Psalm 146: I Did It My Way…

• Read Psalm 146 from the ESV.
• Read my Psalm 146 poem from A New Song.

These last five psalms resolve the tensions, fears, and frustrations of the psalmists. They point forward to the time when all creation will rest under God’s lovingkindness. In them, we find the foundation upon which all true hope is built. And this first psalm, Psalm 146, resolves the two primary issues which have loomed over the Psalms from its very beginning.

Psalm 146 begins with a call to praise God as long as we live, but it is the body of Psalm 146 which provides the major content for us to consider. After praise, we are told to not trust in princes because they cannot provide salvation. All hope we place in them will vanish when they die.

It is easy for us to point at the great failures of the past when empires thought they would last a thousand generations. There were Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar, the Chinese Dynasties, Alexander the Great, the Caesars, the Holy Roman Empire, England, and the Third Reich, just to name a few. While those empires saw no way in which their power might come to an end, they did. And now the only place we can find these empires is on a shelf in a museum. And, dare I say, the remnants of the empires in which we currently live will likewise be on view in some museum in the future. We will join the billions of people who have lived before us who and who are, even now, resting in the dust under our feet.

In the Garden of Eden lived in perfect communion with God, but we chose to seek our own way. In Genesis 3:6 we are told that Eve chose to eat the fruit of the tree because from the tree she could find wisdom on her own. Adam and Eve’s choice began a never-ending succession, running to this very day, of people believing they can cast away God’s rule and do things their own way. It is about this to which the psalmist referred when he wrote in Psalm 2,

Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.” – Psalm 2:1-4

But those thoughts are not just from the distant past. When Frank Sinatra stepped up to the microphone in Madison Square Garden in 1974 to sing the famous song My Way, he introduced it by saying, “We will now do the national anthem, but you needn’t rise.” When the first few notes were played the crowd erupted with thunderous applause. Frank Sinatra’s song My Way was not just the national anthem of people then, it is the implicit personal anthem of nearly everyone today. We are proud people and want to have things our own way. We are not “one who kneels.” We bow our knee to no one and nothing else. But continue reading Psalm 2 and you will see God’s response to us:

He who sits in the heavens laughs;
the LORD holds them in derision. – Psalm 2:5

God doesn’t laugh because he is happy about our futility. He laughs because he knows how futile our search is. He knows we put our trust in princes, but he also knows that those princes will eventually fail. Living in the 21st century we have a good seat from which to judge the success of all former human empires: they all receive a failing grade. And we need to be honest with ourselves and admit that the present empires will also receive a failing grade. But there is one prince in whom we can place our trust who will never fail.

God created everything. Right off the bat, God wins. Hands down. No human can ever create anything close to the beauty and complexity of this universe. Only God can do that. And we are part of that creation and owe our very existence to him. But there is more. God gives justice to the oppressed, he feeds the hungry, he frees the prisoner, gives sight to the blind, uplifts the lowly, protects the alien, the widow, and the fatherless, and loves he the righteous. God’s love is everlasting and will never fail.

Psalm 1 tells us that the way of the wicked leads to destruction and that they are “like chaff which the wind drives away.” But beginning in Psalm 3 and spread throughout all of the psalms until Psalm 145, the wicked cause many struggles for the psalm writers. It is also likely that the wicked have caused troubles in the lives of everyone else who seeks to follow God. And if you are like me, you’ve probably asked, at least once, why the wicked always seem to win and go unpunished. If you’ve asked that, then you are in luck because Psalm 146 tells us that God disposes of all wicked and their wickedness with three little Hebrew words: “derek rasha’ ‘avath.” It only takes three little words for God to make evil a footnote to human history. In English, Psalm 146:9b says, “but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.”

The wicked person of Psalm 1 is easily destroyed. The human governments of Psalm 2 are laughed out of existence. All that remain are God and his people. Psalm 146 celebrates the beginning of a whole new order which will last for more than a thousand generations. God’s kingdom will last for eternity and it is filled with people for whom God is their one, only, and final hope.

Oh, and by the way, no one will be singing My Way anymore.