Wednesday: Praise the LORD, O My Soul

Theme: Worship and Warnings

In this week’s lessons from Psalm 146, we learn more about worship and the God who is the subject and object of our praise.

Scripture: Psalm 146:1-10

As we noted in yesterday's study, there are a number of important things we can learn about worship. To begin, we noted that worship is work and worship must engage our minds. Let's look at two more points about worship. 

3. Worship is possible because of God's prior revelation. To worship God we must know who God is. But we cannot know who God is unless God first chooses to reveal himself to us. God has done this, of course. He has done it in the Bible, which is why the Bible and the teaching of the Bible need to be central in our worship services. Clements writes, “The only reason we can worship God is that we know something about him,...something...which excites our admiration, our gratitude, our faith, our joy...Worship is heartfelt, emotionally-charged expression; but it is also a rational and thoughtful expression. True worship is [thus] always a response to what we know of God, as a result of his revealing himself to us.¹

4. Worship is personal. You must worship God yourself. No one else can do it in your place. The choir cannot worship in your place, nor can the ministers. It is correct that worship is also corporate. We do it with others, and it is for the entire people of God. But each one must worship God himself, old and young, fathers and mothers, even children. If you are a Christian, worship is for you, whoever you may be. 

This is the note with which the author of Psalm 146 starts off. For having called the congregation to worship in the first word of the psalm, he immediately declares his determination to worship God himself, saying, “I will praise the LORD all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live” (v. 2). Spurgeon says, “It is a poor business if we solely exhort others, and do not stir up our own soul.”²

At first glance it seems strange that the psalmist's call to worship and his personal resolve to worship should be followed by the warning of verses 3 and 4. This is because these verses tell us not to put our trust in princes, and this does not seem to have anything to do with worship, even negatively. What does skepticism about the ability and resolve of other people to help us have to do with praising God? 

1. We value others more than we value God. The reason is not hard to discover as soon as we begin to think this through. Isn't the chief reason why we fail to worship God the fact that we value human beings more than we value God? Not theoretically, of course. We know that God is greatest by definition. But he is invisible to us and is usually also remote from our thoughts. What we do see is other human beings, particularly those who seem important in the world's eyes. So we focus on people and put our trust in them. We do it politically, thinking that the president or Congress or the mayor or some other highly placed persons will be able to solve our problems. But they can't even solve their own. We do it when we look to science or education or anything else to be our ultimate savior. The sad thing is that we do not actually trust God and worship him. The psalmist says, “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing.” Other Scriptures give nearly identical counsel. See, for example, Psalm 118:8, 9; Isaiah 2:22 and Jeremiah 17:5, 6. 

John King was a pastor who lived in the early seventeenth century. He explained in a funeral sermon based on this text why we should decline to put our trust in mere human beings: 1) because they are mere men, no different from ourselves; 2) because they are weak men, unable to give help; 3) because they are dying men; 4) because when they die they are subject to dissolution—they return to the earth; and 5) because their thoughts are as transitory as their bodies.³

Verses 3 and 4 make these points by two plays on Hebrew words. First, however important human beings may seem to be, in the end they return to the ground from which they came. The force of this statement comes from the fact that in Hebrew adam, meaning “man,” is the same word for “earth” or "ground.” So dirt goes to dirt. Lest we should miss this, verse 4 deliberately recalls God's words to Adam in Genesis 3:19: "For dust (earth) you are and to dust (earth) you will return.” The second play on words has to do with “spirit” or “breath,” which are the same word in Hebrew: ruach. Verse 4, like Isaiah 2:22, teaches that we are only “one breath” beings. We live one breath at a time, and when that “spirit (breath) departs” we are gone. 

¹Roy Clements, Songs of Experience: Midnight & Dawn through the Eyes of the Psalmists (Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus, 1993), p. 187. 

²Charles Haddon Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, vol. 3b, Psalms 120-150 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1968), pp. 400, 401. 

³Ibid., p. 406.

Study Questions: 

1. Why do we teach that the Bible needs to be central in worship? 
2. To what is true worship a response? 
3. Explain the example of worship the psalmist provides. 
4. What is the meaning of the Hebrew word adam? Why is this significant? 

Reflection: In what ways do we value others more than we value God?

Key Point: If you are a Christian, worship is for you, whoever you may be.