His Mercy Endureth Forever

vv. 1–3Unto the LORD, the God of gods, the Lord of lords

The first word is a plural imperative and the verb of the whole psalm. הוֹדוּ is from ידה, the root of תּוֹדָה, the thanksgiving of Psalm 100’s title. Its range is wider than English thanks. It is also what a man does with his sins when he stops hiding them: “I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD” (Ps. 32:5; see the Psalm 32 lesson). To give thanks in Hebrew is to own something out loud — to acknowledge before others what is true about God, as confession acknowledges what is true about oneself. That is why this psalm can be a list: thanksgiving here is first a public account of what he has done, and only then a feeling. Paul makes its absence the first symptom of the fall: “when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful” (Rom. 1:21).

The first reason comes before any act is named: כִּי־טוֹב, for he is good. When Moses asked to see the glory, the answer was “I will make all my goodness pass before thee” (Ex. 33:19), and our Lord would not let the word be used lightly: “there is none good but one, that is, God” (Mark 10:18). The Confession builds all worship on the same order. The light of nature “showeth that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and doth good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served” (WCF 21.1). Is good, and doth good: the psalm’s first verse, and then its next twenty-five.

Then three titles. First the covenant name, יְהוָה, given at the bush as “my name for ever, and … my memorial unto all generations” (Ex. 3:15). Then Moses’ own pair: “the LORD your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible” (Deut. 10:17). The titles concede no real rivals. On the night of the firstborn God said, “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment” (Ex. 12:12), and at the sea Israel sang, “Who is like unto thee, O LORD, among the gods?” (Ex. 15:11). Verse 2 announces that verdict in advance. The third title uses אָדוֹן, master — not the covenant name, which is why the Authorised Version prints Lord in ordinary type.

The New Testament keeps the pair and gives it names. Paul grants that in the world’s reckoning “there be gods many, and lords many”, and answers, “to us there is but one God, the Father … and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things” (1 Cor. 8:5–6). John sees verse 3’s title on the rider’s vesture, “KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS” (Rev. 19:16), and hears it given to the Lamb (Rev. 17:14). A congregation singing verse 3 is singing a title the Lamb wears.

Notice, last, that the refrain has been sung three times before a single deed is mentioned. The psalm begins with the verdict and then shows that the evidence supports it — the only order that survives a year in which the blessings are hard to count.

vv. 4–9Great wonders; the heavens, the earth, the lights

The history begins before there was anyone to deliver, and its first noun is an Exodus word. נִפְלָאוֹת, wonders, is what God promised before the plagues — “I will stretch out my hand, and smite Egypt with all my wonders” (Ex. 3:20) — and, in the singular, what Israel sang beyond the sea, “glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders” (Ex. 15:11). Psalm 136 uses it first of creation. Before it reaches Egypt it has put the making of the world in the same category as the plagues. לְבַדּוֹ, alone, rules out partners: “I am the LORD that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself” (Isa. 44:24). In a world where the sun and moon were gods, alone was a polemical word.

By wisdom is בִּתְבוּנָה, with understanding, as in “by understanding hath he established the heavens” (Prov. 3:19; cf. Jer. 10:12). Isaiah adds that no one will reach the bottom of it: “there is no searching of his understanding” (Isa. 40:28), very nearly the hinge of the Psalm 145 lesson. The New Testament names the understanding: “All things were made by him” (John 1:3); “by him all things consist” (Col. 1:17); “Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). The wisdom of verse 5 is the Son.

Stretched out the earth is לְרֹקַע, a smith’s verb: to beat out, hammer thin, as when “they did beat the gold into thin plates” (Ex. 39:3). Its noun is the firmament of Genesis 1:6, רָקִיעַ. The dry land is laid out upon the waters (Ps. 24:2), and that matters, because water is about to become the subject: the God who spread dry ground over the deep will make a dry road through the sea (v. 14).

Then the lights, and here the psalm and Genesis differ. Genesis calls them הַמְּאֹרֹת, the luminaries, and never names the sun or the moon. Psalm 136 uses the plainer אוֹרִים, lights, and then names them. What it takes from Genesis is the job description: לְמֶמְשֶׁלֶת, to rule, is Genesis 1:16’s own phrase — “the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night”. The lights rule because they were appointed to. Moses warned against being “driven to worship them” (Deut. 4:19); the psalm names them and thanks someone else.

The lights are also a covenant pledge. God offers the regularity of the sky as the measure of his faithfulness to Israel — “If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever” (Jer. 31:36) — and in the verse before, Jeremiah runs from the sun and moon to the God “which divideth the sea” in one breath, as the psalm does. After the flood the same promise was made to all flesh: “day and night shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). Every sunrise is a kept promise: “To shew forth thy lovingkindness in the morning, and thy faithfulness every night” (Ps. 92:2), and the word there is hesed. The catechism defines providence as God’s “most holy, wise and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions” (WSC 11); the psalm supplies the motive. Thanksgiving for daylight is not a lesser thanksgiving than thanksgiving for the exodus. Here it comes first.

vv. 10–12Egypt in their firstborn; a strong hand

The redemption opens with the hardest line in the psalm, To him that smote Egypt in their firstborn, and gives it the same refrain as the sunrise. No congregation sings that easily. Before asking how it can be sung, ask what the line meant in its own story.

The firstborn were not chosen at random. Before the first plague God told Moses what the last would be, and why: “Israel is my son, even my firstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn” (Ex. 4:22–23). The tenth plague answers a king who held another Father’s firstborn in bondage and refused, through nine warnings, to let him go. It also answers Egypt’s gods: “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD” (Ex. 12:12). Verse 2 called him the God of gods; verse 10 is the night the title was proved.

And Israel’s firstborn were not safe by being Israelite. The same destroyer went through the land, and what kept him from a door was blood on the lintel: “when I see the blood, I will pass over you” (Ex. 12:13). Afterwards every firstborn son of Israel belonged to God and had to be bought back: “the LORD slew all the firstborn in the land of Egypt … but all the firstborn of my children I redeem” (Ex. 13:15). The line between Egypt and Israel that night was not drawn between the guilty and the innocent. It was drawn by a lamb.

That is why the church can sing this line. “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7). The God who spared Israel’s firstborn did not, at the cross, spare his own: “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?” (Rom. 8:32). The Son is “the firstborn from the dead” (Col. 1:18), and the redeemed are the “church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven” (Heb. 12:23). On the night of verse 10 the firstborn of Egypt died and the firstborn of Israel lived under the blood. At Calvary the Firstborn died, and the blood was his.

Verse 11 is the exodus in three Hebrew words, וַיּוֹצֵא יִשְׂרָאֵל מִתּוֹכָם, and brought out Israel from among them — the verb God uses to introduce himself at Sinai: “I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Ex. 20:2). The catechism draws Sinai’s conclusion: “because God is the Lord, and our God, and redeemer, therefore we are bound to keep all his commandments” (WSC 44). Gratitude in Scripture is obedience with a reason given.

Verse 12 gives the manner, Moses’ formula repeated until it became a creed: with a strong hand, and with a stretched out arm (Deut. 4:34; 5:15; 26:8), and God’s promise before the plagues, “I will redeem you with a stretched out arm” (Ex. 6:6). Isaiah asks, “to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed?” (Isa. 53:1), at the head of the chapter about the wounded Servant (cf. John 12:38), and Mary sings, “He hath shewed strength with his arm” (Luke 1:51). The arm stretched out over Egypt was stretched out again on a cross.

vv. 13–15The Red sea divided; Pharaoh overthrown

Three verbs, and the first and last are worth stopping on. לְגֹזֵר … לִגְזָרִים, who divided … into parts, is a verb with its own noun beside it: who cut … into cuttings. The plural noun גְּזָרִים, pieces, is rare; the lexicons list it in only one other place, the night of God’s covenant with Abraham, when “a burning lamp … passed between those pieces” (Gen. 15:17). In that same chapter God told Abraham that the nation his seed would serve “will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance” (Gen. 15:14). And the psalm’s next line has Genesis 15:17’s verb: there the lamp passed (עָבַר) between the pieces; here God made Israel to pass (וְהֶעֱבִיר) through the divided sea. Whether the psalmist meant the echo cannot be proved. It is at least apt. The people walked between the pieces because, four centuries earlier, God had passed between the pieces himself and promised.

Verse 15’s verb is the vivid one. וְנִעֵר, overthrew, is to shake out, as dust out of a garment: “Also I shook my lap, and said, So God shake out every man from his house” (Neh. 5:13). It is the verb of the narrative too — “the LORD overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea” (Ex. 14:27), וַיְנַעֵר — so the psalm is echoing Exodus. Pharaoh’s army, the terror of the known world, is shaken off like something clinging to a cloak.

Another psalm tells this same night and remembers something else. Psalm 106, which opens with the identical sentence, says: “Our fathers understood not thy wonders in Egypt; they remembered not the multitude of thy mercies; but provoked him at the sea, even at the Red sea” (Ps. 106:7). Wonders, mercies (hesed in the plural) and remembered — three of Psalm 136’s own words, all in the negative. Psalm 106 records what Israel forgot at the water; Psalm 136 records what God did there, and says after it what Israel should have said.

The New Testament takes the crossing into the church. “All our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; And were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea” (1 Cor. 10:1–2). And John sees the redeemed by “a sea of glass mingled with fire”, singing “the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are thy works” (Rev. 15:2–3). Great and marvellous are verse 4’s great wonders: the creation word became the Exodus word, and the Exodus word has become the song of the Lamb.

vv. 16–20Through the wilderness; Sihon and Og

Forty years get one verse. The participle לְמוֹלִיךְ, who led, is Moses’ word for those years — “Who led thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought” (Deut. 8:15), the same participle — and Nehemiah’s prayer of rehearsal, the nearest thing in Scripture to a prose Psalm 136, says what the leading consisted of: “Yet thou in thy manifold mercies forsookest them not in the wilderness … forty years didst thou sustain them in the wilderness, so that they lacked nothing” (Neh. 9:19, 21).

What the psalm leaves out teaches as much as what it says. Most retellings of the wilderness have Israel’s failures in them — the golden calf, the spies, the murmuring; Psalms 78 and 106 are built around those failures, and Paul warns the church by them (1 Cor. 10:6). Psalm 136, like Psalm 105, mentions none of it — not from forgetfulness, since Psalm 106 is in the same book, but as a different act of worship. There is a time to confess the forty years, and a time to say only what God did in them.

Then the kings, struck with the participle that struck Egypt (v. 10). Famous kings are מְלָכִים אַדִּירִים, majestic kings — the adjective of Psalm 8:1, “how excellent is thy name”. The psalm sets their majesty beside his and leaves you to finish the comparison.

Sihon and Og are the only people in the psalm with names, apart from Pharaoh and Israel, and their story should shape how the lesson handles them (Num. 21:21–35; Deut. 2:24–3:11). Israel asked Sihon first for passage along “the king’s high way” (Num. 21:22), and Moses sent “words of peace” (Deut. 2:26). Sihon came out to fight, and Deuteronomy gives the hard note without apology: “the LORD thy God hardened his spirit, and made his heart obstinate, that he might deliver him into thy hand” (Deut. 2:30). Og was the last of the giants, with “a bedstead of iron” nine cubits long (Deut. 3:11). Behind both stands Genesis 15 again: Abraham’s descendants would come back only in the fourth generation, “for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full” (Gen. 15:16). Sihon was king of the Amorites (v. 19). Four centuries of patience came before verse 18.

Then a Canaanite woman heard about it. Rahab told the spies what Jericho knew: “we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red sea for you … and what ye did unto the two kings of the Amorites, that were on the other side Jordan, Sihon and Og” (Josh. 2:10). That is verses 13 to 20 of this psalm in a Canaanite’s mouth. Jericho’s heart melted; Rahab’s believed: “the LORD your God, he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath” (2:11). And she asked for the very word of the refrain — “since I have shewed you kindness, that ye will also shew kindness unto my father’s house” (2:12), both times חֶסֶד. The spies promised to deal with her in hesed and emet, “kindly and truly” (2:14). She “perished not with them that believed not” (Heb. 11:31), and her name stands in the genealogy of Christ (Matt. 1:5).

The same news hardened Sihon and saved Rahab. The Canons of Dort say that God “graciously softens the hearts of the elect, however obstinate, and inclines them to believe; while he leaves the non-elect in his just judgment to their own wickedness and obduracy”, and that in this “is especially displayed the profound, the merciful, and at the same time the righteous discrimination between men, equally involved in ruin” (Canons of Dort 1.6). Equally involved in ruin is the phrase to give a congregation. Rahab was not better than Sihon. She was given ears to hear.

vv. 21–22An heritage unto Israel his servant

Two lines, and the second picks up the last word of the first: for an heritage … an heritage unto Israel his servant. The repetition slows the psalm at the one point where the gift is named. נַחֲלָה is property that comes to you because of whose you are — the family holding Naboth would not sell: “The LORD forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee” (1 Kings 21:3). And the verb is וְנָתַן, gave, which returns in verse 25 as giveth food. Land and bread come from the same hand.

Moses made sure Israel heard the word correctly: “Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land: but for the wickedness of these nations … and that he may perform the word which the LORD sware unto thy fathers” (Deut. 9:5). Neither reason is Israel. The Amorites’ iniquity was full, and God had sworn. The conquest is told in Scripture as grace, and the refrain over verse 21 says so.

Then Israel his servant. Psalm 135, telling the same gift, says “Israel his people” (135:12); Psalm 136 has עַבְדּוֹ, singular, the title Isaiah gives Israel as a person: “But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen” (Isa. 41:8). In Isaiah the Servant becomes one figure who does what the nation could not, and Matthew names him: “Behold my servant, whom I have chosen; my beloved … he shall shew judgment to the Gentiles” (Matt. 12:18, quoting Isa. 42:1). Paul makes the same move with the promise to Abraham: “He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ” (Gal. 3:16). The heir is the Servant, and those in him inherit with him: “if ye be Christ’s, then are ye Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal. 3:29).

And the inheritance has grown. The promise to Abraham was that he should be “the heir of the world” (Rom. 4:13); the meek “shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5); the Father says to the Son, “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession” (Ps. 2:8). Peter points beyond it to “an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away” (1 Pet. 1:4), and between the land and the last day stands the command to disciple the nations (Matt. 28:19) — the same inheritance taken by other means. The church’s confidence that the nations will be given to the Son is what verse 22 looks like after the Servant has come.

vv. 23–24In our low estate; redeemed from our enemies

After twenty-two verses about him and them, the pronoun changes: Who remembered us in our low estate … And hath redeemed us from our enemies. The singers stop narrating and start testifying. No event is named, so every generation can stand in these lines — which is why the psalm can be sung in a country that never saw Egypt. שֵׁפֶל, low estate, is a rare noun — the “low place” where, in the Preacher’s upside-down world, the rich are made to sit (Eccl. 10:6) — and its verb is Isaiah’s levelling, “every mountain and hill shall be made low” (Isa. 40:4).

זָכַר, remembered, is never God recalling something he had forgotten. It is covenant action. “God remembered Noah”, and the waters went down (Gen. 8:1). In Egypt “their cry came up unto God … and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob” (Ex. 2:23–24), and the exodus began. Psalm 106 has this verse’s construction — “he remembered for them his covenant, and repented according to the multitude of his mercies” (Ps. 106:45) — where Psalm 136 says זָכַר לָנוּ, he remembered for us. To be remembered by God is to have his promise acted on.

The New Testament opens with this verse being kept. Mary sings, “he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden” and “He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy” (Luke 1:48, 54); Zacharias, that God has come “To perform the mercy promised to our fathers, and to remember his holy covenant” (1:72) — verse 23 and its refrain, sung over two promised children. And the Son went down into the low estate himself. The catechism describes his humiliation as “his being born, and that in a low condition, made under the law, undergoing the miseries of this life, the wrath of God, and the cursed death of the cross” (WSC 27). From the cross beside his came verse 23 in the first person singular — “Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom” — and the answer, “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:42–43).

Verse 24’s redeemed is not the word of Psalm 130, where פָּדָה was a price paid (see the Psalm 130 lesson). Here it is פָּרַק, to tear away, to break off — Isaac’s word to Esau, “thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck” (Gen. 27:40), and the lion’s “rending it in pieces” in Psalm 7:2. Jerusalem’s lament uses it for the deliverer who never came: “there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand” (Lam. 5:8). Psalm 136 answers the lament. There is one who does, and he tears his people out of the jaws. The enemies are צָרֵינוּ, our adversaries, from a root meaning to press or hem in; the Psalm 23 lesson met the same family of words at the table spread “in the presence of mine enemies”.

vv. 25–26Food to all flesh; the God of heaven

The second-last line comes down to the table. The participle נֹתֵן is present and continuous, who is giving, and לֶחֶם is bread, the ordinary word for a meal. After the heavens and the sea and the kings, the last piece of evidence is tonight’s supper.

It is everyone’s supper. כָּל־בָּשָׂר, all flesh, belongs to the covenant after the flood, where it stands beside verse 23’s verb: “I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh” (Gen. 9:15). The love that remembered Israel in Egypt is the love that promised never again to destroy the earth, and keeps the promise with every harvest. Paul preached it at Lystra: God “left not himself without witness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven, and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:17). The Heidelberg Catechism lists fruitful and barren years, food and drink, among the things that come to us not by chance but from God’s “fatherly hand” (HC 27), and draws the conclusion that we may be patient in adversity and thankful in prosperity (HC 28). A God who keeps the lights and the nations in his hand, and still feeds “the young ravens which cry” (Ps. 147:9), is the God this psalm thanks.

The New Testament adds what the psalm could not yet say: “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger” (John 6:35). The food on the table tonight and the bread of the Lord’s Supper come from the same hand, the one in providence and the other as the seal of the covenant. The Psalm 145 lesson takes up the open hand from the other side, and the two psalms meet at Luther’s table (below).

Then the last line returns to the first. הוֹדוּ again, but to a new title, אֵל הַשָּׁמָיִם, the God of heaven. This exact form, with אֵל, appears to stand only here. The fuller God of heaven is rare early — Abraham uses it (Gen. 24:7) — and common after the exile. Nehemiah prays to “the God of heaven … that keepeth covenant and mercy” (Neh. 1:4–5). Jonah confesses to pagan sailors “the LORD, the God of heaven, which hath made the sea and the dry land” (Jonah 1:9). Daniel: “in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed” (Dan. 2:44). And long before them Rahab had said something like it: “he is God in heaven above, and in earth beneath” (Josh. 2:11). It is the name by which outsiders came to know him, and the psalm ends on a name the nations could say.