Praying the Psalms With Hope With N.T. WrightНамуна

Praising God

The Psalter began with a general outline of how the good God of creation has ordered the world to work. The vast middle of the Psalter presents the full range of human experience, wrestling with the tensions between the knowledge of God’s character and the apparent inversion of God’s good order, lamenting and despairing and hoping against hope for God to do what he’s said. The Psalter ends, answering all that went before, with a sequence of psalms overflowing with praise.

If you've been around a church for any time at all, you’ll be familiar with the word “hallelujah.” Maybe you hear it in songs or in prayers or in pastors’ sermons.

Comparatively few people actually know where the word comes from or what it means. It means, quite simply, “Praise the Lord.” It's a word that comes repeatedly in the book's last five psalms: 146, 147, 148, 149, and 150. Indeed, it comes at the beginning and the end of each of those psalms. In Psalm 150, it appears, in some form, at the beginning of each line of the psalm. So, the final section of the Psalter is all about praising God.

Whoever organized the Psalms in this way seems to be saying that everything ultimately comes down to praise. When you're thinking about prayer, or about suffering, or about creation, or about any of the other major themes of the Psalms, sooner or later, it comes back to praise. The whole Psalter is then framed between the call to allegiance in Psalm 1 and the call to praise in Psalm 150.

It's as if to say that the whole point of life, in all its messiness and uncertainty, is praise. The final verse of the final psalm is, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” As we read the Psalms, that's who we are encouraged to be. All humanity is summoned to praise God, summing up the praises of the whole creation. That's what the psalms are given to us for. To guide us, yes; to remind us of God's justice, which is to go out into all the earth, yes; but ultimately, it all comes back to praise.

Reflect:

What are some ways you can embrace this kind of boundless praise? What changes in your life would it require? What results might you expect an increase in praise to have?