Praise the high yet humble God
The rich and powerful domesticate religion, making it an opiate to control the masses. But Israel’s God will have none of it! He sides always with society’s outcasts and most vulnerable against their oppressors.
1 Praise Yahveh!
You who serve Yahveh
praise Yahveh for all he’s shown himself to be.
2 May Yahveh’s good name
be blessed both now and forever.
3 Yahveh’s name is to be praised
everywhere on earth.
4 Yahveh reigns supreme over all the nations
his glory transcending the heavens.
5 Who could compare with Yahveh our God?
He’s enthroned so high
6 and yet he stoops down
to attend to the lowly heavens and earth.
7 He raises the poor up from the dirt
and lifts the wretched from the garbage dump
8 seating them with the best and brightest
the most influential among his people.
9 And the woman grieving in a childless home
he makes the happy mother of children.[1]
Jews still use this psalm in celebrating Passover, when God rescued Israel from slavery. Beginning a series of five praise psalms, it calls Yahveh’s servants to praise him for earning a reputation in all his dealings with Israel like no one else. By calling for universal praise, the psalm is both missionary and polemical, implying that no other power has a prior claim on us.
Everyone in the surrounding nations thought exaltation equaled the extreme arrogance and aloofness characteristic of their gods. By contrast, though Yahveh is the highest of the high, yet he cares enough for the lowest of the low—implicitly, the enslaved Israelites and their descendants—to bend down and pick them up out of the gutter. In a world that valued wealth and children above all else, garbage pickers and childless women were badly shunned and overlooked. But not by Yahveh!
Combining such extremes of exalted majesty and humble condescension in one person was no less shocking in ancient times than it is today. And Yahveh doesn’t just extract the outcast from their mess. He creates astonishing new possibilities for them. He empowers the weak and completely reverses their fortunes, underscoring the fact that he’s like no rival god and deserves everyone’s praise everywhere on earth, both now and always.
Jesus, your disciples sang this song the night you washed their feet and then wept alone in dark Gethsemane. They didn’t know they sang of you. Exalted beyond all our imagining, you laid aside your glory and came down to lift us up. I worship you, Jesus. Who can compare with you? Amen.
In your free moments today, meditate on these words:
He’s enthroned so high, and yet he stoops down
to attend to the lowly heavens and earth.
[1] The Hebrew text ends with “Praise Yahveh,” but it seems more likely that that call to praise belongs at the start of Ps. 114 instead. For more on this, see the note at Ps. 114:1.
