Part 1: God Is Good to You and Me | Part 2: God Is Good to His People | Part 3: God Is Great

How do we respond to God’s goodness and greatness, to his utter commitment to seek and accomplish our welfare, forever?

Our response should be automatic, immediate, and immense.

We should be grateful.

We should all be grateful.

David makes that point with a crescendo of praise:

²⁰ Bless the LORD, ye his angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word.

I teach systematic theology, with its 10 traditional doctrinal units. The unit on salvation—soteriology—is a lot longer than the unit on angels, for a simple reason: we don’t know much about angels, because we’re not told much.

We do know that we humans are “a little lower than the angels” (Ps 8.5), and that they serve both God (our verse here) and God’s people (He 1.14); that they have considerable, but not infinite, power (Da 10.13); and that some of them, at least, enter God’s throne room (Is 6.2). These are not personages to be trifled with.

But David calls them to praise God. And then he escalates.

²¹ Bless ye the LORD, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure.

God often refers to himself as “the LORD of hosts,” a title we take to speak of his power to enforce his will, backed as he is by heavenly armies. (Of course, as omnipotent, he doesn’t need the backing, but it makes for powerful imagery [2K 6.17].)

All those hosts? The ones with the chariots of fire? They bow in humble corporate gratitude before him who is good, who is great.

²² Bless the LORD, all his works in all places of his dominion.

Remember how, during Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the Pharisees told him to hush the exuberant crowd? Do you remember what Jesus said to them?

“If these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out” (Lk 19.40).

The inanimate creation itself knows its creator, and David calls it to do the obvious thing—to call out in praise to him.

Which, come to think of it, creation does, every day, and every night (Ps 19.1-6).

I’ve heard that song on the beach at 6.30 am, when I stand with a small band of strangers to watch the glowing orb first peek its beams over the clear horizon.

I’ve heard it while viewing the butterfly display at Chicago’s Field Museum, each creature a different color, some even changing colors as you walk by—even though they’re dead—and meditating on the size of heaven’s graphic design department, all their energies expended on creatures that are made of paper and live for just a week.

I’ve heard it while meditating on flagellates, those tiny creatures that inhabit the digestive tract of termites and break down the indigestible cellulose—which is the only thing that termites eat—into substances that the termite can digest, all the while being protected by the termite from the surrounding oxygen, which is toxic to flagellates. (Which do you suppose evolved first—termites? or flagellates?)

I’ve heard it while threading between thunderheads while negotiating Bozeman Pass in a Cherokee Six.

I’ve heard it in the immense darkness of night in Death Valley or a Nebraska ranch or a Pacific or Caribbean island when I tip my head back toward the sky and stand awash in the light of millions of stars.

Creation’s praise continues all around us, 24 hours a day, despite the brokenness of the planet.

And so I conclude as David does—

Bless the LORD, O my soul.

How can I keep from singing?

I note that there’s more to come.

One day, soon enough in God’s eternal timetable, we all—all God’s people, all his servants, human and otherwise—will surround his throne and sing his praises, millions of voices, including my currently feeble one, raised in perfect praise to the one who is worthy, because he is good, and because he is great, and because he has loved and rescued us.

Even so.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Part 1: God Is Good to You and Me | Part 2: God Is Good to His People 

It’s often been said that if God is great but not good, we’re doomed to extinction; if he’s good but not great, then we’re doomed as well, because there’s nothing he can do about our needs. David has delighted us with his meditation on God’s goodness, but now he exponentiates that delight by noting that God can—and will—do all that his goodness motivates him to do.

To begin with, he knows (Ps 103.14)—specifically, he knows the weakness of our constitution (“our frame, … that we are dust,” as the KJV so lyrically puts it).

The fact that God knows all things is an immense assurance to us, his people. He knows who we are and what we are; he knows what’s coming down the highway at us; he knows what it will take to deliver us from the Enemy. He knows.

And because he is good—a point David has already established—he loves us and wills to deliver us.

Omniscience is one of the noncommunicable attributes of God, one of the ways he stands apart from, and above, all other beings and all the forces of his creation. When we face the complexities of life, there’s a lot we don’t know, and we find that ignorance frustrating—“What should I do?”—and sometimes even fear-inducing—“What’s going to happen to me?” But he knows.

There’s more.

He lives.

We have a few short years—as I approach age 70, I understand all the more how short they are—in which we can get done all those things we seek to accomplish, the bucket list and everything else. We’re constantly frustrated by the obvious fact that there just isn’t enough time.

¹⁵ As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. ¹⁶ For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

But God, God lives forever. He has always existed, and he always will. For him there is no deadline pressure, no crowded schedule, no ebbing of strength or mental focus.

And that means that his attributes, all of them, have always been and always will be. That goodness David told us about? Still good. Always will be.

Here David focuses on a single aspect of God’s goodness:

¹⁷ But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children’s children.

Here the KJV calls this attribute “mercy,” which in English is the withholding of deserved punishment. That in itself is a remarkable source of hope.

But the other English versions render this word differently:

• NASB: “lovingkindness”
• ESV: “steadfast love”
• CSB: “faithful love”
• NIV “love”

It should occur to us that these are much bigger ideas than just mercy, the withholding of punishment. And that’s a clue that there’s more to this underlying Hebrew word than we might expect.

This is the word hesed, which is one of the most theologically significant words in the entire Hebrew Scripture. It’s the focus of the most often-repeated verse in the Bible: “his mercy endureth forever.” When I was in Seminary, my Hebrew professor glossed it as “steadfast loving loyalty.”

This is covenantal commitment to an important relationship. It’s the fierce determination to see to the welfare of someone you are committed to in love. It’s how husbands ought to treat their wives, and wives their husbands, and parents their children, and children their parents.

Totally committed. Determined.

That’s how God sees his people. And he sees them that way forever. No matter what.

If you’re his child, he is committed to exercising his goodness on your behalf for as long as he lives—until, as the founder of my university put it, “the angels sing a funeral dirge over his grave.”

And that, my friends, will never happen.

He is infinitely good, and he is infinitely great. He wants to protect, direct, and empower his people; he is able to do that; and he is committed to do it.

So how should we respond?

Next time.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

Part 1: God Is Good to You and Me

David—or whoever wrote this Psalm—has begun with a call to praise God, and he’s given as his first reason a series of good things God has done for him—and you, and me; the recipients there are all singular. In the next section he changes to the plural; he talking about things that God has done not just for “me,” but for “us”—for his people corporately. Throughout history, God has consistently intervened to meet the greatest needs of his people.

At Israel’s birth as a nation, God revealed himself to them in multiple ways: at the burning bush (Ex 3.1-6), through the plagues in Egypt (Ex 5-12), at the parting of the Red Sea (Ex 14.21-31), and at Sinai (Ex 20). In fact, verse 8 of our Psalm is essentially a direct quotation of Exodus 20.6.

And what is the characteristic of God—what is the good thing about him—that the Psalmist chooses to highlight in this section?

Mercy.

In his dealings with his people, God is the sort of person who doesn’t give them the punishment that they deserve. Despite our sin, despite our selfishness, despite our arrogance and disrespect toward him, he shows mercy.

Specifically,

• He is slow to anger (Ps. 103.8). He doesn’t lose his temper or lash out in uncontrolled rage. He puts up with a lot from us and doesn’t crush us like a bug—which, as omnipotent, he certainly could. He deals with us carefully, tenderly, reasonably, patiently.
• When he does get angry—and when he should get angry,* he does—he doesn’t stay that way forever (Ps 103.9). When his justified anger has accomplished his purpose, he calmly sets it aside.
• His dealings with us are underproportioned (Ps 103.10). He doesn’t give us the negative things we deserve.

He is merciful—filled with mercy, the attribute that stops punishment or consequence well short of what is truly called for.

And why is that?

Well, for starters, that’s who he is, and he always acts consistently with his nature.

But the Psalmist highlights another reason: he has a relationship with us; we are his people (Ps 103.11-13).

• We fear him, reverence him, recognize his fatherhood over us (Ps 103.11).
• He has removed our transgressions from us (Ps 103.12), as far as the east is from the west. I’ve traveled to the other side of the world both by going east and by going west, and I can tell you that they never meet. Why has he done this remarkable thing? Why has he unburdened us of the guilt of our sin? From the Psalmist’s perspective, he’s done so because Israel is his people, his special flock, and he’s given them the grace of forgiving their sins when they offer the specified sacrifices at the specified place. We who are not physical Israel know that those sacrifices prefigured another sacrifice, a greater, perfect sacrifice, offered by God the Son through the eternal Spirit unto God the Father. God has forgiven us because our sin debt has been paid, and we are now cloaked in the righteousness of Christ.
• He is our Father, and we are his children (Ps 103.13). That’s a significant relationship, a permanent one, one that calls for love and patience and loyalty and provision and protection.

So it’s not just that God’s a nice person, nice to all the human persons in a beneficent sort of way. No, we his people are corporeal, a body, a flock, and we have a relationship with the God who created and redeemed us. He’s good to us for reasons far deeper than the need to help a beggar on the street or an accident victim on the highway.

We’re family.

And we’ll always be family.

* There are times when anger is the only appropriate response. If you see a child being sexually abused, you should get angry, and you should put a stop to it. Injustice should make us angry and spur us to action. Imminent threats to the well-being of those we love should make us angry. They make God angry, and that is a virtue, not a weakness or a flaw.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash