Praise the LORD. Praise the LORD, you his servants; praise the name of the LORD.
The psalmist implores us to not only praise the LORD but to praise his name. So what does it mean to praise God’s name?
Names and their meanings are important in the Bible. God changed Abram’s name, which means exalted father, to Abraham, which means father of a multitude. And Jesus gave Simon the name Cephas or Peter, meaning Rock. So what about God’s name? God is given many different names or titles in the Bible, but one stands above the others as the personal name of the God of the Israelites, revealed by God himself to Moses: the name written in Hebrew as YHWH, thought to have been pronounced Yahweh.
Whenever we see the word LORD all in capitals in our English Bibles, it means in the original Hebrew text it would have been the YHWH. It has traditionally been written as LORD because of a Jewish custom that began around the 3rd Century BC of not saying the name Yahweh out loud – and instead they started to say Adonai, meaning Lord – a tradition which continues in our English translations.
As if to emphasise God’s name even more, the original Hebrew of our psalm begins and ends with the phrase ‘Hallelu Yah’. (Apologies to anyone who speaks Hebrew, please forgive my clumsy language skills here…) ‘Hallelu’ is an exhortation for the congregation to praise (something like ‘praise you people’!) and ‘Yah’ is short for Yahweh. So Hallelujah isn’t just the joyful ‘yes!’ that I thought it was – it is so much more - a call to praise the personal covenant God of Israel, Yahweh - to praise him together as his covenant people – as the psalmist puts it, as his servants.
Praise Yahweh, you his servants; praise the name of Yahweh!
God first revealed his name as Yahweh to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus chapter 3. Yahweh means something like “I am” or “I will be”. God is the one who is, who was and forever will be. He has no beginning and no end, he never changes and he is eternally present – he alone is. So his name stands for who he is. And as the OT story continues God reveals more of his character by his words and his actions and so the meaning of his name becomes fuller and richer as we understand more and more of who God is.
In Exodus chapter 34 after God’s rescue of his people from Egypt, Moses goes up Mount Sinai and God passes by in a cloud proclaiming his name; “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”
So to praise the name of the LORD, to praise the name of Yahweh, is to praise God for who he is – his love, his compassion and his justice - his character as revealed to his people by his words and his actions.
As Christians we have an even fuller and deeper understanding of who God is, as revealed in the person of Jesus. And we see this most clearly at the cross, when Jesus showed us just how compassionate, gracious and abounding in love God is, when he willingly died in our place, taking the punishment we deserve, so that we might be saved and have eternal life with him forever. So for us, to praise the name of Yahweh is to praise God for the wonder of what he has done in saving us through Jesus.
The name Jesus itself also has a meaning. Jesus’s name in Hebrew was Yeshua, which is derived from the Hebrew for ‘Yahweh saves’. Which now wonderfully makes sense of the formally mysterious (or maybe it’s just me!) statement in Matthew chapter 1 when an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and said “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins’.
Back to psalm 113:
Our psalm today is the first in a collection of psalms 113-118 known as ‘The Hallel’, which was traditionally sung at Jewish festivals, including Passover. If like me you’ve ever wondered what the hymn was the Jesus and his disciples sang at the last supper (Matthew 26v30 & Mark 14v26), then this is probably it!
For the Jews the Hallel was a hymn of praise to Yahweh, celebrating his past deliverance and looking forward to the future when he would restore Jerusalem. This meant it was especially appropriate to sing at Passover when they looked back to the exodus when God redeemed his people from slavery in Egypt and brought them safely into the promised land.
We see in psalm 113 the author remembers that the Israelites are now God’s own people, the servants of Yahweh, not of Egypt (v1) and that they have been raised from being the lowest of the low, slaves, poor and needy, in the dust and ash (v7) to being like princes, settled in their own home with children around them, a new nation (v8-9). The psalmist marvels: who is like Yahweh, our God who sits enthroned on high (v5), and yet stoops down to notice even the lowest of the low, and lifts them up, rescuing them to make them his own people, settled in their own land (v7-9)?
Of course, this wasn’t the experience of the Jewish nation for long, and as the Jews sung the Hallel there must have been a strong sense of looking forward, longing for the ultimate fulfilment of God’s promises.
Imagine the disciples singing this psalm with Jesus, the night before he died on the cross - only Jesus fully understanding at the time how much more the words would mean to his disciples after his death and resurrection – and how much more they now mean to us as Christians. We may not feel much like princes at the moment, or like a childless woman who is now the happy mother of children – but through Jesus we now have a sure and certain hope for the future.
We can look forward with absolute certainty to a time when this psalm will be fully fulfilled and God’s name will be praised for evermore across the whole earth (v2-3). Who is like our God? He is exalted over all the nations, his glory above the heavens (v4) and yet he has stooped down to rescue us from the ash heap of sin and death (v7) and raised us up to be his own people, to one day live with him like princes forever (v8-9).
So praise the name Yahweh, you his servants, praise the name of Jesus, Hallelujah!
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