Let Everything That Has Breath
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Read Psalm 150 in full before proceeding; 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. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
Praise him for his mighty acts! Praise him for his surpassing greatness!
Psalm 150:2
We have come to the end. Psalm 150 is the last psalm in the Psalter, and it is the grand finale of the whole book: six verses of almost nothing but praise, a final, unrestrained shout of worship that brings the long journey of the Psalms to its close. The word praise rings out thirteen times in these six short verses, framed at beginning and end by the great cry Hallelujah: Praise the LORD! After everything the Psalter has held, it comes to rest here, in sheer, exuberant, overflowing praise.
And think of everything it has held. We have traveled, in these sessions, through the whole range of the human heart laid open before God: the laments crying how long, LORD and from the deep water I cry out; the penitential psalms confessing create for me a pure heart; the imprecatory psalms handing their rage to God; the songs of trust and the great thanksgivings; the royal psalms and the songs of ascent. The Psalter has refused to look away from any of it: the grief, the guilt, the anger, the fear, the joy. And after all of it, at the very end, the book does not trail off into silence or settle into resignation. It erupts into praise. That is no accident. It is the Psalter telling us where the whole road leads.
It is worth pausing, at this summit, to remember what the Psalter has been for us. For generations beyond counting, this book has been the church’s prayer book and the believer’s school of the heart, the place where the people of God have learned to pray. It has taught us to bring everything to God and hide nothing: to lament without despairing, to confess without fleeing, to rage without sinning, to trust in the dark, to give thanks for rescue, to delight in His word, and to hope in His King. And through it all, in session after session, we have learned to find Him there: the Lord Jesus in the prayer book of His people, who prayed these psalms, fulfilled them, and gave them back to us as His own. Now, at the last, the school graduates us into praise. Having taught us to pray through every weather of the soul, the Psalter sets us down here, in the sunlight of unbroken Hallelujah, and shows us what all that praying was for. The end of learning to pray is learning to praise; the end of the whole long road is worship.
The psalm is built with a kind of beautiful simplicity. It asks, in turn, the great questions of worship. Where shall we praise Him? In his sanctuary and in the sky, which testifies to his strength (v. 1), on earth and in heaven both. Why shall we praise Him? For his mighty acts and for his surpassing greatness (v. 2). How shall we praise Him? With every instrument that can make a joyful sound, and with dancing besides (vv. 3–5). And who shall praise Him? The widest answer in all of Scripture: let everything that has breath praise the LORD (v. 6). Every place, every reason, every instrument, every breathing creature: praise without limit and without end.
And all of it points beyond itself. For the praise the Psalter arrives at is the praise the whole Bible arrives at: the last book of Scripture ends, as the Psalter ends, in a roar of worship, every creature in heaven and earth ascribing praise and honor and glory to God and to the Lamb. The reason the book of Psalms can end in unbroken praise is that the story has an ending, and the ending is the Lord Jesus: the laments answered, the sins forgiven, the sufferings vindicated, death itself undone, all in His cross and resurrection. The everlasting Hallelujah of Psalm 150 is the song of the redeemed, and the One who leads it is the Lord Jesus Himself, the great Worshiper, singing in the midst of the assembly the praise He purchased for us.
So we come to the summit. We will ask, with the psalm, where and why and how and who, and we will see why the book that began with the blessed man and the anointed King ends with everything that has breath praising; why, after every extremity, praise is the final word; and how that final word is the destiny of all who belong to the Lord Jesus. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.
Praise the LORD in His Sanctuary
Praise the LORD! Praise God in his sanctuary! Praise him in the sky, which testifies to his strength! (v. 1). The psalm begins by naming two places of praise, and between them they take in the whole of reality. His sanctuary: the holy place, the temple, the gathered worship of God’s people on earth. And the sky, which testifies to his strength (literally “the expanse of his strength,” which older translations render his mighty heavens): the vast firmament above, where the angels and the hosts of heaven worship without ceasing. Praise rises from both: from the congregation in its sanctuary below and from the armies of heaven above, the two choirs joining across the infinite distance to praise the same God. Heaven and earth are united in this one thing, the worship of the LORD.
This is worth pausing over, for it dignifies the humblest gathering of believers beyond anything we usually imagine. When the people of God assemble, in a great cathedral or a small country church, with a pipe organ or a single guitar, and lift their voices in praise, they are not making a small and local noise. They are joining a worship already in full voice in heaven. The Scriptures say that in coming to worship we have come to … the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, so that the curtain between the sanctuary and the heavens above has grown thin, and the praise of earth blends into the praise of heaven. The little congregation singing on a Sunday morning is the outpost of a worship that fills the universe, and through the Lord Jesus its faltering praise is carried up and joined to the song of the angels.
Praise him for his mighty acts! Praise him for his surpassing greatness! (v. 2). Here is the why, and it is twofold. We praise God for what He has done, His mighty acts, and for who He is, His surpassing greatness. The two belong together: His acts reveal His character, and His character is displayed in His acts. And while His mighty acts are many (creation, the Exodus, the long history of His faithfulness), the New Testament teaches us to see the mightiest act of all in the death and rising of His Son. The resurrection is the supreme mighty act, the act in which God’s power and love were poured out to the uttermost and death itself was broken. So when the church praises God for his mighty acts, it praises Him most of all for the empty tomb, the deed that gathers up all the others and gives the whole creation its final reason to sing.
And there is comfort in this joining of earth to heaven for the believer whose own praise has gone thin. There are seasons when we come to worship with nothing, when grief or weariness or doubt has emptied us, and the hymns die in our throats, and we can barely form the words. The truth of this verse is that the praise does not depend on us. In His heavens the worship never falters; the angels and the hosts have not paused, the song goes on unbroken, and when we step into the sanctuary we step into a praise already in full voice, whether we can add much to it or not. On such days the body of Christ around us carries the praise we cannot manage, and the choirs of heaven carry it further still, and our thin whisper is taken up and folded into a song far greater than ourselves. We are never the source of the praise, only late and grateful joiners of it. That means that even when we come with empty hands, there is a song to join.
Praise Him with Trumpet and Harp
Praise him with the blast of the horn! Praise him with the lyre and the harp! Praise him with the tambourine and with dancing! Praise him with stringed instruments and the flute! Praise him with loud cymbals! Praise him with clanging cymbals! (vv. 3–5). Now the psalm answers the question how, and it does so by throwing open the doors of the orchestra. Horn and lyre and harp; tambourine and strings and flute; cymbals loud and cymbals clanging: every instrument the people of God could lay their hands on is conscripted into the praise. And not instruments only, but the body itself: praise him with dancing. This is praise with everything we have, holding nothing back, the full orchestra, the whole range of human music and movement, enlisted in the worship of God.
There is a glorious extravagance here that ought to loosen our own worship. The praise of Psalm 150 is not a thin and cautious thing, offered with one eye on the clock and a worried concern to keep things dignified. It is loud, full-bodied, exuberant: clanging cymbals, for heaven’s sake, and dancing. The psalm assumes that a God this great and this good deserves to be praised with everything a creature can muster, with skill and volume and joy. Now, the Scriptures also teach reverence, and worship is not chaos; there is a place for stillness and silence before the LORD. But many of us have so prized restraint that we have lost the exuberance entirely, and Psalm 150 stands as a rebuke to a worship gone timid and dull. Whatever our temperament, the God who gave us horns and cymbals and the very limbs that dance means for the whole of us (voice, skill, body, and all) to be caught up in His praise.
And notice that the instruments themselves are a kind of parable. Every one of them is a gift: the materials drawn from the creation God made, the skill to play them a talent He bestowed, the music a faint echo of the harmony He built into the world. So when the horn sounds and the strings sing and the cymbals crash in His praise, the creation is simply giving back to its Maker, in the form of worship, the very gifts He first gave. That is what all our praise is, the returning of God’s gifts to God with thanks. The artist’s skill, the musician’s craft, the worker’s strength, the thinker’s mind: all of it, laid on the altar of praise, is the creature handing its borrowed gifts back to the Giver. There is no gift God has given that cannot be turned into an instrument of His praise.
And do not miss the dancing, for it tells us that praise is meant to be embodied. Praise him with the tambourine and with dancing! We are tempted to imagine that real worship is a thing of the mind and the spirit only, that the body is at best a container to be tolerated and at worst a distraction to be subdued. The psalm will have none of it. It summons the body itself (the feet, the hands, the whole frame) into the praise of God, because God made the body and means to redeem it. We are not souls trapped in flesh, longing to escape; we are creatures of body and soul together, and the God who will one day raise these very bodies from the grave is honored when we worship Him with them now: when we stand, kneel, lift our hands, sing aloud, and yes, even dance. The faith that gave us Psalm 150 is not a bloodless thing for the mind alone; it is for the whole embodied person, and it looks forward to a resurrection in which praise will be as physical as it is spiritual, offered by bodies made new and glad.
Let Everything That Has Breath
And then the psalm, and the whole Psalter with it, comes to its final word: Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! Praise the LORD! (v. 6). It is the widest summons in all of Scripture. Not the people of Israel only, not the gathered congregation only, not even humankind only, but everything that has breath, every living, breathing creature under heaven, is called to praise the LORD. The book that began, all those psalms ago, with one blessed man meditating on the law ends by summoning the whole breathing creation into a single, universal song.
Dwell for a moment on that word breath, for it is chosen with care. To have breath is to be alive, and the breath in our lungs is not our own achievement; it is the gift of God, who formed the man at the beginning and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and in whom, the apostle says, we live and move about and exist. Every breath you have ever drawn was on loan from your Maker. And the psalm tells us what that breath is for: it is given to be given back in praise. The proper end of every breath is to return to its Giver as worship. This puts our whole lives in a startling light. We are, quite literally, kept alive breath by breath by the goodness of God, and the fitting response, the very purpose of the breath, is to praise Him with it. A life is a long succession of borrowed breaths; a praising life is one that gives them back.
And here the gospel breathes its deepest note. For the risen Lord Jesus, on the evening of the resurrection, breathed on His disciples and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. That Spirit, whose very name in both Hebrew and Greek means breath, is the One who enables all true praise, so that no one can so much as say Jesus is Lord except by Him. The breath we give back to God in praise is, at its deepest, the breath He has breathed into us anew by His Spirit. And there is a further mercy: death takes our breath away, but it does not keep it. Because the Lord Jesus rose, the breath that the grave silences will be restored, our very bodies raised, our lungs filled again, to praise Him without end. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD is therefore not only a summons for now but a promise for forever: the breath He gave, that death stole, He will give back, that we might praise Him in the resurrection with breath that never fails again.
And there is a sense in which the believer praises not only with his own breath but on behalf of all the breathing creation. The whole of creation, the Scriptures say, declares God’s glory and even groans for its redemption; the Lord Jesus once said that if His disciples were silenced, the very stones would cry out. The mute creation has a praise in it that it cannot put into words. And humankind was made to be, as it were, creation’s voice, the priest who gathers up the wordless worship of the birds and the seas and the mountains and offers it articulate to God. When the believer praises the LORD, he is not only returning his own borrowed breath; he is speaking for the sparrow and the cedar and the stars, lending words to a creation that longs to praise and cannot. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD is thus a calling as much as a command: to stand at the head of the creation and lead it in the song it was made to sing, until the day when, redeemed and made new, it sings unhindered with us.
Why the Book Ends in Praise
Step back now and consider the whole. Why does the book of Psalms end here, in this unbroken, exuberant praise? It is not because the Psalter is naïve about suffering; no book in the Bible is more honest about the depths. We have heard it cry from the pit, accuse God of forgetting, beg for rescue, confess unspeakable guilt, and sit in a darkness that, in Psalm 88, never lifts within the psalm itself. The Psalter knows the whole catalogue of human misery from the inside. And yet, having said all of it, having refused to pretend anything away, it ends in praise. The arrangement is itself a sermon. It is the Psalter telling us, with the weight of its whole structure, that the human story, taken up into the hands of God, does not end in the depths. It ends in praise.
This is unspeakably comforting for everyone who has walked the darker psalms and wondered whether the darkness was the last word. It is not. The laments are real, and they are honored (they are given psalm after psalm, and they are never rebuked for their honesty), but they are not where the book comes to rest. They are stations on a road, and the road leads here. The believer who is, this very day, deep in a lament is not at the end of his story; he is somewhere in the middle of a book that ends in Psalm 150. The crying is not the destination. The praise is. And the whole journey from the depths to the doxology is held together by the One who walked it ahead of us.
For this is the very shape of the gospel. The Lord Jesus Himself went down into the deepest lament (He prayed Psalm 22 from the cross, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?) and came up into the praise of the resurrection. He traveled the whole length of the Psalter’s road, from the pit to the praise, from the cross to the empty tomb, and He did it so that we might travel it after Him. The movement of the Psalter from lament to praise is the movement of Good Friday to Easter, written across a hundred and fifty psalms. And because He has gone that way and reached the praise, we know the road has an end, and what the end is. The book ends in praise because the gospel ends in praise, because the Sufferer rose, and lives, and reigns, and leads His people out of every lament into the Hallelujah that has no end.
There is a further wisdom in the order, and it is this: the praise of Psalm 150 is not cheap, because it comes at the end of the road and not the beginning. The Psalter does not open with this exuberant Hallelujah, as though praise were a simple matter of striking up a happy tune. It arrives here, after a hundred and forty-nine psalms that have descended into every depth a soul can know. And that means the praise of the last psalm is praise that has passed through the laments: praise that knows what it is to cry from the pit, and praises anyway; praise on the far side of grief, not in ignorance of it. This is the deepest and most durable kind of praise there is. The shallow gladness that has never been tested evaporates at the first trouble; but the praise of a saint who has walked through the dark valley and out the other side is praise with roots, unshakable because it has already been shaken and held. So the believer in the depths need not envy the joy of others or feel he has fallen behind. He is on the very road that leads to the richest praise of all, the Hallelujah of one who has been to the bottom and found God faithful even there.
The Everlasting Hallelujah
And so the last word of the Psalter opens onto the last word of the whole Bible. For when John was given to see the end of all things, he saw and heard exactly what Psalm 150 summons: every creature, in heaven, on earth, under the earth, in the sea, all of them singing, To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be praise, honor, glory, and ruling power forever and ever! The everything that has breath of Psalm 150 becomes, in the last vision of Scripture, the numberless multitude from every nation, and the angels, and the living creatures, and at last the whole creation, joined in one unending roar of praise to God and to the Lamb who was slain. The psalm is a window onto that final scene, the everlasting Hallelujah toward which all history is moving.
And in that great song the people of God do not sing alone, nor even merely among the angels; they sing led by their Lord. For the Scriptures take a line from Psalm 22, the very psalm of the cross, and put it on the lips of the risen Christ: I will proclaim your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will praise you. The Lord Jesus, who went down into the lament for us, now stands in the midst of His gathered people as the leader of their praise: the great Worshiper, the choirmaster of the redeemed, raising the Hallelujah He purchased with His blood and drawing every ransomed voice into it. When we praise, we do not praise toward a distant and silent heaven; we praise with Him, in Him, led by Him, our voices gathered into the song the Son sings to the Father.
Which means that every time the church lifts its praise (every Sunday gathering, every hymn over a kitchen sink, every faltering Hallelujah from a believer just up out of the depths), it is a rehearsal for eternity. We are practicing now, in our small sanctuaries with our imperfect voices, the song we will sing forever with everything that has breath. The praise will outlast the laments; it will outlast our tears, our griefs, our very deaths; it will outlast the present heavens and earth. When all of it is past, the redeemed of the Lord, raised and breathing and gathered from every nation, will still be singing, and the Lamb will still be leading the song. The Psalter has shown us the whole road, and now it sets us down at its end and hands us the last word, which is also the first word of forever. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD. Praise the LORD.
And that everlasting praise will be, among other things, the final answer to every lament we have prayed along the way. For the same last vision of Scripture that shows us the creatures praising the Lamb shows us why the praise is at last unbroken: He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more, or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the former things have ceased to exist. Every how long, LORD will have been answered; every cry from the depths will have been heard and met; every tear the Psalter wept will have been wiped away by the hand of God Himself. The praise of the new creation is not a forgetting of the laments but their resolution: the joy on the far side of every sorrow, sweeter for all that it cost. The laments were real, and they mattered, and they were heard; and now they are swallowed up in a gladness that will never end. That is the Hallelujah toward which the whole book, and the whole creation, and our own long road of faith, is finally moving.
Gathering the Threads
We came to the summit of the Psalter, and found it crowned with praise. Psalm 150 asks the great questions of worship and answers them without limit. Praise Him where? In His sanctuary and in the sky that testifies to His strength, the church on earth joining the hosts of heaven, our faltering praise carried up through the Lord Jesus into the song of the angels. Praise Him why? For His mighty acts and surpassing greatness, and most of all for the mightiest act of all, the death and rising of His Son. Praise Him how? With every instrument and with dancing, the whole of us and all our gifts handed back to the Giver, a worship loud and full and unashamed. And praise Him who? Everything that has breath, the widest summons in Scripture, every borrowed breath given back to the God who breathed it into us and, by His Spirit, breathes it into us anew.
And we saw why the book ends here. The Psalter, which has been more honest about the depths than any book in the Bible (crying from the pit, sitting in a darkness that never lifts), does not end in the depths. It ends in praise, and the arrangement is a sermon: the human story, taken into the hands of God, comes to rest not in lament but in Hallelujah. For anyone deep in a lament today, this is the comfort: the crying is not the destination; it is a station on a road that ends in Psalm 150. And that road was walked first by the Lord Jesus, who went down into the cry of the cross and came up into the praise of the resurrection, so that the movement from lament to praise is simply the movement of Good Friday to Easter, written across the whole book. The everlasting Hallelujah of the last psalm opens onto the last vision of Scripture, every creature praising the Lamb who was slain, and in that song the redeemed do not sing alone but led by their Lord, the great Worshiper who stands in the midst of the assembly and raises the praise He bought for us. Our worship now is a rehearsal for that eternal song. The praise will outlast the laments, and our tears, and our very deaths; and when all is past, everything that has breath will still be praising the LORD.
And so we lay down the Psalter as the church has always laid it down: not with a problem unsolved or a grief unhealed, but with a Hallelujah. We have learned from it to pray in every weather of the soul, and now it sends us out to live as a praising people: to bless the LORD every day with the breath He lends us, to gather with His people and join the song of heaven, to find the Lord Jesus in every psalm and praise Him through them all, and to carry the Hallelujah into a world that has forgotten how to sing. The praise we begin now we will not finish in this life; it spills over into eternity. But we begin it now, and the last word the prayer book of God’s people leaves on our lips is the word it will leave there forever: Praise the LORD.
For Discussion
Psalm 150 calls for praise in his sanctuary and in the sky, which testifies to his strength (v. 1), on earth and in heaven. How does our praise on earth join the praise of heaven, and what does it mean to worship the same God the angels worship (consider Hebrews 12:22)?
The psalm grounds praise in God’s mighty acts and surpassing greatness (v. 2). What are the mighty acts for which we praise Him, and how is the greatest act of all the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus?
The psalm calls for praise with every instrument (horn, lyre, harp, tambourine, strings, flute, cymbals) and even with dancing (vv. 3–5). What does this exuberant, whole-person praise suggest about how we worship, and what tends to make our worship more restrained than the psalm envisions?
The psalm ends, Let everything that has breath praise the LORD! (v. 6). What does it mean that every breath is a gift from God meant to be given back in praise, and how does this shape the way we think about our very lives?
The whole book of Psalms, having traveled through lament, penitence, anger, and suffering, comes to rest at last in this unrestrained praise. Why is it significant that the Psalter ends in praise, and what comfort is there for someone deep in a lament in knowing that praise, not lament, is the final word?
The destiny of all who belong to the Lord Jesus is to join the everlasting praise of heaven (consider Revelation 5:13). How is our praise now a rehearsal for that eternal song, and how does the Lord Jesus Himself lead His people’s praise (consider Hebrews 2:12)?
Looking Ahead
With Psalm 150 we have reached the end of the Psalter’s own road, and the close of our long journey through the songs of trust and praise. Two psalms remain in this volume, and the first of them looks back over the whole sweep of God’s dealings with His people. Psalm 78 is one of the great historical psalms, and it opens by stating its purpose plainly: Pay attention, my people, to my instruction! … What we have heard and learned, that which our ancestors have told us, we will not hide from their descendants. We will tell the next generation about the LORD’s praiseworthy acts (Psalm 78:1–4).
It is a long and searching retelling of Israel’s story (the Exodus and the wilderness, the wonders and the rebellions, God’s patience and His people’s faithlessness, again and again), told so that the next generation would place their confidence in God and not forget the works of God. We will consider how the honest remembering of the past, with all its failures, teaches faith to the future; how the long record of human faithlessness and divine patience points to the one faithful Son who would finally keep the covenant from our side; and why telling the next generation the deeds of the LORD is among the most important things the people of God ever do.
Read Psalm 78 before the next session. It is a long psalm of seventy-two verses; read it in one sitting if you can, to feel its sweep. Notice its stated purpose of teaching the next generation, and the rhythm of God’s faithfulness against His people’s repeated faithlessness.
Closing Prayer
Praise to You, O LORD, in Your sanctuary and in Your mighty heavens! We praise You for Your mighty deeds and according to Your excellent greatness, and most of all for the mightiest deed of all, the death and rising of Your Son, by which You answered every lament and broke the power of death. Loosen our timid hearts, and teach us to praise You with everything we have, with voice and skill and gift and body, holding nothing back, and to hand back to You in worship the very gifts You first gave us. We bless You that every breath we draw is Your gift, and we give it back to You now in praise.
We thank You that the long road of the Psalter, through every depth and darkness, comes to rest at last in praise, and that this is the road Your Son walked ahead of us, down into the cry of the cross and up into the praise of the resurrection, so that no lament is our final word. For all who are still in the depths, let this be their comfort: that the crying is not the destination, but praise is. Gather us at the last with everything that has breath, with the numberless multitude of every nation and all Your angels, into the everlasting Hallelujah, led by the Lamb who was slain, the great Worshiper who stands in the midst of the congregation and raises the praise He purchased with His blood. Restore to us in the resurrection the breath that death will take, that we may praise You with it forever. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.