Who is like our God

Psalm 113 Page 603

We should always praise God because He is great and He is gracious to the helpless person that calls on Him.

· This is the first of six psalms (113-118) in the Psalter called “the Egyptian Hallel”

(Hallel means praise). As Kidner explains (ibid.),

“Only the second of them (114) speaks directly of the Exodus,

but the theme of raising the downtrodden (113)

and the note of corporate praise (115),

personal thanksgiving (116),

world vision (117)

and festal procession (118)

make it an appropriate series to mark the salvation which began in Egypt and will spread to the nations.”

The Jews sang the first two psalms before the Passover meal and the other four afterwards.

So these were probably the songs that Jesus and the apostles sang in the upper room

on the night that He was betrayed (Matt. 26:30).

The psalm falls into two main sections,

the call to praise the Lord (1-3); and,

the causes for praising the Lord (4-9), namely,

that He is great (4-5) and

He is gracious (6-9).

There is an unstated but strongly implied action point:

If you are poor and helpless, call upon the great God to be gracious to you.

The God who deserves to be worshipped.

Psalm 113:1-3 “1 Praise the Lord! Praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord! 2 Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore! 3 From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised!”

· Three times in the first verse the psalmist exhorts us to praise the Lord.

John Calvin (Calvin’s Commentaries [Baker], 4:331) explains that this repetition is not superfluous, given how cold and callous we are in practicing it.

He points out that we all acknowledge that we were created to praise God’s name, and yet we often disregard His glory.

Thus the psalmist repeats the exhortation so that we will be more fervent and faithful in praising the Lord.

Genuine praise of God does not mean that we go around saying, “Praise the Lord” all the time.

Rather, it is a response to thinking about who God is and what He has done, as revealed in His Word and enjoying God for who He is and what He has done.

C. S. Lewis pointed out (Reflections on the Psalms [Harcourt, Brace, and World], p. 95, cited by John Piper, Desiring God [Multnomah Books, 1996] p. 49), “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.”

Think about a rainbow, we go and search for it after the sun returns after a heavy rain and then we take a picture of it and placer it on face book, why. We want to share the enjoyment with others. Tha is what praiing God is.

Experiencing who God is and what he has done in your life and sharing that enjoyment with others. We are so moved by God, we want others to experience that same feeling and action with others.

So what does he deserve to be worshipped.

Because of who He is:

· “Lord,” which occurs five times in the first three verses (eight times in this short psalm)

translates the Hebrew name for God, Yahweh. It stems from the Hebrew verb, to be.

Legacy Standard Bible (PSALM 113)

1 Praise Yah!Praise, O slaves of Yahweh,Praise the name of Yahweh.

2 May the name of Yahweh be blessedFrom now until forever.

3 From the rising of the sun to its settingThe name of Yahweh is to be praised.

The only place in the Bible where this is explained is when God revealed Himself to Moses at the burning bush.

Exodus 3:13-14 “13 Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” 14 God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’ ””

Moses asked the Lord what he should reply when the Jews asked him,

“What is God’s name who sent you to us?” God replied (Exod. 3:14), “‘I AM WHO I AM’; and He said, ‘Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

and this verse, is reinforced by several New Testament passages (Matt. 22:32; Mark 12:26; John 8:58; and the important “I am” sayings in John’s Gospel),

seems to show that the simple meaning is preferable: “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be.”

Though derived from the most basic of all verbs and expressed in the simplest verbal form,

YHWH expresses a wealth of God’s attributes.

God is a person.

It is God who makes known his name to Moses and he does so by speaking to him.

We are not dealing with a force, like in Stars Wars. The God we worship is not a unknowable nergy force that allows us to heighten our senses .

We are also are not dealing with a crutch for our problems that make us feel good, or a figment of our imagination that we created when we were young and didn’t know better.

” God is a divine person who has created and communicates with persons made in his image.

It is because God is a person (actually three persons in one, as the doctrine of the Trinity affirms)

that we can know him and fellowship with him.

You cannot have fellowship with a figment of our imagination, crutch or a mere cosmic force.

God is self-existent.

God is self-existent, having no origins and therefore answerable to no one.

In order to know something

we have to determine its origins,

how it came into being,

what caused it.

But God has no origins; nothing caused him or explains him.

Hence, we cannot know God except as he reveals himself to us,

and even then we do not know God in himself.

We only know him anthropomorphically, that is,

only to the extent that he compares himself to us and to the finite things we know.

· A. W. Tozer says that the unknowability of God is one reason why philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God. They are impatient with anything that refuses to give an accounting of itself. Perhaps this is why even believing people seem to spend little time thinking about God’s person and character.

God is self-sufficient.

Self-sufficiency means that God has no needs, just as self-existence means that God has no origins.

God does not need human beings.

He did not need to create us, and having created us,

he does not need us for anything we can do for him.

Graciously he uses us to carry out his plans,

just as he used Moses as his chosen servant to deliver Israel.

But he did not need Moses any more than he needs us.

God does not need helpers or defenders or worshipers.

We contribute nothing to God.

· When we realize that God is the only self-sufficient one,

we begin to understand why the Bible has so much to say about the need for faith in God alone and why unbelief in God is such sin.

If we refuse to trust God,

what we are really saying is that some other thing or person is more trustworthy,

which is both folly and a slander against God’s character.

God is eternal.

If God is the eternal “I am,” as his name states, then he is everlasting, perpetual, or eternal.

This quality is difficult to put into one word, hence the three words given.

What they mean is that God is,

has always been, and always will be, and that he is always the same in his eternal being.

This attribute is beyond our full comprehension because we live in time and cannot think apart from space/time categories.

Nevertheless, it is a comfort because God has set eternity in our hearts—

we long to be immortal—

and because we know that we shall enter into eternity if we are in him.

God is unchangeable.

God is immutable,

meaning that God never differs from himself.

What he is today he will be tomorrow.

The one who “is what he is” does not evolve.

· God’s immutability has two important consequences for us.

First, God can be trusted to remain as he reveals himself to be.

The God who revealed himself to Moses is the same now as he was then.

The God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ is and will always be like Jesus.

God will never change in any of his attributes.

God will always be sovereign, holy, wise, gracious, just, compassionate,

and everything else he has revealed himself to be.

Nothing will ever change God.

Second, God is inescapable.

He will not go away.

We may try to ignore him now;

but if we reject him now,

we will have to reckon with him in the life to come.

The reasons we should worship God.

God is enthroned on high, but He humbles Himself to help those who are helpless, who cry out to Him.

A. Praise God because He is great (113:4-5).

Psalm 113:3-4 “3 From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised! 4 The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens!”

The psalmist says that not only is the Lord high above all nations, but also, “His glory is above the heavens” (113:4).

If you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you 8 minutes to get to the sun.

It would take 33,000 years to get to the center of our galaxy, The Milky Way.

The Milky Way belongs to a group of some 20 galaxies known as the Local Group.

To cross the Local Group, you’d have to travel for 2 million years.

The Local Group belongs to the vast Virgo Cluster, part of the even larger Local Supercluster, 500 million light-years across.

To cross the entire universe (as we know it) at the speed of light would take about 20 billion years! God’s glory is above all of that!

Knowing that God’s glory is above the heavens puts us in our proper place!

When the psalmist says that God is enthroned on high,

it points to His sovereignty.

He rules over the entirety of His creation.

Nothing happens apart from His sovereign will or permission.

As Psalm 103:19 declares, “The Lord has established His throne in the heavens, and His sovereignty rules over all.”

The psalmist goes on (113:6) to indicate that God has to stoop down to look on the heavens, let alone the things on this speck called earth!

This means, as Jeremiah proclaimed (32:17), “Ah Lord God! Behold, You have made the heavens and the earth by Your great power and by Your outstretched arm! Nothing is too difficult for You.” Or, as Paul put it (Eph. 3:20), God “is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us.”

So the psalmist says, “Praise God because He is great!”

But if God were only great, we would cringe in fear and hesitate to approach Him.

So the psalmist also affirms,

B. Praise God because He is gracious (113:6-9).

Psalm 113:6-9 6 who looks far down on the heavens and the earth? 7 He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap, 8 to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people. 9 He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children. Praise the Lord!”

Leupold comments (p. 791),

“He has done two things, each of which seems to make the other impossible.

He has first taken His seat so high that no one can match Him,

yet He has regard for the lowliest of the low in that He ‘looks down so far.’”

Verses 7 & 8 are almost verbatim from the song of Hannah (1 Sam. 2:8).

Hannah was barren, but cried out to God for a son.

In response, the Lord gave her Samuel,

who became the great prophet.

Hannah’s song extols how God

casts down those who are proud in their own strength, who rely on themselves,

but He lifts up the needy and helpless who cry out to Him.

So if this is supposed to be our motivation for praising God, we may question the wisdom of this psalmist's choosing these particular items.

Instead it may well be that these words reflect the experience of this particular poet.

Maybe he had experienced these blessings in his own life and, if so, then of course it is appropriate that he list them as reasons to give God praise.

But for the rest of us this may be one of many psalms that you need to read as part of a larger collection of psalms.

So perhaps we need to take the concluding words of Psalm 113 as this psalmist's experience or maybe this was his particular way of illustrating the larger truth that God takes loving note of our earthly lives.

You see, God stunned the imagination of the ancient Israelites not just because of his awesome power

but even more so because of his tender care.

That's perhaps another reason why this psalmist picked out the poor and the childless--in ancient Israel you could not get much more marginalized than to fall into one of these two categories.

In other words, these two groups of people were the invisible members of society.

Especially in ancient Israel the poor and the barren were the lowest of the low, the ones so puny in stature that they were overlooked by almost everyone.

And yet these are precisely the ones whom God notices and cares about.

And somehow this facet of God's character was more striking to the Israelites than even his heavenly powers.

Nearly all ancient societies believed in gods who were full of light and power and splendor.

But most of those gods were also reputed to be aloof,

to be so soaringly above it all as to treat human beings as at best pawns.

But not so the one true God as he revealed himself to Israel:

this was a God who could spin quasars with one hand and lift up some nameless poor person with the other.

This was a God who could make mountains smoke and who could at the same time tenderly smile on a childless woman.

This is, in other words, a God who notices us in all our smallness.

God is not so lofty that he can barely even see us on this earth.

God is, as a matter of fact, more attentive to this world than we are!

He sees and is distressed about people whom even we overlook in our focus

The only ones that can worship God are His servants.

Psalm 113:1 “1 Praise the Lord! Praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord!”

“Servants of the Lord” (v. 1) refers either to the entire nation as God’s chosen servants (Isa. 41:8-9)

or to individuals in the nation who had experienced God’s redemption (Ps. 34:22).

Sometimes it referred to the priests who served God in the tabernacle (Ps. 134:1).

But here it probably refers to individual Israelites (H. C. Leupold, Exposition of Psalms [Baker], p. 790).

In New Testament terms, since we all are believer-priests, members of God’s chosen nation (1 Pet. 2:9),

all believers are servants of the Lord.

In other words, being a servant of the Lord is not something that a few of God’s people volunteer for:

“I volunteered to serve on the building committee.”

Or, “I serve the Lord by teaching Sunday school.”

Rather, it is something that all of God’s people are by virtue of the fact that we have been bought by the blood of Christ.

And a major part of our service for the Lord is to praise His name. Derek Kidner puts it (p. 401),

“There is point in specifying the Lord’s servants and His name, since worship to be acceptable must be more than flattery and more than guess-work. It is the loving homage of the committed to the Revealed.”

And so if you know Christ as Savior and Lord, you are His servant and part of your service every day is to praise His name.