Bless the LORD, O My Soul

vv. 1–2Bless his holy name; forget not all his benefits

The psalm opens with a command the singer gives himself. בָּרֲכִי is a feminine singular imperative, addressed to נַפְשִׁי, my soul. He is not asking God to bless him. He is telling his own soul to bless God, which assumes that the soul will not always do it unprompted. The Psalter does this repeatedly: “hope thou in God” (Ps. 42:5). “My soul, wait thou only upon God” (Ps. 62:5; see the Psalm 62 lesson). “Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee” (Ps. 116:7) — and that line, from a psalm in this same November set, uses the same rare form of the feminine suffix as Psalm 103:3–5 and the same verb as our verse 10. The believer is not only the audience of his inner life. He is expected to preach to it.

To bless God is to give him nothing he lacks. It is to speak well of him, by name, out loud, because he has first blessed us (Eph. 1:3); and the rest of the psalm is the list of reasons.

All that is within me — כָּל־קְרָבַי, all my inward parts — refuses a partial obedience. It is the same word Jeremiah uses for where the new covenant writes the law: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jer. 31:33). The God who writes his law in the inward parts can command the inward parts to bless him. And the object is his holy name, שֵׁם קָדְשׁוֹ, the name of his holiness: not a feeling about God but God as he has made himself known. The first petition of the Lord’s Prayer asks for the same thing, and the Catechism explains it as a request “That God would enable us and others to glorify him in all that whereby he maketh himself known” (WSC 101).

“Forget not all his benefits”

Verse 2 repeats the command and names the danger: וְאַל־תִּשְׁכְּחִי, and do not forget. Moses had said exactly when forgetting happens. “When thou hast eaten and art full, then thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the good land which he hath given thee. Beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God” (Deut. 8:10–11). Bless, and do not forget — our verse’s two verbs — at a full table. The mechanism is a lifted heart (Deut. 8:14), and Israel did exactly that: “And forgat his works” (Ps. 78:11). The danger in a year of plenty is not that the benefits stop. It is that the soul stops noticing where they came from.

The Bible’s saddest example is a man who was healed. “In those days Hezekiah was sick to the death, and prayed unto the LORD”, and was healed (2 Kings 20 tells how, and adds fifteen years to his life). Then: “Hezekiah rendered not again according to the benefit done unto him; for his heart was lifted up” (2 Chr. 32:24–25). Benefit there is the word of our verse 2. Our Lord met the same failure on the road: ten lepers cleansed, and “one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God … and he was a Samaritan. And Jesus answering said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine?” (Luke 17:15–17).

The word for benefits is גְּמוּלָיו, from a root that means to deal with someone, to treat them, to pay them back. It is usually a word for recompense, and most often for the recompense of the wicked: “render to them their desert” (Ps. 28:4). Here it is turned inside out. The soul is told to remember how God has dealt with it, and verse 10 will use the verb to say how: “nor rewarded (גָּמַל) us according to our iniquities.” The benefits are the dealings of a God who did not pay us what we were owed. Psalm 116 asks the obvious question with the same root: “What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits toward me?” (Ps. 116:12; see the Psalm 116 lesson). And the Westminster divines built a whole run of the Shorter Catechism on the word — the benefits that accompany or flow from justification, adoption and sanctification (WSC 32–38). The closing section lays that inventory beside this psalm.

vv. 3–5Who forgiveth, healeth, redeemeth, crowneth, satisfieth

Five participles, each with the article — the one forgiving, the one healing, the one redeeming, the one crowning, the one satisfying — work almost as titles: names for God built from what he does. The soul is still the one addressed, thine iniquities, thy life. It is a personal inventory, read aloud to the person it belongs to.

Forgiveth, healeth

סָלַח is the Old Testament’s word for forgiveness that only God gives. It is never used of one man forgiving another; other words do that work (the Psalm 130 lesson studies it at 130:4). Moses prays it after the golden calf: “pardon our iniquity and our sin” (Ex. 34:9). And all is not an intensifier dropped in for rhythm. The psalm does not allow the soul to keep a residue of unforgiven sin on the account.

Then רָפָא, to heal, and the pairing is deliberate. The participle is the one God used of himself in the wilderness: “I am the LORD that healeth thee” (Ex. 15:26). Elsewhere forgiveness and healing go together again and again. “If my people … shall humble themselves, and pray … then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (2 Chr. 7:14). David prays the pair in Psalm 41:4, “heal my soul; for I have sinned against thee”, and in Isaiah’s restored city no one says “I am sick”, and its people “shall be forgiven their iniquity” (Isa. 33:24). And the Servant’s work joins them for ever: “he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities … and with his stripes we are healed” (Isa. 53:5).

Our Lord did verse 3 in the order the verse gives it. A paralysed man was let down through the roof, and Jesus said first, “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee” (Mark 2:5). The scribes reasoned, “who can forgive sins but God only?” — which is exactly the point of סָלַח — and he answered by healing the man, “that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins” (Mark 2:7, 10). He healed the body to prove the forgiveness. Matthew says his healings fulfilled Isaiah 53: “Himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses” (Matt. 8:17). Peter applies the same chapter to sin: “by whose stripes ye were healed” (1 Pet. 2:24). James keeps the pair in the church’s ordinary practice (Jas. 5:15).

Redeemeth, crowneth

גָּאַל is the kinsman’s verb. A גֹּאֵל was the near relative who bought back what a poor man had lost — his land, his freedom, his name (Lev. 25:25; Ruth 3–4). When Boaz did it, the women of Bethlehem blessed the LORD “which hath not left thee this day without a kinsman” (Ruth 4:14). Job reached for the word at the bottom of his misery: “For I know that my redeemer liveth” (Job 19:25). And God takes it as his own title (Isa. 43:1; 44:6).

What the soul is bought back from is שַׁחַת, AV destruction: the pit, the grave, corruption. Elihu uses it for the moment God intervenes at the edge: “Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom” (Job 33:24). And it is the word of a verse the apostles preached as the resurrection of Christ: “neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Ps. 16:10; Acts 2:27, 31; 13:35). The Redeemer himself did not see שַׁחַת. His kin are bought out of it.

Then the crown. עָטַר, to crown, is the verb of Psalm 8: “thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour” (Ps. 8:5) — which Hebrews applies to Jesus, “crowned with glory and honour” for “the suffering of death” (Heb. 2:9). It is also the verb of a harvest psalm: “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness” (Ps. 65:11). The soul’s crown is חֶסֶד וְרַחֲמִים, lovingkindness and tender mercies — covenant loyalty and felt compassion. David prays the same pair (Ps. 25:6; 51:1). The man rescued from the pit is not merely released. He is crowned.

Satisfieth, renewed

Verse 5 has the psalm’s hardest word. עֶדְיֵךְ, AV thy mouth, is elsewhere the ordinary word for an ornament. Israel stripped off its ornaments in mourning after the golden calf (Ex. 33:4–6), and Jeremiah’s maid does not forget hers (Jer. 2:32). Ornament makes little sense here as it stands, and translators have guessed: the Greek has thy desire, the Authorised Version thy mouth, others thy years or thy prime. A teacher should say plainly that the word is uncertain. The sense of the line is not: God fills the whole person with good. “For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness” (Ps. 107:9; see the Psalm 107 lesson).

The result is renewal: תִּתְחַדֵּשׁ, from the root for new, the word of Lamentations’ “They are new every morning” (Lam. 3:23). Like the eagle’s recalls Isaiah’s “they shall mount up with wings as eagles” (Isa. 40:31). The verb there is a different one, but the bird is the same, and so is the promise of strength that does not run out. Paul gives the New Testament form of the line: “though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:16).

vv. 6–7Righteousness for the oppressed; his ways to Moses

The address changes. The soul has heard its inventory; now the psalm speaks about the LORD, in the third person, and it starts reciting history. Verse 6 begins with another participle, עֹשֵׂה, one who does, and its object is plural: צְדָקוֹת, literally righteousnesses.

In the Old Testament the plural means righteous acts: the things God has done in history to set right what was wrong. Deborah’s song tells Israel to “rehearse the righteous acts of the LORD” (Judg. 5:11); Samuel, laying down his office, reasons with the people “of all the righteous acts of the LORD” and then recites the Exodus (1 Sam. 12:7–8); Micah uses the word the same way (Mic. 6:5). God’s righteousness is something he did, and the doing is rescue.

The beneficiaries are כָּל־עֲשׁוּקִים, all that are oppressed. The verb is the one God’s law uses when it forbids Israel to grind the poor: “Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy” (Deut. 24:14). What the LORD forbids his people to do, he undoes himself. Psalm 146 says it in almost the same words: “Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry” (Ps. 146:7). Our Lord opened his ministry at Nazareth by reading Isaiah’s version of it: “to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18). And James warns a church with wealthy members that wages “kept back by fraud” cry out to “the Lord of sabaoth” (Jas. 5:4). Thanksgiving for God’s righteous acts has a social edge. A man who blesses the God of verse 6 had better not be one of the people verse 6 is rescuing others from.

“His ways unto Moses”

Verse 7 names the central righteous act and the man who saw it close up. He made known his ways unto Moses answers a prayer, almost word for word. After the golden calf Moses asked, “shew me now thy way, that I may know thee” (Ex. 33:13), and the Hebrew uses the same verb, make known, and the same noun, ways. Psalm 103 reports the prayer answered. The answer came in the next chapter, when the LORD passed by and proclaimed his name (Ex. 34:6–7), and verse 8 is about to quote it.

The parallel line, his acts unto the children of Israel, may mean no more than the first line in other words; Hebrew poetry often says one thing twice. But Scripture supplies a reason to hear a difference. Moses was given the ways, the character and purposes behind what God did; the people saw the acts, the plagues and the sea and the manna. And the Psalter says that seeing the acts was not enough. The fathers “saw my work” for forty years, and yet “they have not known my ways” (Ps. 95:9–10). Hebrews quotes that verdict as a warning to Christians (Heb. 3:9–10). The word for acts in our verse is the one Psalm 78 uses when it says Israel forgot: “And forgat his works” (Ps. 78:11). It is possible to see everything God does and still not know him.

The New Testament says how the ways are now known: “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18). Moses was shown the goodness and told the name; the Son has declared the Father. Many readers hear in John’s grace and truth (1:17) an echo of Exodus 34’s goodness and truth, the line verse 8 is about to quote.

vv. 8–10Merciful and gracious; not after our sins

Verse 8 is a quotation, and everyone in Israel would have heard it as one. When the LORD passed before Moses on the mountain he proclaimed, “The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Ex. 34:6). Psalm 103 sings the words back: merciful, gracious, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy. Few sentences are quoted more often inside the Old Testament itself. Moses pleads it at Kadesh (Num. 14:18). Nehemiah’s Levites confess it (Neh. 9:17). Joel calls a fast on the strength of it (Joel 2:13). Jonah throws it back at God as a complaint, because he knew God would spare Nineveh: “for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness” (Jonah 4:2). And the last psalm of this November set says it again: “The LORD is gracious, and full of compassion; slow to anger, and of great mercy” (Ps. 145:8; see the Psalm 145 lesson).

The four words are worth holding up one at a time. רַחוּם, merciful, is from the root of verse 4’s tender mercies, and verse 13 will use its verb of a father. חַנּוּן, gracious, is from the root of grace, the favour given to someone who has no claim on it. אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם, slow to anger, is literally long of nostrils: Hebrew pictures anger as hot breath, and God’s is a long time coming. And רַב־חֶסֶד, plenteous in mercy, is the covenant love that verse 11 is about to measure.

What the psalm leaves out

Exodus 34 does not stop at verse 6. It goes on: “Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation” (Ex. 34:7). Psalm 103 does not quote that verse, and it would be easy to think it had dropped the hard half of the name. It has not. Its three words for sin — iniquities (vv. 3, 10), sins (v. 10), transgressions (v. 12) — are the three words of Exodus 34:7, and every one of them is dealt with. And Exodus 34:7’s children’s children comes back in verse 17, reversed: not iniquity visited on them, but “his righteousness unto children’s children.” Other texts keep the warning clause in plain view — Moses at Kadesh (Num. 14:18), and Nahum: “The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked” (Nah. 1:3). The psalm presupposes the whole name and sings the part that a forgiven man most needs to hear.

“He will not always chide”

Verse 9 says what slow anger looks like over time. יָרִיב, chide, is from רִיב, the word for a lawsuit, the case God brings against his unfaithful people: “the LORD hath a controversy with his people” (Mic. 6:2). He will not keep prosecuting it for ever. Isaiah gives the reason: “For I will not contend for ever, neither will I be always wroth: for the spirit should fail before me” (Isa. 57:16). The second verb, יִטּוֹר, keep, is the verb for guarding or nursing a grudge. Jeremiah hears God say it to faithless Israel: “I am merciful, saith the LORD, and I will not keep anger for ever” (Jer. 3:12). But the same verb in Nahum says that God does keep wrath — for someone: “he reserveth wrath for his enemies” (Nah. 1:2). The anger is real, and it is kept. It is not kept for ever against those he has reconciled.

Then verse 10, where the new pronoun appears: “He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.” The verb rewarded is גָּמַל, the root of verse 2’s benefits. This is what the benefits are: dealings that were not according to our iniquities. Ezra knew it in the ruins: “thou our God hast punished us less than our iniquities deserve” (Ezra 9:13).

The psalm does not say how a just God can decline to deal with sinners after their sins. The New Testament does. He did deal with sin according to its deserving, and he dealt with it on someone else. “All we like sheep have gone astray … and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53:6). “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Cor. 5:21). Paul says God set Christ forth as a propitiation “to declare … his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Rom. 3:25–26). Verse 10 is gospel because Good Friday happened.

vv. 15–18As for man, his days are as grass

The psalm has measured the mercy. Now it measures the man. The word is אֱנוֹשׁ, man in his weakness, the word of “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:4) and of “Thou turnest man to destruction” (Ps. 90:3). Psalm 8’s mindful is the verb of our verse 14’s remembereth. The God who remembers our dust is the God who is mindful of mortal man.

His days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. Grass in the land of Israel greened after the winter rains and was burned brown in weeks. The Psalter uses it for the brevity of every human life (Ps. 90:5–6) and for the brief success of the wicked (Ps. 37:2). Job says it of himself (Job 14:1–2). And Isaiah gives it the form the New Testament will quote: “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it” (Isa. 40:6–7).

For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone. The word for wind is רוּחַ, Isaiah’s spirit in the verse just quoted. It is gone is one Hebrew word, וְאֵינֶנּוּ, and it is not. And the place thereof shall know it no more is a clause Job uses, in the same Hebrew words, of a man who dies: “He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more” (Job 7:10). The field does not remember the flower. The street does not remember the man.

The everlasting mercy

Then the adversative, and the whole strophe turns on it: But the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting. The grass has a season; חֶסֶד has no beginning and no end. From everlasting to everlasting is the phrase Moses uses of God himself: “even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God” (Ps. 90:2). The mercy lasts as long as the God whose mercy it is.

Peter quotes Isaiah’s grass and applies its ending to the gospel: “For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away: But the word of the Lord endureth for ever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you” (1 Pet. 1:24–25). What outlasts the grass, in Isaiah, is the word; in Psalm 103 it is the mercy; in Peter they turn out to be the same thing, the gospel. And Mary, singing over the child in her womb, reaches for this verse’s language: “And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation” (Luke 1:50).

And his righteousness unto children’s children. This is the reversal of Exodus 34:7 noted above. There, iniquity was visited upon the children’s children; here, righteousness runs unto children’s children. The Ten Commandments had already weighted the scales — iniquity “unto the third and fourth generation”, mercy “unto thousands” (Ex. 20:5–6) — and Moses made the thousands generations (Deut. 7:9). The covenant runs in families. God promised Abraham to be “a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee” (Gen. 17:7), and Peter at Pentecost said the same promise stood: “For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off” (Acts 2:39). That is why the Confession says the visible church consists of all who profess the true religion “and of their children” (WCF 25.2), and why the children of believers are baptised (WCF 28.4).

“To such as keep his covenant”

Verse 18 names those on whom the mercy rests: “To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them.” שֹׁמְרֵי בְרִיתוֹ, keepers of his covenant, is the language of Psalm 25, though there the Hebrew uses a synonym for keep: “All the paths of the LORD are mercy and truth unto such as keep his covenant and his testimonies” (Ps. 25:10). The word for commandments is פִקֻּדָיו, his precepts, a word found only in the Psalms and most of all in Psalm 119 (see the Psalm 119 lesson). And the verb is remember: God remembers that we are dust (v. 14), and his people remember what he said. Memory runs both ways in this covenant.

vv. 19–22His throne, his angels, his works, my soul

The last movement begins with a throne. The God whose mercy has been measured against the heavens has his throne in the heavens: הֵכִין כִּסְאוֹ, he has established his throne. The verb means to set firm, to make ready, and the Psalter uses its root for the same throne elsewhere: “Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting” (Ps. 93:2). “The LORD‘s throne is in heaven” (Ps. 11:4; see the Psalm 11 lesson). And his kingdom ruleth over all: there is no territory outside it. Nebuchadnezzar learned it the hard way: “none can stay his hand” (Dan. 4:35).

This matters for everything before it. The mercy of verses 3–18 is a King’s mercy, not the kindness of a well-meaning god who cannot help. It is the decree of the one whose providence reaches “from the greatest even to the least” (WCF 5.1). The New Testament puts a face on the throne. The risen Christ says, “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth” (Matt. 28:18), and Paul says the Father “gave him to be the head over all things to the church” (Eph. 1:22). Psalm 145 says it in this set’s closing psalm: “Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations” (Ps. 145:13).

The angels

Now the summons widens, and it starts at the top. Bless the LORD, ye his angels, that excel in strength. The phrase is mighty ones of strength, גִּבֹּרֵי כֹחַ, and they are described by what they do: עֹשֵׂי דְבָרוֹ, doers of his word (AV that do his commandments), and then hearkening unto the voice of his word. The doing comes before the hearing. Israel at Sinai put the same two verbs in the same order: “All that the LORD hath said will we do, and be obedient” (Ex. 24:7). And James uses the same phrase of every Christian: “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only” (Jas. 1:22).

Bless ye the LORD, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure. מְשָׁרְתָיו, his ministers, is the word of the next psalm, “Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire” (Ps. 104:4), which Hebrews quotes and then explains: “Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?” (Heb. 1:7, 14). The angels the psalm calls to bless God are busy serving the people whose benefits the psalm has listed. They praised God at the birth of the one who secured them — “a multitude of the heavenly host praising God” (Luke 2:13).

That do his pleasure — רְצוֹנוֹ, his will. Our Lord taught his disciples to pray for exactly this on earth: “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). The Shorter Catechism explains the petition in this verse’s terms: we pray that God “would make us able and willing to know, obey, and submit to his will in all things, as the angels do in heaven” (WSC 103), and the Heidelberg, at the same petition, asks that each of us may do the duties of his station and calling as willingly and faithfully as the angels in heaven (HC 124). Verse 21 is the third petition’s picture of heaven.

All his works, and my soul

Bless the LORD, all his works in all places of his dominion. The circle is now as wide as it can go: every creature, in every place where he rules, which is every place. Psalm 145 says the same: “All thy works shall praise thee, O LORD; and thy saints shall bless thee” (Ps. 145:10). Psalm 148 spells it out, creature by creature. And John saw it done, in this psalm’s order: first “the voice of many angels round about the throne” (Rev. 5:11), and then “every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever” (Rev. 5:13). In all places of his dominion is also a missionary phrase: there is no place outside his rule, and so no people who are not summoned (WSC 102).

And then the psalm does what it began by doing. Bless the LORD, O my soul. Psalm 104 closes the same way, but here the return is especially pointed, because of everything in between. The soul that was told to bless in verse 1 has since heard the inventory, the creed, the measurements, the father, the dust, the grass and the throne. Now it stands in a universe that has been called to the same work, and it adds itself last, the smallest voice in the choir and not left out. That is what every Lord’s Day is. “But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, To the general assembly and church of the firstborn” (Heb. 12:22–23). A congregation singing Psalm 103 on an ordinary Sunday is joining angels who have been doing it all along.