These five psalms close the whole book on one word repeated ten times, "Hallelujah," halal and Yah fused together, praise and the shortened name of the LORD. After a hundred and forty-five psalms of lament, petition, confession, and argument, the book stops arguing and erupts. If Psalm 1 commends a life ordered by God's instruction, this closing chorus shows what the instruction was for all along. Adoration was the destination.
Psalm 146 begins in the smallest register, one voice talking to itself. 1"Praise the LORD, O my soul!" It resolves to keep doing it as long as it lives. What it praises matters as much as the praise. It praises a God who made heaven and earth and in the same breath 7"gives food to the hungry." Psalm 147 keeps that double focus. 3"He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds," and the same God 4"determines the number of the stars; he gives to all of them their names." Nearness and immensity turn out to describe one God.
Psalm 148 widens the circle further than any other, calling sun and moon, sea creatures and stormy wind, mountains and cedars, kings and children into one chorus, until every category of creature the psalmist can name has a line in the song. Then Psalm 149 narrows it again, on purpose, to the church's own gathered life. 2"Let Israel be glad in his Maker," with praise sung in the assembly of the godly, with dancing, tambourine, and lyre.
The word assembly carries weight. Paul treats singing God's praise together as part of how the church is taught and built up, the word of Christ dwelling richly among a people through the songs they sing to one another (Colossians 3:16). A congregation can lose its grip on this in more than one direction, by measuring worship by how it feels instead of by what God has commanded, by singing without ever being taught why, or by mistaking constant cheerfulness for faith while avoiding the honest lament that fills the hundred and forty-five psalms before this. Praise earns the right to end the book unqualified only because it was preceded by that much honesty. Has our own praise passed through the same honesty, or has it learned to skip it?
Then Psalm 150 drops every remaining argument and simply calls for everything, trumpet, lute, harp, tambourine, strings, pipe, cymbals. 6"Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!" The Hebrew word for breath is the word Genesis uses for the breath God breathed into the man he had formed from dust, the breath that made dust a living soul. The last command of the whole Psalter reaches back to the first gift of Genesis. The breath keeping us alive right now was given, in the end, for this.
The reason to praise God this morning is older than how yesterday went, and older than how you feel sitting down to read this, because it is built into the breath itself. Read after the resurrection, this vision is a preview. Revelation shows the same scene enlarged, every creature in heaven and on earth ascribing worth to the Lamb who was slain and redeemed people from every tribe. He gathers Psalm 146's one small voice and Psalm 150's cosmic orchestra into a single song that does not end, and he hands each of us a reason to join it that has nothing to do with our mood.
Praise him before you decide how you feel. Use the breath you have, and let that be the whole reason.
Prayer
Father, we praise you this morning for reasons older than how yesterday went. Thank you for the God who numbers the stars and still notices one bowed-down person. Forgive the praise that has learned to skip honest lament, and teach us to bring our whole selves, grief included, into your assembly. Let the breath still in us be reason enough to say hallelujah. In the name of the Lamb who was slain, amen.