Psalm 145 is the last psalm attributed to David, and it closes his voice in the Psalter with a carefully built acrostic. Each line begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph through tav, a whole alphabet given over to praising God. Its title is tehillah, "praise," the only time that word heads a psalm, and it is this word that gave the whole book its Hebrew name, the Book of Praises.
The psalm opens with one voice. 1"I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever." By the last line that single voice has gathered the whole world in. 21"Let all flesh bless his holy name forever and ever." Between those two points, verse by verse, more voices join, one generation instructing the next, the faithful adding their own testimony, until all your works and all your saints and finally all flesh stand together praising the King one man began praising alone.
At the center sits a couplet almost every Hebrew reader would have known. 8"The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." Those same words first appeared together when the LORD proclaimed his own name to Moses after Israel's worst failure, the golden calf (Exodus 34:6). David quotes God's self-description back to him centuries later, as though the character revealed at Sinai has gone on being true the whole time.
Then, in the middle, one word surfaces four times in three verses. The Hebrew for kingdom appears in verse 11, in verse 12, and twice in verse 13. 13"Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom." Kingship is the psalm's load-bearing wall.
But this King's greatness is never separated from his goodness. The next verses turn from what God is to what he does, in a run of active verbs. He upholds, he raises up, he opens his hand, he is near, he hears, he watches over. 14"The LORD upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down." 18"The LORD is near to all who call on him." The hand that holds an everlasting kingdom together is the hand that reaches down for whoever is falling or bowed down today.
There is one small, telling gap in this otherwise perfect alphabet. The line that should begin with the Hebrew letter nun is missing from the traditional Hebrew text, and its content was later recovered from the Greek Septuagint and a Dead Sea Scrolls copy. It was most likely a scribal accident. Later readers saw how fitting the gap is. Even a psalm built to marshal the whole alphabet in God's praise falls one letter short, and no human attempt, however complete, will catch up to him.
The psalm ends the way the whole book eventually ends, with an open invitation. Jewish tradition took it seriously enough to make this the one psalm recited three times every day, more than any other. David could not, alone, say enough about a King this good. So he wrote a poem that hands the unfinished task to everyone who reads it next.
Say one line of it aloud today, and let your praise be short of the alphabet, the way his was. Then give the rest of the task to the next person who needs a reason to praise.
Prayer
Father, your greatness is unsearchable, and still you are gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. Your kingdom is everlasting, and yet you are near to all who call on you, upholding those who are falling and raising up those who are bowed down. Receive our praise, though it falls short the way David's alphabet did, and let our mouths join every generation in blessing your holy name. In Jesus' name, amen.