Praise the Lord. How good it is to sing praises to our God, how pleasant and fitting to praise him! The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the exiles of Israel. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds. He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name. Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit. The Lord sustains the humble but casts the wicked to the ground. (Psalm 147:1-6)   This psalm has a lovely way of weaving two pictures of God together that we sometimes have a hard time joining.  Do we have a big, powerful, far off God—the inside of whose boardroom we will never see—or a God who is intimately involved in the small, everyday, muddy and mundane realities of our lives with us?  This psalm answers with: "yes." The God of psalm 147 is a big God who deals with the massive works of the universe.  He numbers and names stars, for instance.  But he is also a God intimately involved in the daily lives of his people, too.  The mind-numbing difference between these two contexts does not seem to phase or create a barrier for God at all.  He knows his whole creation by name.  He works his ways and gives his caring, intimate presence in everything he does.  The God who is great and powerful enough to deal with the heavenly bodies of the universe is surly powerful enough to move the things in our lives.  But this is not the coercive power that we fear these days: this is the power of a God who bends down, condescends to menial, servant-like tasks of changing bandages.  Toward the end of this psalm, we hear of how it is God's word that goes out to work out and accomplish so many of these things.  Again: this is not a picture of a distant deity shouting commands that somebody had better do, or else.  No, this is a picture that looks much more like the first half of the psalm.  It is a picture that looks, in fact, a lot like Jesus.  The Word of God: Lord of all the Universe, yet also the Servant of all the Humble and Brokenhearted.  He is at once deity and humanity. Transcendent and imminent.  Big enough to do what needs doing, humble enough to walk beside us and support us through the long journey that gets us there.     These acts we're invited to praise God for are long, generational pictures of God's work of salvation in the lives of his people against the backdrop of evil.  It doesn't happen overnight.  Wounds don't heal instantaneously.  The exiles of Israel didn't return for 70 years.  Sometimes our times are hard.  Worthy of lament, of anger, of grief as we face the real evils and troubles of this world. But we have a big God who is not afraid to walk the hard, dark, or narrow roads of life with us in Jesus until our salvation is complete.  Having witnessed that long, faithful work of God again across the last 146 psalms, psalm 147 reminds us that praise is the fitting final word to place on our lips.  Thank you God for who you are and for all you have done for us!  

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