Praise the LORD.
Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty heavens.
Praise him for his acts of power;
praise him for his surpassing greatness.
Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,
praise him with the harp and lyre,
praise him with tambourine and dancing,
praise him with the strings and flute,
praise him with the clash of cymbals,
praise him with resounding cymbals.
Let everything that has breath praise the LORD.
Praise the LORD.
Initial Thoughts:
Is it significant that the last of the Psalms, which contain every human emotion including anger and sadness, is a psalm of praise? It is a sort of doxology, not just to this section of the psalms, but to the whole book. interestingly the Hebrew name for the book of Psalms is "tehillim" - praises.
There is a note of hope here, for those of us stuck in the harder ground of the psalms of sorrow anger or lament. As Eugene Peterson comments, the promise is that Prayer leads to praise: "This is not a 'word of praise' slapped onto whatever mess we are in at the moment. This crafted
conclusion of the Psalms tells us that our prayers are going to end in praise, but that it is also going to take awhile. Don't rush it. It may take years, decades even, before certain prayers arrive at the hallelujahs....Not every prayer is capped off with praise. In fact most prayers, if the Psalter is a true guide, are not. But prayer, a praying life, finally becomes praise. Prayer is always reaching towards praise and will finally arrive there. If we persist in prayer, laugh and cry, doubt and believe, struggle and dance and then struggle again, we will surely end up at Psalm 150, on our feet, applauding, "Encore! Encore!" (Eugene Peterson, Answering God: The Psalms as Tools for Prayer (Harper & Row, 1989), 127)
