Psalm 150: Hobbits, Narnia, and Eternity

• Read Psalm 150 from the ESV.
• Read my Psalm 150 poem from A New Song.

I remember the first time I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore year in high school and I woke up one morning and decided to read The Hobbit. I turned to page one and read, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” I finished The Hobbit before I went to sleep that night. Over the next two days, I read The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. When turning the last page I read the last lines, “He drew a deep breath. “Well, I’m back,” he said.” I wanted to return to the beginning and start all over again.

As much as I love those books, however, there is something about them I don’t like: their finality. The story ends when Samwise declares he is back and the only thing lying beyond that declaration is the hope of re-reading the story. I must turn back to page one and start in that familiar hobbit-hole if I wish to experience the thrill once again. But the journey to come is all too familiar and it sadly always ends. But not every story has such a final ending.

The book of Psalms begins with this first line:

Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.

Some would say the Psalms are merely a collection of unrelated poems, but I disagree. I believe the Psalms tells a story, and Psalm 1 is the beginning of that story. And while the journey is long, the story ends with the following words found in Psalm 150,

Praise the LORD!
Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty heavens!
Praise him for his mighty deeds;
praise him according to his excellent greatness!
Praise him with trumpet sound;
praise him with lute and harp!
Praise him with tambourine and dance;
praise him with strings and pipe!
Praise him with sounding cymbals;
praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!
Praise the LORD!

The Psalms story begins with the righteous person who delights in the LORD’s law; it ends with the LORD in all of his glory. But the LORD is not alone. The righteous people from Psalm 1 are standing before the LORD singing his praises.

The first thing the psalmist tells us about this moment is that God is praised in his sanctuary. I realize the word “sanctuary” makes this seem like a moment where everyone is standing in an auditorium singing to God, but the Hebrew word used for sanctuary actually means “otherness,” “holiness,” “apartness,” “sacredness.” This means that the righteous man is not necessarily standing in an auditorium singing, but he is singing about how wholly other God is. God is not a fabrication of the human mind, but he is holy, unique, sacred, and beyond human comprehension.

When I think about the “otherness” of God, I think of Job’s words in Job 42:2-6 when he finally sees God. He says, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” Job had tried to reason and comprehend God in his “otherness” but he, upon seeing God, had to admit his failure. He thought he knew the LORD, but once he experienced him, Job found him so completely different from his understanding that he was left speechless.

But when the righteous man finally stands before the LORD in Psalm 150 and contemplates his complete and utter uniqueness and holiness he is not silent. He is compelled to open his mouth with praise and he erupts in noisy song. He plays trumpets, clangs cymbals, wails on guitars, and dances before the LORD much like David danced when the ark was brought into Jerusalem. He offers praise to God. This praise—the righteous man’s noisy and earthy praise—is the second thing we read concerning this moment when he stands before the LORD at the end of his Psalm journey.

And if we, like the righteous man of Psalm 1, delight in the law of the LORD, then when we traverse our own journey and find ourselves standing before the LORD, our praise will be much the same. We will not be concerned with anything or anyone other than the LORD. Our praise will be a noisy celebration filled with dancing and singing and loud instruments when we finally stand before the LORD.

But, unlike the Lord of the Rings, we won’t merely say “I’m back” and then wait for another day to start the story once again. Psalm 150 ends the journey of the righteous man in Psalm 1—our journey—but Psalm 150 is also just the beginning. Psalm 150’s moment of praise is a moment much like that described by C. S. Lewis in the final paragraph of The Last Battle. He wrote, “And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

Completing Psalm 150 may fill us with a longing to return to Psalm 1 and start reading again, and that is a good thing. But when we actually stand before the LORD and sing his praises, we will not be longing to return to our hobbit hole and start again; we will be looking forward to unending joys found only in the eternal experience of living with the LORD and his love.

Praise the LORD!