I am told that there are three words
known by Christians around the world: “Hallelujah”, “Amen” and “Coca-Cola”. The
psalm we read this morning (Psalm 106) contains two of those words—and I’ll
leave it to you to figure out which two! In fact even that is a bit of a trick
question, because you aren’t likely to find “Hallelujah” either—unless you look
at the footnotes in your Bible, where you’ll see that the opening and closing
words of the psalm, “Praise the Lord!” are simply a translation of the Hebrew
words Hallelu Yah.
So let’s take a look at this psalm. In my
mind’s eye I can see an enormous gathering of people in Solomon’s magnificent
Temple, its massive eighty-foot columns soaring above them. There is a sense of
anticipation in the air that is almost palpable. Then a hush comes over the
crowd as a cantor stands up on the dais before them and intones, “Praise the
Lord. Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.” Then from the choir and the
congregation there comes the resounding response, “His love endures forever.”
It would have been a familiar chorus. We
find it repeated more than forty times in the Old Testament—twenty-six times in
Psalm 136 alone. “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever.” But then the psalmist has one of those
moments. Perhaps you’ve had them too (I know I do), when something in the
service causes your mind to fly off on a tangent. It may be a matter as mundane
as, “Did I remember to turn off the burner on the stove before we left?” Or
perhaps it is a more profound reflection, something that might never have
crossed your mind before. For the psalmist those opening words prompt in him a
question. And the question is this: “Who can proclaim the mighty acts of the
Lord or fully declare his praise?” Who really is qualified to offer praise to
God in the first place?
Over my forty-plus years of pastoral
ministry I have seen an increasing trend to emphasize informality, casualness,
in worship. Maybe you are familiar with the contemporary praise song that runs,
Come,
just as you are to worship,
Come, just as you are before your God,
Come…
Come, just as you are before your God,
Come…
Now before I say another word, let me tell
you that I love that song. I love it because it says something important: that
we don’t have to clean up our act, to get our life together, before we come to the
Lord. The God we worship is the one who ate and drank with outcasts and
sinners. Thank God that we have largely done away with the fustiness and
formality that characterized so much of what was called worship! A friend of
mine once told me of how he went to preach in a church in a high-end suburb of
a large American city. He dressed (as he thought was appropriate) in a blazer
and tie. When he arrived at the door one of the leaders, an executive in a
large multi-national corporation, recognized him as that morning’s guest
preacher. He introduced himself, then discreetly took my friend aside and said
to him, “Now are you going to take off that tie or do I have to rip it off?” I
am tempted to call that approach “formalized informality”!
Praise
Let me say that I think that all in all the
emphasis on informality has largely been a healthy influence on the church. At
the same time, however, we need to remember that worship is a privilege.
Frederick Faber expressed it well in his hymn:
My God, how wonderful
thou art,
Thy majesty, how bright;
How beautiful thy mercy seat
In depths of burning light!
Thy majesty, how bright;
How beautiful thy mercy seat
In depths of burning light!
How wonderful, how
beautiful,
The sight of thee must be;
Thy endless wisdom, boundless power,
And glorious purity!
The sight of thee must be;
Thy endless wisdom, boundless power,
And glorious purity!
That is exactly
where the psalmist is coming from in this morning’s passage. For him this was
an honour with which nothing could be compared: to enter the presence of the
Creator of heaven and earth! Elsewhere in the psalms we read,
Better
is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of the wicked. (Psalm 84:10)
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of the wicked. (Psalm 84:10)
We find this
sentiment expressed in Psalm 24:
Who may ascend the
mountain of the Lord?
Who may stand in his holy place?
Who may stand in his holy place?
To which comes the reply,
The one who has clean
hands and a pure heart,
who does not trust in an idol or swear by a false god.
who does not trust in an idol or swear by a false god.
Our psalmist this
morning is drawn to a similar conclusion: “Who can proclaim the mighty acts of
the Lord?” he asks. “Who can fully declare his praise?” The answer: “Blessed are those who act justly, who always do what is right.” Now that is a
tall order! We might just squeak through on the first qualification. But who
can claim always to do what is right? Well, there may be a few rare saints for
whom that is true much of the time; for most of us the best we might be able to
answer truthfully is some of the time. But all
of the time? The psalmist is setting the bar considerably higher than I know I
can can reach.
Penitence
No wonder then that his mood turns from one
of praise to one of heartfelt petition: “Remember me, Lord, when you show favour to your people; come to my aid…” This in turn leads him to take
an honest look into his own heart and into the history of his people—and what
he sees there is not a pretty sight. “We have sinned,” he laments, “even as our
ancestors did; we have done wrong and acted wickedly.”
In the twenty-three verses
that follow he leads us through a tragic catalogue of sins. We won’t go into
them all in detail, but suffice it to say that they include unbelief (verses
7-12), impatience with God’s plans (verses 13-15), contempt towards their
God-appointed leaders (verses 16-18), idolatry (verses 19-23), discontent with
God’s gifts and promises (verses 24-27), apostasy (verses 28-31), rebellion against
the Holy Spirit (verses 32-33), and finally the murder of their own children in
sacrifice to false so-called gods (verses 34-39). It is all summed up in the
words of verse 43: “They were bent on rebellion…”
As you look at all
those misdemeanours you might be inclined to protest, “But those aren’t the
psalmist’s sins! They were committed centuries before he was even born. How can
he hold himself responsible for what his ancestors did?” But here’s the catch:
It’s not that the psalmist actually did all those things, but that he
recognized himself and his own evil inclinations in their acts.
That may be a
difficult concept for some of us to get our minds around. So let me give you an
illustration. In his book The Body Charles Colson recounted the chilling
story of Yehiel Dinur. He was one of a number of Auschwitz survivors who were
called in to testify at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1960. Here is what
Colson wrote:
On his day to testify,
Dinur entered the courtroom and stared at the man in the bulletproof glass
booth—the man who had murdered Dinur’s friends, personally executed a number of
Jews, and presided over the slaughter of millions more. As the eyes of the two
men met—victim and murderous tyrant—the courtroom fell silent, filled with the
tension of the confrontation. [Then] Dinur began to shout and to sob,
collapsing to the floor. Was he overcome by hatred, by the horrifying memories,
by the evil incarnate in Eichmann’s face?
As he later explained in a riveting 60 Minutes interview, it was
because Eichmann was not the personification of evil Dinur had expected.
Rather, he was just an ordinary man, just like anyone else. And in that one
instant, Dinur came to the stunning realization that sin and evil are the human
condition. “I was afraid about myself,” Dinur said. “I saw that I am capable to
do this exactly like he.”
Dinur’s remarkable statements caused Mike Wallace to turn to the camera and
ask, “How was it possible for a man to act as Eichmann acted?” Yehiel Dinur’s
shocking conclusion? “Eichmann is in all of us.”[1]
When the prophet
Isaiah was confronted with the full reality of God in all his holiness, he
cried aloud, “Woe is me! I am doomed!
For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and
my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:5). Like the psalmist and like Yehiel Dinur, Isaiah
recognized his solidarity with the rest of his people and his profound need for
forgiveness.
Pardon
So it is that in the last two verses of
this morning’s psalm we pray, “Save us, Lord our God, … that we may give thanks
to your holy name and glory in your praise.” These final verses are a direct
quotation from an earlier incident in the Bible. And in using them as he does
the psalmist shifts our thoughts from the low points in Israel’s collective
history to one of its high points. The scene he is calling us to recollect is
in the streets of Jerusalem, where all the people, from the lowliest peasants all
the way up to the king, are to be found dancing and singing with exuberant joy.
Why? Because the ark of the covenant, Israel’s most holy object, the sign and
symbol of God’s holy presence, is being brought to rest in their midst.
So it seems to me that what the psalmist is
saying is that in spite of all our sin and waywardness, in spite of the long
history of human depravity and corruption, God remains faithful to his people. To
take words from Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner, God’s steadfastness is
greater than our perversity.[2]
To this great expression of faith the
people are invited in the final verse of the psalm to add their own “Amen”. Yet
if this psalm has taught us anything, we are tragically aware that our “Amens”,
no matter how earnest or well-intentioned, will always be fickle and temporary.
Far more importantly than ours, we have a God who has proclaimed his own
“Amen”.
In the final book of the Bible Jesus
reveals himself as “the Amen, the
faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation” (Revelation 3:14). So it is that God’s “Amen”
comes to us in human form—more than that, in the shape of a cross and the one
who hung there for you and for me. And it comes to us in his words, “It is
finished”. It was at Golgotha that our God in his unquenchable love both
demonstrated the extent of his faithfulness to us and dealt the final blow to
our human sin. We can stand in God’s presence because in Jesus he has stood in your
place and mine, and taken all our sin and wrongdoing, all our waywardness and
rebellion, and absorbed them into himself. It is because of Jesus that we can
approach God’s throne of grace with confidence and glory in his praise, knowing
that there we will receive mercy and grace.
So with humble and penitent hearts and with
joy that no one can take from us, let us give thanks to the Lord, for he is
good: His love endures forever.
Hallelujah!
