Monday, June 12, 2017

Let Everything With Breath Praise The Lord

Psalm 150


Our Psalm for today is a rather short one.  Though it is short, it is full of praise to God.  It is an excellent and fitting end to the Book of Psalms, the Bible’s hymnbook.

Verse 1 starts right off in telling us that God is to be praised everywhere.  We are to praise Him in the sanctuary, our places of worship.  That’s not the only place where we can bring our praises to Him, though.  We are to praise Him from the earth to the sky.  Wherever we are, we are to praise God, the Creator of everything we see.

People may ask us why we should praise God.  Verse 2 answers that question.  We praise Him for the greatness of His being.  Yahweh is great and wonderful, worthy of all of our praise!  He deserves praise, also, for the great and mighty things that He does, both in the world at large, and also for us personally.   Every day we should come up with at least several things that we can praise God for, and then spend some moments doing just that.  The Bible doesn’t say that everything has to be going great in our life in order to praise Him.  As a matter of fact, when things are going wrong, that is a good time to praise God.  Our praises to God put the devil to flight.

Verses 3 thru 5 explode with loud sounds of instruments, each calling us to join them in praise to God!   Many of the Bible translations say to praise Him upon the trumpet or cornet (vs. 3).  The word used in the original Hebrew was the shofar, or ram’s horn, which was used as a call to worship on Holy Days.   Then the psalmist calls for praising God on both the lute and the harp.  The lute was any stringed instrument with a neck that had an opening in the body with a sound hole, and that was plucked to play, the precursor to the guitar.  The harp here would be a smaller one than is typically seen in orchestras today.  It would be one that could easily be held in the lap and played, either with a pick or fingers.  Praise to God on both wind and stringed instruments.

Verse 4 tells us to praise God upon a timbrel.  That instrument would correspond to our modern tambourine.  The psalmist then speaks of praising the Lord God upon all stringed instruments, any ones that weren’t included in the previous verse.  The next instrument that we are called upon to use in our praise to God is the flute.  The word also included reed instruments and pan-pipes.  In this verse we also read that the psalmist calls upon praising God with dance.  This was what King David did in II Samuel 6:16.

Verse 5 calls upon God’s people to praise Him with cymbals, loud, clanging, rattling cymbals.  We can praise God with every sort of instrument.  If done with reverence and respect to God, all musical instruments, and dance can be used to praise Him.

Singing and making musical praise is an important part of worship.  Jesus and the apostles sang hymns.  The Gospel writer Mark mentions on one occasion right before Jesus’s arrest and crucifixion when He and the apostles sang a hymn together in Mark 14:26.  Twice the Apostle Paul encourages believers to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, in Ephesians 5:19 and in Colossians 3:16.


Verse 6 closes up this psalm, a call of praise to God.  Here the writer says who it is that should be praising God.  The answer he gives is very simple - everything that has breath is to praise Him.   Everything that is alive, both plants and animals, breathe, though not in the same way.    Plants praise God in their own way.  The beauty of flowers praises Him.  The majesty of the mighty oaks and redwoods praise Him as well.  The beauty of the butterfly praises Him, along with the whirring sound of the cicada.  The song of the birds sing their praises to God, along with the trumpeting sound of the elephant.  Every animal has breath, and each praises God in their own way.  Do you have breath?  Are you breathing today?  As long as each of us has a single breath left in us, we are to be praising God.

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