"Who is Like the Lord?" Psalm 113:1-9 Sunday Morning Worship Service

This morning our text is Psalm 113, so let's begin our time by reading from God's Word.

If you look down at your copy of the scriptures, follow with me as I read Psalm 113, beginning in verse 1.

The Word of God says this.

Praise the Lord.

Praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord.

Blessed be the name of the Lord, from this time forth and forevermore, from the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised.

The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens.

Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and on the earth?

He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people.

He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children.

Praise the Lord.

This is the word of the Lord.

The Psalter, the book of Psalms that the churches receive, contains 150 Psalms, and the Psalter that we've received functions on a number of levels in the life of the believer.

150 Psalms form a whole book that teaches a believer how to live a whole life of worship.

The Psalms call the believer to worship the highest end for which we were created, to know God and to enjoy Him forever, or we could say in a single word, God made us for worship.

And the Psalter functions as a whole book to teach us how to live a whole life of worship in relationship with the whole of God.

But in addition to this macro level, each individual psalm has its own integrity.

Each individual psalm comes to us in a number of a whole swath of genres, teaching us how to worship God in every season and experience of life, in the highs and the lows, in darkness and in light, in rejoicing and in weeping.

Each individual psalm meets us at various stages of our life and teaches us how to live every stage and experience of our life in worship to God.

But in addition to this macro and micro level, there's a kind of in-between level that the Psalms also function on.

And that is in the tradition of the Psalter, there are a number of sequences of sets of Psalms within the Psalter that function in the life of the church.

Psalm 113 is the beginning of one of these sets.

Psalm 113 to Psalm 118 has traditionally been sung by the Jewish people and often in various traditions of the church at the celebration of Passover.

That is, as the Jewish people would celebrate God redeeming his people from Egypt and making them his own, they would sing Psalm 113 to Psalm 118.

And as we this morning are gathering around the Lord's table to commemorate the Jewish Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, who's become our Passover Lamb, who gave Himself as a sacrifice for us and for our salvation, I think it's appropriate that we would set our minds on the Lord Jesus by reading and studying Psalm 113 together, which calls us to praise the Lord who has called us to be his own people.

And Psalm 113 begins by doing exactly that, by calling us to praise the Lord.

Look at Psalm 113 and verse 1.

Praise the Lord.

Praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord.

Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore, from the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised.

In these few verses, we're told six times to praise Yahweh.

Eight times Yahweh's name is mentioned, over and over and over.

These verses emphatically call us, summon us to worship God.

And you'll notice that all of us are called to worship God in verse 1, where the text says, Praise, O servants of the Lord.

Now who are the servants of the Lord?

Now clearly Moses is a servant of the Lord, David is a servant of the Lord, the prophets are the servants of the Lord.

But Deuteronomy 10, among other texts of Scripture, say the whole people of Israel are servants to the Lord.

And as a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, a member of his body of the church, each one of us is a servant of the Lord.

In other words, this text is summoning all of God's people, every single one of us, to praise the Lord.

And you'll notice when and where we are to praise the Lord in verse 2 and 3.

Look at verse 2.

These two lines form a cohesive unit by saying, Blessed be the name of the Lord, from this time forth and forevermore, from the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised.

These two verses come together to form a chiasm.

This is just a very normal kind of poetic device, wherein the same thing is said at the beginning and the end of the poetic lines, and what is emphasized is what's in the middle.

You'll notice that the bread of this chiastic sandwich is at the beginning of verse 2 and the end of verse 3.

Notice the beginning of verse 2.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

And then the same theme is at the end of verse 3.

The name of the Lord is to be praised.

So what's in the middle, the meat of the sandwich, so to speak?

Well, it's when and where we're to praise the Lord.

From this time forth and forevermore.

When are we to praise him?

All the time, eternally forever.

And where are we to praise him?

From the rising of the sun to its setting.

That is, in every place, at all times.

So you see the emphasis in these Psalms is this.

All people, everywhere, forever, are to praise the Lord.

Ceaseless, never-stopping, unending, constantly growing praise to the Lord.

This is what the Psalm summons us to.

And this is a theme throughout the whole Psalms.

The Psalms tell us, for example, to declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples.

Or Psalm 67, that says that all the peoples praise you, O God.

Let all the peoples praise you.

Or again, in Psalm 86, verse 9, that says that all the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name.

Psalms 86:9

All peoples, everywhere, forever.

This is the command of the Psalm.

Now, as soon as I say it like that, up until now I've been using words like summon or invitation, but as soon as I say what's really going on here is a command, and that is indeed what is happening.

Praise the Lord is a command, a direct command from God to you to praise him.

I think something in us tends to recoil at the notion of being commanded to praise somebody else.

And part of that is because we know on a human level, if you witness an individual going around commanding people to praise him, praise me, praise me, we would say this person is very shallow.

There's something really empty in him that he's so desperately needy for other people's approval.

And we tend to, because naturally we tend to conceive of God as lower than he is, more on our level, impute the same kind of characteristics to God when he invites or commands people to praise him.

We, in the back of our mind, think: does the command for everyone to praise God imply that God needs something from his creatures?

God is desperate, he needs the approval of his creatures.

Well, a moment's reflection would tell us definitely not.

God is in need of nothing.

God is self-sufficient, pure essence, absolute overflowing, perfect in all of his attributes, infinite in his glory, his majesty, absolutely self-sufficient and transcendent.

He needs nothing in his creatures.

But what he's doing when he's commanding his creatures to praise him is for his creatures to satisfy their greatest need in him.

Think about what praise really is.

The whole world is filled with praise, isn't it?

After this, there will be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, millions and millions of people watching football games.

And they will see their team do something, and then they will come out and they will tell you, Did you see what I saw?

They will praise their favorite football team.

At some point this week, you will bump into somebody working on their computer and you'll say, Oh, it's an interesting computer, what's it like?

And they'll say, It's a MacBook, let me tell you all about it.

And they will overflow with praise in their MacBook.

Or someone who's excited about a political candidate will praise their candidate.

And you think about it for a moment.

What they are doing is they are expressing their enjoyment.

What we praise are the things that we enjoy, and it is only natural that when we genuinely enjoy something, our enjoyment overflows in the expression of praise of that object.

This has been repeatedly articulated in the history of Christian tradition, but one of the more recent expressions of it is from C.

S.

Lewis's little book, Reflections on the Psalms, where he says that he had had this same experience that I was just recounting a moment ago of naturally kind of recoiling when we're exposed to texts like Psalm 113, where God is summoning people to praise him.

And he thought to himself, does God need something?

And it was in the course of the reflection that I just kind of summarized that he said he came to the conclusion that praise doesn't merely express but actually completes the enjoyment.

Praise is itself enjoyment's appointed consummation.

What God is doing in summoning us to praise him is he's summoning us to find all of our highest and deepest enjoyment, satisfaction and pleasure in him.

To find our needs met in God, our needs for love and peace and contentment and purpose.

All of our needs satisfied in God.

And as our needs are satisfied in God and our enjoyment in God grows, what will happen is we will overflow in praise to God.

He is commanding us to praise because our highest good is in knowing God, and in knowing God, our hearts will overflow in praise.

This is a the highest need of every human being is to know the God that made them.

That is what God is summoning, commanding us to.

To know him, and to know God is to praise him.

But if indeed that is what God is calling us to, and we're honest with ourselves, we will also admit that sometimes it is hard to praise God.

Sometimes the words that are coming from our lips don't really fit with the attitudes that are happening in our hearts.

Because life is hard, and our hearts are a convoluted mess, and we are beset with anxieties and worries and bitterness and anger and disappointments.

And it is much easier to allow that cycle to continue and continue and continue, but that will not help you.

If what God is calling us to, when he commands us to praise him, is to find all of our needs satisfied in God, and for the needs to be so overflowingly met that our hearts bubble up in praise, then that call is worth fighting for.

I think it's worth reading you one quick quote from C.S.

Lewis because he puts this so articulately when he says, if it were possible for a created soul fully to appreciate, that is, to love and delight in, the worthiest object of all, and simultaneously, at every moment, to give this delight perfect expression, then that soul would be in supreme beatitude.

I put that quote on the screen just because I think it well summarizes what verses 1 through 3 in the Psalm are commanding.

God is commanding us to find the highest enjoyment and delight in the worthiest object of all, God Himself.

And if our hearts were to fully enjoy God and give expression to that delight in praise, that would be beatitude.

That would be the highest experience which human beings can have.

God's commanding us to it, He's calling us to it, He's summoning us to praise Him.

And that is worth fighting for.

So when our hearts are beset by the worries and anxieties and bitterness and distractions and envies that occupy our minds so much of the time, it is worth being active and vigilant to set our hearts on what will truly satisfy us, God alone.

And the Psalms actually give us a pattern of how to pursue that.

For example, in Psalm 42, the psalmist says, Why are you cast down on my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me?

That's the experience of many of our hearts, perhaps most of the time.

The question is, what do we do with that?

Do we permit our hearts to kind of navigate the ship of our lives and toss us to and fro by every wave of feeling and circumstance?

What the Psalms invite us, command us even to do, is to take ourselves by the scruff of the neck and say, No, soul, put your mind on God.

You see the next line.

What the psalmist does is he says to himself, hope in God, for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.

This is the pattern of Scripture.

We take our minds and we put them on what is true.

We take our hopes and put them on what is true.

We take our hearts and we set them and we fix them on what is true.

God, as revealed to us in his word.

And I think it's appropriate to mention here that we see a pattern of this, even in this collection of Psalms that I mentioned at the beginning, are called the Egyptian halel.

Al halel is just a word that means praise, and Egyptian for the commemoration of God calling his people out of Egypt into redemption.

Psalms 113 are recited, is recited at the Passover meal, year after year, from ancient times even up to the modern day.

And it's not by accident that God commanded the people of Israel to observe these feasts, like Passover, at given set intervals.

They're commanded to come together and remember the work of God in their lives.

And they're commanded to praise the Lord.

Well, this isn't just a kind of Old Testament theme, that there are set patterns and set discipline and set regular schedules in the life of the believer to come before God and to tell my soul, soul, praise the Lord.

It's also part of new covenant life.

In the church, we gather together on the Lord's Day.

And every Sunday we come together on the Lord's Day and we tell our souls, soul, hope in God.

And whenever we come around the table in the Lord's Supper communion, we tell our souls, remember Jesus Christ.

What we are doing is we are telling ourselves to remember what is true, to hope in God and again praise Him.

And it's in the discipline of saying, I know at this moment, the praise that's coming out of my lips may not necessarily be a reflection of my heart, but God has called me to praise him and I'm gonna do it.

And oftentimes it's in the act of obedience to praise God that God graciously opens your eyes to who he is and meets you in your praise and changes your hearts and your affections so that your heart does reflect the words that are coming out of your mouth.

You know this happens so many times even in just run-of-the-mill human experience.

How many times have you had the experience where you have an appointment that you have to go to?

You have something that you have to do with your your spouse or with your children, and you don't want to do this.

I don't want to go do this thing.

But then when you go and you sit with this person at this meeting or appointment that you have to do, you find yourself sitting there and saying, you know, there's nowhere I would rather be.

Genuinely, my heart has transformed by doing the discipline of conforming my outer self to what I know is true and what I know is good.

That act itself, God has graciously used to transform my inner self to conform to this outward reality.

This is what God is inviting us to, commanding us to.

And the rest of the psalm gives us two reasons to do that.

We'll look at them together.

The first is we praise God for the heights of his glory.

Look at verse 4.

The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens.

Who is like the Lord our God who is seated on high?

Verse 4 is a kind of stair step in its poetic form.

The first line says, The Lord is high above all the nations, all the problems and the turmoil in the nation in which you live that affect you and all of your circumstances.

There is a God who is transcendent and above that.

His glory and his majesty and his justice and his goodness is uncompromised by all of the problems that comprise your life.

God is above that in the heavens.

But then it stair steps and goes up even higher in the second line and says, yet more, his glory is even above the heavens.

God is utterly transcendent, beyond any comprehension, and absolutely self-sufficient, in need of nothing.

There's no lacking God that could be filled.

God in himself, sheer existence, absolute beauty, spectacularly glorious.

This God, totally transcendent and self-sufficient, you could rightly say, as verse 5 does, who is like the Lord our God?

What the Psalm is doing is setting his mind on who God is.

He's been commanded to praise God, and what he's doing in order to praise God is reminding himself who God is, utterly set apart sheer magnificence.

Who is like him?

And the answer to that rhetorical question is obviously no one.

And as we read these two verses in Psalm 113 and think about the fact that for generations, for millennia even, these Psalms have been sung at the celebration of Passover, it probably won't surprise us to see that there are many connections in these verses to the Passover story.

I'll give you an example.

Is the same language that is used in, for example, Exodus chapter 8, verse 6, when God says, Moses, you're going to go to Pharaoh, and I'm going to work my wonders in Egypt, so that the whole earth will know there was no one who is like the Lord your God.

Exodus 8:6

Or the phrase that's used in verse 4, his glory is above the heavens.

That phrase, above the heavens, is used again and again in the Exodus story as God commands Moses, stretch out your hand or stretch out your staff above the heavens.

And then what God does is the God who is beyond the heavens comes down and uses his power to redeem his people and to make them his own.

And that reality, that the God who redeemed his people, is a God who comes down and graciously condescends to make himself known to his people is the reality of God that comprises the rest of the psalm.

In verse 6 and following, the Psalm turns to tell us that we're to praise Him not just for the heights of His glory, but the depths of His grace.

If you look at verse 6, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth, the God of infinite glory, condescends to come all the way down.

Some translations even render verse 6.

He stoops far down to come and to make himself known to his people.

Now I want to make something, uh just if you'll jot your eyes down to verse 5 and verse 6, just to make you aware of something in the way that this two lines are are uh phrased in the original text.

Verse 5 and 6, if your English translation is like mine, probably looks like this.

If you look at the first line of verse 5, it's indented to the left, isn't it?

And then the first line of verse 6 is indented to the left.

And so it looks like the beginning of verse 5, the beginning of verse 6 maybe go together.

Because you see verse 5 and 6, they're all one sentence.

But in the language of the text, it's actually the end of verse 5 and the beginning of verse 6 that go together.

So the best way to read these two verses is like this, verse 5.

Who is like the Lord our God?

What's he like, this Lord, this God?

What is he like?

And verses 5 and 6 say, Well, he's seated on high, and he looks far down.

Those two lines go perfectly parallel with one another.

And there's not even a conjunction, so that there's nothing to separate them.

They're two sides of the same coin.

They're one indivisible reality.

What the Psalm is saying is that as essential to God's nature, as is his transcendent majesty, is his compassionate, kind condescension to his people.

God is in his essence compassionate, kind, merciful, and gentle.

Who is like the Lord our God?

You know, this is the reality of God that is even described in the Torah.

Moses at the Deuteronomy chapter 4 says to his people, the same language that's in verse 5, who's like the Lord our God?

Deuteronomy 4 · chapter mention

Or he says, What great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call upon him?

This is the Lord.

So the psalmist has been called to worship the Lord, to praise the Lord.

And what he does is he sets his mind on the majestic heights and the amazing depths to which God will condescend to make himself known to his people.

And the last three verses recount for us two actions that God undertakes when he condescends to his people.

You notice the first one, verse 7 and 8.

Look at verse 7.

He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people.

When God condescends, he doesn't look for the noble, he doesn't look for the mighty, he looks for him who is on the ash heap.

And ash heep is almost a polite way of rendering this text.

This is perfectly possible, it's perfectly legitimate rendering, but in the book of Nehemiah, the same word is rendered dung heap.

And the idea here is somebody who's on the refuse pile, who is outside the city gates, who is untouchable, he's the absolute outcast, he's in the worst possible condition.

And when the God of transcendent majesty condescends, he seeks out the person who is on the ash heap, scoops him up, and makes him sit with nobility.

Truly, as Psalm 3418 says, God is near.

To the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.

This is the Lord God.

Or his second act in verse 9, look at verse 9.

He gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children.

Infertility is one of the most difficult things to bear, and in the modern world it is unspeakably challenging.

But in the ancient world, I think there's perhaps even another level to it.

If you think about the nature of family life in our modern Western society, we've largely relegated it to kind of personal choice.

But in the ancient world, the personal element is 100% there.

But there's an additional societal expectation.

There is an expectation, an obligation upon a woman to bear, particularly sons, to contribute to society, and failure to do so places you outside of the society, assumed that you're outside the blessing of God.

It is the deepest kind of personal pain and social reproach that a person can bear.

And what the text says is that the God of self-sufficient majesty, who needs nothing from his creatures, out of the sheer goodness of his character, condescends and seeks her out, lifts her up and gives her a home and makes her home and her life full of joy.

This is the God.

The God who's revealed in the Psalms.

It's a perfectly legitimate translation, but the word for gives in the Hebrew text is the word for sit.

He makes her to sit in a home.

That just sounds awkward in English.

What does that mean?

She sits in a home.

So the sense of it is that he gives her a home.

So it's a good translation.

And yet, I think the author is doing something intentional because he uses the same word for sitting when he describes God's action for the person on the ash sheep.

Notice verse 8.

What does he do for the person on the ash heap?

He lifts him up, and verse 8 makes him sit with princes, with the nobility.

So he lifts up the person from the ash sheep outside the walls of society and makes him sit with the nobility.

And he lifts up the barren woman and makes her sit in a home full of joy.

And this word for sitting is used a third time in the Psalm, if you'll jot your eyes up a little bit higher, it's in verse 5.

Who is like the Lord our God?

What is our God like?

He is seated on high.

He sits on high.

I think by using the same verb to describe who God is in his essence and what he does to people when he condescends to them, is communicating to us that what God does when he condescends to the person on the ash sheep or the woman in her barrenness is that he shares himself.

He makes them share in his own character, in his own glory, in his own possessions.

God shares himself.

What is it that he gives to them?

He gives, on the one hand, nobility, on the other hand, joy.

Where does nobility and joy come from?

From the God who is in himself, transcendent joy.

What God is doing is revealing himself as a God of transcendent majesty and self-sufficiency, who graciously condescends to the most desperate and shares his very self, all that he has.

This is the song that begins the celebration commemorating God's act in the Exodus to redeem a people for himself, a summons to praise God everyone, everywhere, at all times, because he is high and majestic and condescends to the lowly and crushed in spirit to save them and give him himself.

Matthew chapter 26, verse 30 says that they sang together.

Matthew 26:30

Did they sing this psalm?

Well, I can't prove to you that they sang this psalm.

But wouldn't it be perfectly appropriate for Jesus, he who is God Himself, who was with God and is God, to sit at the table and look his disciples in the eye and sing with them, the Lord is high above all the nations, his glory is above all the heavens, who is like the Lord our God, seated on high, and looks far down, stooping all the way down.

Isn't that Jesus?

For eternity has been the only begotten of the Father, the fullness of all of his essence, the radiance of all of his glory, the exact imprint of his nature, the fullness of all of the deity, who did not count that equality something to be grasped, but emptied himself by stooping down, taking on human nature, sitting at these dusty little tables with his disciples.

And that wasn't enough.

And he kept stooping, humbling himself to the point of death, even death on the cross, outside the city gate, in the utmost humiliation, the worst kind of excruciating death, and more than that, enduring the very judgment of a holy God against the sin of the world.

And he kept stooping all the way down into Sheol, into death itself.

Scooped up his people, burst through the grave, and then ascended into heaven, resurrected bodily, took his people into the world to come, and sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

There he is at this very moment, with myriads of God's incredible angels and a host of his saints praising him, praising the Lord, praising the name of the Lord, in fullness of enjoyment, overflowing in ecstatic, ever nonceasing praise.

And in his ascension, he sends the Spirit into the world to seek out those who are on the ash heap, and to bring life to their death.

Open their eyes so that we can recognize that we need a Savior, and we cry out to Him.

And when we cry out, Jesus meets us where we are and lifts us from the ash heap, washes us of our sins, gives us a share of his own spirit, makes us partakers of his own divine nature.

Ephesians 2 says, the Father lifts us up and seats us with Christ in the heavenly places, so that in the ages to come he will be able to show to the world his immeasurable riches of kindness towards us in Christ Jesus.

He makes us to sit at his very table.

One day, as Jesus said at the end of his Passover meal with his disciples, I won't take the last cup of this meal, I won't drink of the vine until I drink it with you in the kingdom.

We will sit down at a table with Jesus, and he will share all he has with us forever.

Who is like the Lord?

Who shares all that he has with this people?

Isn't this what God has done for us in Christ?

In giving us his Son, He has given us all that He is.

Jesus is the fullness of God in bodily form.

God has held nothing back in giving us the Christ, Jesus, the incarnate God, and we will share in his table forever and ever and ever in unceasing joy, spilling over into genuine praise.

As we sit around the table this morning, we receive the body of Christ, the blood of Christ, and we proclaim and we remind ourselves that by faith Jesus is mine, and he's held nothing back, all of him for all of me, and I rest in Jesus.

So I think it's only appropriate that the psalm that is given to remind us of the Passover celebration where God gave himself to save his people calls us to praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord.

Lord, we do praise you.

We thank you for who you are and for what you've done for us.

Father, we thank you for your grace in giving us Christ.

Lord, we do thank you that you gave yourself for us.

And Spirit, we thank you that you patiently bear with us.

You open our eyes to behold the glory of Jesus, and you conform us to his image.

And we pray that you would continue to do that even this morning as we celebrate this supper together.

We pray that you would cause us to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus, to trust less in ourselves, to lean not on our own understanding, but in all our ways to acknowledge you and to rest our whole heart, soul, mind, body on Jesus.

We pray that you would equip us for the work that you've called us to this week and that you would enable us to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel that you have given us.

We pray this in the name of Christ.

Amen.

And now, for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website at ibc.church.

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Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel political.