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Psalm 113

The one intent of this psalm is praise to Jehovah.  As the people are coming to the temple, the leader sings, "Praise O servants of the Lord, praise the Name of the Lord from this time forth and forevermore!"  The people who are near repeat the lines, and the people still coming hear the call to praise.  They too then repeat the lines, and soon much of the city is singing or hearing about God's praises!  They hear that, "From the rising of the sun to its going down the Lord's Name is to be praised!" So the covenant people of God are being called to worship their glorious God!

They next sing an actual example of the kind of praise they're being called to express.  They sing, "The Lord is high above all nations, His glory above the heavens." All of God's people need to learn how to praise Him.  In our day as well, we need to notice that such praise is just verbalizing what God is and has done.  It's proclaiming that Jehovah is sovereign over all that the nations of the world think or do, and that He will bring glory to Himself from it all!  (This should be remembered when we worry about certain nations having the atom bomb, etc.)

The praise then continues, "Who is like the Lord our God, Who dwells on high, Who humbles Himself (even) to behold the things that are in the heavens and in the earth?"  It just means that He should be praised, in other words, because He is so much greater than even the entire universe!  Such thoughts should be kept in mind when we go out of an evening to gaze at the stars that are so distant that even their light has taken millions upon millions of years to travel to our eyes!  But the infinite God is far greater than even all that!

He is so great that though He is infinitely high over all creation, yet He can and does concern Himself even with the smallest of details, so it shouldn't surprise us that He's even concerned with the poor of the earth.  This song tells us that "He raises the poor out of the dust, and lifts the needy out of the ash heap, that He may seat him with princes, with the princes of His people!"  The infinite God is concerned both with the entire universe and with the most mundane individual aspects of it all as well!  Surely He is a God to be praised!

Do you begin your day with praise to that God?  Do you tell Him how wonderful He is, how gracious He is, how merciful and full of truth and goodness He is?  Do you remember, each day, that He is interested in even your smallest concerns, the concerns you have each hour?  He's concerned for the minutest aspect of your life!  Oh praise Him for it, and be ever mindful of it!