in some of the later Psalms and certainly this one with other passages in the Old Testament. I've mentioned two. Here's another one. This is almost exactly an echo of the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2:8. She'd been childless, she'd prayed for a son, God gave her a son, he became the prophet Samuel, and her song is a song of praise to God for his goodness in giving her the child. That's what you have reflected here at the end of the Psalm.

There's another reflection as well. We have the same sort of thing, probably borrowing the same language, in Mary's great Magnificat, where she talks about God exalting the poor and lifting them up and bringing down the mighty, which he does through her son, the Savior, even Jesus. Now, we come to the very last verse. What do we say about that? It says he settles the barren woman in her home as a happy mother of children.

Some of the more modern pedantic scholars take issue with that. They suggest that that's not a very good ending for the Psalm, kind of weak, because after all, it begins with God and his glory exalted above the heavens, and here he is talking at the very end about a barren woman. I suppose it's a kind of chauvinism, if you would press them. Maybe they'd say, why is the Psalm talking about any kind of woman at all?

But the point of it is it misses the whole point of the Psalm. That's what the modern scholars do. They're so pedantic in their analysis they don't get it at all. The whole point of the Psalm is that this mighty, glorious, exalted God stoops so low that he lifts up even the lowly, and he's thinking of the lowest person, the least esteemed person in the day, in the culture of that day, a woman who had no children.

And so, it ends on exactly the right note. It says God sees and he intervenes. And the echo, of course, to Hannah and her song, where she had the birth of Samuel as a case in point, that is exactly what God does. Now, let me put it another way. What this is saying, because it gets down to talking about a particular instance here at the end, is that God cares about the individual.

He's talking about the downtrodden, but it's not the downtrodden as a class. We do that. That's the way we deal with it politically. We talk about the underclass or the impoverished or those on welfare, something like that, and there's a great mass out there that we want the government to deal with. But you see what this is saying, that God cares about the individual one, that barren woman who has no children and who is not well-regarded because of that, or the poor individual or the one who has very low esteem.

Now, that I think has a couple of final applications. Let me give them. First of all, when God saves us from our sin, and this is talking about salvation among other things, he saves us from our sin one by one, that is individually. Not everyone has had the experience of being raised from the dust to a throne or from the ash heap to sit with princes, though some have, but all who have been saved by Jesus Christ are lifted from the pigsty of their sin and the ashes that they made of their own lives to have fellowship with God and salvation and rule with Jesus Christ in his glory. And it happens one by one. He doesn't save us in mass. He doesn't save us in terms of class distinctions. God saves us one by one as the Gospel is preached and the Holy Spirit calls, and you individually have the opportunity to respond.

So, have you responded? Have you heard the Gospel? Have you believed it? That this great God who is beyond your understanding came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ to die for you personally and pay the price of your sin? Salvation involves that kind of faith, personal faith, saying, "Yes, I believe that. I trust him. He died for me."

And here's the second application. That is, God rescues those who are cast down, downtrodden individuals and not a collective mass. God knows each of these persons individually. He knows you if you're one. Many people suffer abuses from fortune. Earlier in our prayer time today, Rick Phillips was praying for those who would come in our service today who were poor and downcast and discouraged, and there are such. Perhaps there are many. Everybody experiences that to some extent. God knows that. He knows you. It's the individual downtrodden, downcast, discouraged, poor person that he lifts up. He not only knows you, he's able to do something about it, and he's able to make you sit with princes, which is what he does spiritually through Jesus Christ.

Here's what Charles Haddon Spurgeon said. He said such verses as these should give great encouragement to those who are lowest in their own esteem. And they should. Has life cast you down? It may have. Turn to God because he's the one who's able to lift you up and bring great blessing. Let's pray.

Our Father, we're thankful that at this time of year especially, we're able to study a Psalm like this, a Psalm that talks of how you come to help the poor and the needy, among whom we count ourselves. You've done that in Jesus Christ. Our Father, give us a fresh appreciation of that and grant that as we go into this Christmas season, we might do it with our eyes lifted from the material, which occupies so much of our time, to you, the invisible one, but the infinitely great God. We pray in the name of Christ our Lord, Amen.