A Word in Season: God’s Greatness (Psalm 145:3)

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What do you think of God? You can tell what King David thought of God by looking at what

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David spoke and sang about the Lord, as he does for example in Psalm 145, where he begins

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I will extol you, my God, O King, and I will bless your name forever and ever.

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Every day I will bless you, and I will praise your name forever and ever. Great is the

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Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable. David is determined, whoever or whatever anyone else does with regard to his

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God, to lift up his glory, to speak out his praises. He intends to do so today and every day.

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As long as he has being, he will speak out the praises of his God and his

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King. Everything that is in him is primed to lift up the excellencies of the great

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God of heaven and earth and his Redeemer. Now why should that be?

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Given David's extent of gift and the energy of his character, why would such a man devote himself in this way and speak with such ardent affection and adoration of this

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God? Because great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.

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To David, God is simply the Great One. He is the One who is high and lifted up.

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He is beyond comparison. He is the uniquely glorious God.

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He is that Holy One of Israel. David knows him to be supreme in his glory and in his beauty and in his majesty, and because David's covenant

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God who has shown himself faithful and merciful and just in all his dealings is great, he is greatly to be praised.

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David is going to give himself to praise that, though it can never fully measure up to the excellencies of God, is at least in his soul some feeble and faint reflection of God's true majesty.

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He knows he cannot climb that high, but he will at least climb as high and as far as he can in order to tell out the praises of God.

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But he will never be able to complete that task, because God's greatness is unsearchable.

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It is beyond human understanding. In all things, God is superly preeminent.

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I've just made up words because I don't know how else to communicate some of those things. He's beyond any human conception, beyond any true comparison.

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His greatness, the perfection of his perfections, all his being, all his doing, all of it beggars human understanding and thought.

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No matter how high you climb, you'll never reach its heights. No matter how low you descend, you'll never plumb its depths.

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Though you reach as far as you can, though you exhaust all human language, though you stretch all human faculty,

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God's greatness remains out of reach. And yet, as you can see in Psalm 145,

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David's going to have a good job at speaking out these praises of God.

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He talks about the praise rolling down through the generations. He talks about the character of God.

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He speaks of the works of God, the compassions of God, the righteousness of God.

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He's not trying to be exhaustive, but he is determined to lift up God, to extol his

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God and his King, and to begin that blessing and that praising, which he is confident will capture all his capacity for the entirety of his existence.

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And what of you, and what of me? What is our conception of God? Most of our understanding of God is tragically too low.

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So very often, what we essentially hear, not just from others, but perhaps even from ourselves, is in effect that I like to think of God in this or that way.

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But how has God revealed himself to us? How is God in the scriptures made known to us?

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What glory, if we are Christians, we have seen shining in the face of Jesus Christ?

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So let us, in as much as we do comprehend anything of God's greatness, commit ourselves to praise him greatly, whose greatness is unsearchable.

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And while others may not and will not, let our praises never fail.