The LORD Is Near

Read Psalm 145 in full before proceeding; it is twenty-one verses. Notice how it holds together God’s unsearchable greatness and His tender goodness to all, and how it moves from one generation declaring His works to the next. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

The LORD is great and certainly worthy of praise! No one can fathom his greatness!
Psalm 145:3

Psalm 145 is one of the grandest hymns of praise in the whole Psalter, and it wears its distinction quietly in its title. It is the last of the psalms that David himself titled, and the only one the Hebrew calls simply a praise (tehillah), the very word from which the whole book of Psalms takes its Hebrew name. If the Psalter is the book of praises, this is the praise, the representative song. And it is built as an alphabet: an acrostic in which each verse begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, from the first letter to the last, as though to say that the greatness of God should be praised with every letter we have, from A to Z, holding nothing back.

It opens with a resolve: I will extol you, my God, O king! I will praise your name continually! Every day I will praise you! I will praise your name continually! (vv. 1–2). And from there it sets out to do exactly that: to praise the King with every letter, and to hand that praise on from one generation to the next. But what makes this psalm so precious is not only its grandeur. It is the way it holds two things together that we are tempted to keep apart: the unsearchable greatness of God, and His tender goodness to the smallest and weakest of His creatures.

On the one hand, the LORD is great and certainly worthy of praise! No one can fathom his greatness! (v. 3). His greatness has no bottom (older translations call it unsearchable); we may praise it forever and never reach the end of it. And on the other hand, this same unsearchable God is good to all, and has compassion on all he has made (v. 9); He supports all who fall, and lifts up all who are bent over (v. 14); He opens His hand and fills every living thing with the food they desire (v. 16); and, most wonderful of all, He is near all who cry out to him (v. 18). The God whose greatness is beyond searching stoops to be near the lowly. That is the heart of this psalm, and it is the heart of the gospel.

Watch, in fact, the direction the psalm travels. It begins at the heights, the LORD is great … No one can fathom his greatness, and then it comes steadily down: to a God good to all His creatures, to a God who catches the falling and lifts the bent over, to a God who opens His hand to feed every hungry thing, and at last to a God who is near all who cry out to him. The movement is downward, from the unsearchable heights toward the lowest and neediest, and that downward movement is the very shape of the gospel. For this is how God characteristically moves: not making us climb up to Him, but coming down to us; not waiting at the summit for the worthy to ascend, but descending to the falling and the hungry and the crying. The whole Bible bends this way, and it bends furthest at Bethlehem and Calvary, where the God whose greatness is unsearchable came all the way down to a manger and a cross. Psalm 145 is, in miniature, the motion of the incarnation.

For the greatest and nearest thing God ever did was to come near in person. The unsearchably great God, whom the heavens cannot contain, drew near to us in the Lord Jesus, took our flesh, and was named Emmanuel, which means God with us. The King whose kingdom is everlasting reigns in Him. The hand that opens to feed every living thing was opened widest when the Father gave His own Son. The God who supports those who fall came to seek and lift the fallen. And the promise that the LORD is near to all who call became the gospel’s own open door: everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

So we will join the alphabet of praise, and trace how the psalm holds greatness and goodness together: the resolve to praise the King, the unsearchable greatness wedded to the tender mercy, the God who lifts the falling and opens His hand and, above all, draws near to all who call on Him. Blessing the name of our great and good King, we will find that He is nearer than we knew.

I Will Extol You, My God and King

I will extol you, my God, O king! I will praise your name continually! (v. 1). David begins where praise always begins: with a deliberate resolve. He does not wait for a mood of worship to descend on him; he sets his will toward it: I will extol you. And he names the One he praises in words that hold the whole psalm in tension: my God, O king! King speaks of majesty, sovereignty, a reign that stretches over all things; my speaks of nearness, belonging, a personal claim. The God of the alphabet of praise is at once the King of all creation and the personal God of one worshiper, great enough to rule the cosmos, near enough to be called mine.

And the resolve has a rhythm and a horizon: every day I will praise you! I will praise your name continually! (v. 2). Every day: not only on the high days of joy or the low days of need, but daily, as a settled habit of the heart. And continually, which in the Hebrew is literally forever and ever: a praise that will not run out when this life does, but will go on into eternity. This is praise as a vocation, not a moment. The believer is not someone who praises God when he happens to feel like it, but someone who has set himself to bless the LORD every day of a life that will spill over into an everlasting song. We are, if we belong to Him, in training now for what we will be doing forever.

And there is a quiet mercy in making praise a daily habit, for praise does something to the one who offers it. The natural drift of the human heart is inward, to circle endlessly around our own worries, wounds, and wants until the self fills the whole horizon and God shrinks to a rumor at its edge. Praise reverses the drift. To bless the LORD is to lift the eyes off the self and fix them on Someone infinitely greater and better, and in that lifting the soul is, for a moment, set free from the tyranny of its own preoccupations. We were not made to be the center of our own attention; we were made to behold and adore God, and we are never more truly ourselves, nor more at rest, than when we are caught up in praising Him. This is not why we praise (we praise because He is worthy, not because it does us good), but it is a gift that comes with the praising: the self-forgetful gladness of a heart turned outward and upward to its God. The daily resolve to bless the LORD is, among other things, a daily medicine for a soul too prone to turn in on itself.

The LORD is great and certainly worthy of praise! No one can fathom his greatness! (v. 3). Here is the ground of the praise: a greatness we can never exhaust. We will never reach the bottom of God, never run out of reasons to praise Him, never arrive at a day when there is nothing more to discover. No one can fathom His greatness, and far from frustrating the worshiper, this is his endless delight, for it means the praise need never grow stale. And because no one generation can take it all in, the praise is handed on: One generation will praise your deeds to another, and tell about your mighty acts! (v. 4). Praise is meant to be passed down, parent to child, old saint to young, each generation telling the next what God has done, so that the song of His greatness never dies out, but is taken up afresh by every age that comes.

That handing-on is not automatic, and it is worth pausing over, because a generation that fails to declare God’s works to the next does not merely grow quiet; it forgets. Faith is never inherited in the blood; it must be told, taught, sung, and shown, parent to child and church to children, in every age afresh. The psalm assumes a deliberate work: one generation praising God’s deeds to another, putting His mighty acts into words and passing them down. Where that work is neglected, where the old grow silent and the young are left to discover God on their own, the song can die out in a single generation. So this verse lays a quiet charge on every believing parent, grandparent, teacher, and congregation: tell them. Tell the children what God has done. Catechize them, sing it over them, let them see your praise, so that the alphabet of praise is not buried with you but taken up by hands not yet born. The praise of God is meant to outlive us, and it will, but only if we trouble ourselves to pass it on.

Great and Good Together

And now the psalm says the thing it most wants to say, the thing that keeps God’s greatness from being merely terrifying: The LORD is merciful and compassionate; he is patient and demonstrates great loyal love (v. 8). We have met these words before. They are the words God spoke of Himself to Moses, the dearest description of His character in all the Scriptures, the same confession that anchored Psalm 103. Here they are set right beside His unsearchable greatness, and the placement is the point. The God whose greatness has no bottom is not a cold and distant power, indifferent to the specks of dust who worship Him. He is merciful. He is compassionate. He is patient. He overflows with loyal love. The greatness and the goodness are not in tension; they are the same God, and His greatness is precisely the greatness of His goodness.

And that goodness is astonishingly wide: The LORD is good to all, and has compassion on all he has made (v. 9). Not good only to the deserving, not merciful only to the religious, but good to all: His kindness spilling out over the whole of His creation, the just and the unjust alike. This is the goodness the Lord Jesus pointed to when He said the Father causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. Every breath the wicked draw, every harvest the godless gather, every mercy that falls on a world in rebellion against its Maker, is a witness to a God who is good to all. The believer learns from this not only to receive God’s goodness but to imitate it: to be good, as his Father is good, to those who have not earned it.

From His character the psalm rises to His reign: Your loyal followers will praise you. They will proclaim the splendor of your kingdom; they will tell about your power … Your kingdom is an eternal kingdom, and your dominion endures through all generations (vv. 10–13). Kingdoms rise and fall; empires that seemed eternal are now dust and museum exhibits. But God’s kingdom does not fall, for His dominion endures through all generations. And we know now where that everlasting kingdom is centered, for the angel promised of the child to be born that the Lord God will give him the throne of his father David. He will reign … forever, and his kingdom will never end. The everlasting kingdom of Psalm 145 is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus, the Son of David, who reigns now and forever, so that to bless the King of this psalm is to bow before the risen Christ, whose dominion will outlast the stars.

It is worth seeing why the psalm refuses to let these two go apart, for each without the other is a kind of horror. A God who is great but not good would be a tyrant: infinite power with no kindness behind it, a force to be feared and fled, never trusted. And a God who is good but not great would be a comfort with no strength to back it, a kindly well-wisher who cannot actually save, whose love is sincere but helpless. The human heart, left to itself, tends to split God this way: either it shrinks Him to a manageable, harmless niceness, or it inflates Him into a remote and frightening power. Psalm 145 will have neither. Its God is great and good: great enough to do whatever He wills, and good enough that what He wills toward His creatures is mercy. And the place where the two are seen most perfectly joined is the cross, where the unsearchable greatness of God spent itself in the self-giving of His Son. There His power and His pity meet; there we see that God’s greatness simply is the greatness of His love.

He Upholds All Who Are Falling

Then the psalm bends down low, and gives us one of the tenderest lines in all of Scripture: The LORD supports all who fall, and lifts up all who are bent over (v. 14). Set it next to verse 3 and feel the wonder of it: the God whose greatness no one can fathom is the same God who stoops to catch those who fall and to lift those bent double under their burdens. We might have expected a God this great to concern Himself only with great things, with nations and galaxies and the sweep of history. Instead He bends to the stumbler and the stooped, the very ones the world steps over. The falling and the bent over are His special care.

And what comfort there is here for everyone who is, at this moment, falling or bent low. Those who fall: those who feel their footing give way, whose lives are sliding toward a collapse they cannot stop. Those who are bent over: those crushed under a weight of grief, or guilt, or fear, or exhaustion, who cannot seem to straighten up. To them the psalm does not say stand up straight and try harder; it says the LORD Himself supports and lifts up. The lifting is His work, not ours. He does not wait for the falling to recover their balance before He helps them; He catches them in the fall. He does not require the bent over to straighten themselves first; He lifts them up. If you are falling today, the everlasting arms are underneath you; if you are bent low, the hands that hold the universe are reaching to lift your head.

And this is exactly what we see when the great God came near in the flesh. The Lord Jesus spent His ministry among the falling and the bent over, and His standing invitation still rings: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. When He found a woman who had been bent over for eighteen years, unable to straighten herself, He laid His hands on her and raised her up, and she stood straight and praised God, a living picture of verse 14 walking the roads of Galilee. This is who He is. He supports those who fall and lifts up those who are bent over, and He does it most deeply of all by raising the fallen sinner from the dust of death into the life of His resurrection. The God who lifts the bent over will, at the last, raise our very bodies from the grave and set us upright forever.

Let this verse be heard, especially, by anyone who knows what it is to be bent over in the heavier sense: bent under a weight of sorrow or despair that no amount of willpower seems to lift, that presses the soul toward the ground and makes even the next day feel like more than can be carried. To such a one the world says cheer up, or pull yourself together, and the words land like stones. The psalm says something altogether different. It does not command the bent over to straighten themselves; it promises that the LORD lifts them up. The lifting is His to do, not ours to manufacture, and He does not stand off at a distance waiting for us to manage it. He stoops. And He often stoops through His people and the help He provides: through the pastor who speaks His word to us, through the brother or sister who sits with us in the dark, who bears a little of the weight with us, who prays when we cannot pray, and through the doctor or counselor trained to help carry a weight like this. If you are bent low today, do not bear it alone, and do not despair of being lifted; the everlasting arms are under you, and the God who lifts up the bent over has not changed His mind about you, however low you have been brought.

You Open Your Hand

The eyes of all look to You, O LORD, and You give them their food at the proper time. You open Your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing (vv. 15–16). Christian households know these words well, for Luther’s Small Catechism gives them as the prayer to be spoken before meals. From the falling and the bent over, the psalm widens to take in every creature God has made, and pictures the whole of creation as a vast household of dependents, every living thing turning its eyes to the LORD and waiting to be fed. And He feeds them. You open Your hand: the gesture of a generous giver, not parceling out grudging rations but opening His hand and satisfying the desires of every living thing. The bird at the feeder, the lion on the plain, the child at the table, and you at your own: all are fed from the open hand of God.

This is the truth Luther taught the church to confess about the First Article of the Creed: that God daily and richly provides me with all that I need to support this body and life, and that He does so out of fatherly goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me. We are tempted to imagine that our bread comes from our own labor, our own cleverness, our own secured income, but the psalm strips that illusion away. Every meal is from the open hand of God. The farmer plants and the worker earns, but it is God who gives the increase and opens His hand; and the daily bread we are taught to pray for is daily proof that the great King has not forgotten His creatures. To receive a meal as from His hand, with thanks, is to live in the truth of this verse.

But there is an opening of the hand deeper than the daily bread, and the gospel will not let us miss it. For the God who opens His hand to feed every living thing opened that hand widest of all at the cross, where, the apostle says, he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all, held nothing back. The open hand that scatters seed and rain and harvest is the same hand that was opened on Calvary and pierced through for us, and out of that wounded, open hand comes the bread that satisfies the deepest desire of all, for the Lord Jesus is Himself the bread of life, and the one who comes to me, He says, will never go hungry. The God who satisfies the body’s hunger from His open hand satisfies the soul’s hunger by giving Himself.

There is a cure for anxiety hidden in this open hand, if we will take it. So much of our worry circles around provision (whether there will be enough, whether the income will hold, whether tomorrow’s needs will be met), and the worry assumes, deep down, that it all depends on us, that we are the ones who must wring our living out of a closed-fisted world. The psalm answers that the hand is open, and that the eyes of all creatures look to it and are fed. This is just what the Lord Jesus pressed on His anxious disciples: Look at the birds in the sky … your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you more valuable than they are? He did not promise we would never work or never want, but He forbade the gnawing, faithless anxiety that acts as though the hand were closed and God forgetful. To live in this verse is to receive each day’s provision from an open hand with thanks, and to entrust tomorrow’s to the same hand that has never yet failed to open, for the God who feeds the sparrow has not overlooked His own child.

And now the psalm reaches the line that gathers up everything it has been saying: The LORD is near all who cry out to him, all who cry out to him sincerely (v. 18). The verb is the ordinary Hebrew word for calling on God, which older translations render call on him. Hold this beside verse 3 one last time. The God whose greatness no one can fathom (infinite, transcendent, beyond all our reckoning) is near. Not near only to the great, the holy, the impressive; near all who cry out to him. The two truths that we are forever tempted to set against each other, that God is high above us and that God is close beside us, the psalm joins in a single breath. He is too great to be searched out, and yet near enough to hear a whisper. And the nearness is not earned by climbing to Him; it is given to all who cry out, the simple condition of a cry. He satisfies the desire of his loyal followers; he hears their cry for help and delivers them (v. 19).

How can the unsearchably great God be this near? The fullest answer the Bible gives is the one the psalm could not yet see in full: the great God came near in person. The Word became flesh and took up residence among us: the infinite God, whom the highest heaven cannot contain, lay as an infant in a manger and walked our roads and was given the name Emmanuel, which means God with us. In the Lord Jesus, the nearness of God is no longer a doctrine but a face. And He drew near precisely to the ones this psalm names (the falling, the bent over, the hungry, the crying), and He is near still, where He has promised to be: in His word, at His table, among His gathered people, having pledged I am with you always, to the end of the age. The God who is near to all who call did not stay far off and merely listen; He came all the way to us, and remains.

And so the psalm’s promise becomes, in the New Testament, the very door of the gospel. The LORD is near all who cry out to him, and the apostle Paul takes up that ancient truth and declares the open secret of salvation: everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. No one is too far, too fallen, too foreign, too late. The condition is not achievement but a cry, and even the cry is His gift, drawn out of us by His word; not a record that qualifies us but a calling out to the One who is near. The psalm even notes its solemn other side, The LORD protects those who love him, but he destroys all the wicked (v. 20), for the same nearness that saves those who call is judgment to those who turn away from Him forever. But the door stands open while it is called today, and the invitation is as wide as the word all: call on Him, and find Him near.

Which is why the psalm ends as it began, with praise, but praise that has now widened from one voice to a universe of them. My mouth will praise the LORD. Let all who live praise his holy name forever! (v. 21). The single worshiper who resolved in verse 1, I will extol you, ends by summoning all who live to join him, forever. And that is where the alphabet of praise has been heading all along: toward the day when every creature the open hand has fed, every falling one the strong arm has caught, everyone who ever called on the name of the Lord and found Him near, will bless His holy name together, world without end. To praise the great and good King now is to rehearse the song of eternity.

Gathering the Threads

We joined the alphabet of praise, and found in it a God held together, unsearchably great and tenderly good, both at once. The psalm sets His greatness that has no bottom right beside His mercy over all He has made, and the placement is its message: the God too great to be searched out is not cold or distant but merciful and compassionate, patient and abounding in loyal love, good to all, the King of an everlasting kingdom that we now know is the kingdom of the Son of David, the Lord Jesus, whose reign will have no end. We watched that great God bend down to support all who fall, and lift up all who are bent over: catching the stumbler in the fall, lifting the head of the crushed, doing in the flesh of the Lord Jesus exactly what the verse promised, and pledging at the last to raise our very bodies from the grave. And we saw Him open His hand to feed every living thing, the daily bread of the First Article, and open that hand widest at the cross, where He did not spare His own Son, giving us the bread of life that satisfies the deepest hunger of all.

And it all gathered to the line that is the psalm’s crown and our title: the LORD is near all who cry out to him. The unsearchably great God is near: not far off and listening at a distance, but come all the way to us in the Lord Jesus, the Word made flesh, God with us, who drew near to the falling and the hungry and the crying and remains near still in His word and at His table and among His people. The ancient promise became the open door of the gospel: everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. No one is too far, too fallen, too late; the condition is not achievement but a cry, and even the cry is His gift. And so the psalm ends as it began, in praise, but widened now from one mouth to all who live, forever; for to praise this great and good and near King today is to begin, even now, the song we will be singing when He has gathered all who called on Him into the everlasting kingdom of His Son.

For Discussion

Psalm 145 is an acrostic, an alphabet of praise running from the first Hebrew letter to the last. What does this form suggest about how we should praise God, and what does the psalmist’s resolve to praise God every day and continually (vv. 1–2) look like in practice?
The psalm holds two things together: no one can fathom his greatness (v. 3), and yet the LORD is good to all, and has compassion on all he has made (v. 9). Why does it matter that the same God is both unsearchably great and tenderly good?
The LORD supports all who fall, and lifts up all who are bent over (v. 14). How is it a comfort that the great God stoops to lift the weak and the downcast, and how did the Lord Jesus embody this in His ministry (consider Matthew 11:28)?
You open your hand, and fill every living thing with the food they desire (v. 16). How should this shape the way we receive our daily provision, and how did God open His hand most fully in giving His Son (consider Romans 8:32)?
The LORD is near all who cry out to him, all who cry out to him sincerely (v. 18). How can the unsearchably great God also be near, and how is this nearness fulfilled in the Lord Jesus, God with us, and in the promise that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved?
The psalm begins and ends with a resolve to praise, widening from I will extol you (v. 1) to let all who live praise his holy name (v. 21). How does our personal praise join the praise of all creation, and why is praise the fitting response to a God this great and this good?

Looking Ahead

Psalm 145 is the last psalm David titled, and it opens the door to the close of the whole Psalter, for the five psalms that follow, Psalms 146 through 150, are each a burst of Hallelujah, praise piled upon praise, until the book ends not with a petition or a lament but with one final, unrestrained shout of worship. We will end our journey through the Psalter where the Psalter ends, at Psalm 150: the grand finale, the last word of the book of praises.

It is a psalm with almost no content except praise itself: Praise the LORD! Praise God in his sanctuary! Praise him in the sky, which testifies to his strength! (Psalm 150:1). It calls for praise in every place, for every reason, with every instrument (horn and harp, tambourine and strings, clashing cymbals and dancing), and it ends with the widest summons in all the Scriptures: Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! We will consider why the book of Psalms, having traveled through every human extremity, comes to rest at last in sheer, exuberant praise, and how that final shout is the destiny of all who belong to the Lord Jesus, the breath in every lung given back to its Giver in praise.

Read Psalm 150 in full before the next session; it is only six verses. Notice how it calls for praise in every place, with every instrument, and ends by summoning everything that has breath to praise the LORD.

Closing Prayer

Great are You, O LORD, and greatly to be praised, and Your greatness is unsearchable; we will extol You, our God and King, and bless Your name forever and ever. We praise You that Your greatness is the greatness of Your goodness: that You are gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and good to all that You have made. We bless You that the great King stoops to uphold all who are falling and to raise up all who are bowed down; catch us when we are falling, lift us when we are bent low, and let us feel underneath us the everlasting arms. We thank You that You open Your hand and satisfy every living thing, and that You opened Your hand widest at the cross, not sparing Your own Son, but giving us in Him the bread of life.
Above all we bless You that You are near, near to all who call on You. We thank You that the unsearchably great God came all the way to us in the Lord Jesus, the Word made flesh, Emmanuel, God with us, who drew near to the falling and the hungry and the crying, and who is near to us still in Your word and at Your table and among Your people. We rejoice in Your open door, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved; keep us among those who call on You in truth and love You, and gather us at the last with all flesh to bless Your holy name forever and ever. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.