Hallelu Yah

The book of Psalms forms a neat bundle of thoughts of various people throughout Israel's history. The book begins with talking about the blessed man and it ends with praise, which seems an appropriate place to end after looking at 150 different meditations on God and his law.

And so there is praise:
Praise the LORD.
Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty heavens.
2 Praise him for his acts of power;
praise him for his surpassing greatness.
3 Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,
praise him with the harp and lyre,
4 praise him with timbrel and dancing,
praise him with the strings and pipe,
5 praise him with the clash of cymbals,
praise him with resounding cymbals.

6 Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.

Praise the LORD. (Psalm 150 NIV)
It's a fairly simple Psalm that tells us the simple thing "Praise the LORD." (In Hebrew Hallelu Yah hence the title of today's blog). God is to be praised, in the sanctuary, in the heavens, so basically, we are to be praising God everywhere. What for, for his surpassing greatness and his acts of power, so again we are to praise God for everything he does. After reading 149 Psalms we'd probably have a good idea of what they are, and the original audience of this Psalm would have had a thorough understanding of what God had done for them having been taught it their whole lives and experienced the miraculous signs themselves, and as such the Psalmist doesn't feel the need to go in to great detail here. But finally we come to the how, and it is this that takes up the bulk of the Psalm, a long list of instruments and dancing is included. Why the list? Because we are to praise God with all that we have and all that we are.

This week in Children's Church we looked at the parable of the talents, and how the good servants used all that they could to bring happiness and joy to their master. The call of Psalm 150 is much the same, we should be working with all that we have so that we can bring praise to God through our skills and talents wherever we are and for whatever reason.