The Glorious God Who Stoops to Save

This sermon explores Psalm 113, highlighting God’s infinite glory and transcendence, yet also His profound humility and imminence in stooping down to redeem and uplift humanity.

Transcript

The Call to Worship and God’s Worthiness

On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand.

We have been talking about worshipping God for the past few weeks. Even through the Christmas time, when we were talking about God, the Lord Jesus coming, a great deal of the focus has been on the nature of God, His glory. God is a glorious God and He is worthy of our worship. We have been thinking about God’s worth, and He is worthy of our worship. As we began to talk about worship, as worship is used in the Bible, it is used in two ways:

1. It is used to talk about our overall life, all of life. We are to worship God in all of life with every activity. When the prophet Jonah was when God brought about that storm on the sea and the prophet Jonah was identifying himself to the other sailors, he says, “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.” He is talking about his whole manner of life. He is the worshipper of Yahweh.
2. In contrast to those words, Psalm 102 says, “Worship the Lord with gladness. Come before Him with joyful songs.” These are the things that we are doing this morning: coming together to praise God, to call attention to the glory of God, and to remind ourselves of who He is, worshipping God in that way, to give Him thanks and praise.

This morning we are coming to a Psalm of praise. We are going to look at Psalm 113. You may turn to that passage and follow along as we read. This is a Psalm of praise. It is one of the Psalms that, in all likelihood, the Lord Jesus sang with His disciples as they celebrated the Passover meal together. You remember the Gospels say that when they went out, they sang a hymn. In the traditions of Passover, they would sing these Psalms, Psalm 113 through 118. Some they would sing just before the Passover meal and some just after, because these are Psalms of praise. Psalm 113 was sung at most of the Jewish festivals. It is a hymn of praise to God. This group of Psalms is called the Egyptian Hallel Psalms. The word Hallel means praise. If you notice in verse 1, it says, “Praise the Lord.” In Hebrew, that’s a single word, that’s Hallelujah. Hallelujah. You notice how the Psalm ends, Hallelujah. We sang a hymn this morning that was Hallelujah. It’s the same word in English, just brought over to English. The first part, the Hallel part, is to praise. And the Yah part is the name of God. We are to praise Him, praise His name. So this is this beautiful hymn, this beautiful Psalm, one of God’s hymns for us. We are going to look at this morning and meditate on why we are to praise God, why are we to praise Him? And pay some attention to the commandment for us to praise Him.

So please follow along in your Bible as we read Psalm 113. This is God’s holy word.

Praise the Lord! Praise, O servants of the Lord, praise the name of the Lord! Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forever. From the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised. The Lord is high above all nations; His glory above the heavens. Who is like the Lord our God, who is enthroned on high, who humbles Himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in earth? He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes, with the princes of His people. He makes the barren woman abide in the house as a joyful mother of children. Praise the Lord!

Let’s ask God to bless the reading of His word as we think about and meditate on these words this morning.

Worshipping God is about value. We have made that point before over the past few weeks. The word glory, one of the Old Testament words translated glory in our Bible, is the Hebrew word Kavod, which means weighty, significant, or valuable. God is precious and valuable. When we worship, we are crediting value. Everyone, Christian or not, everyone in this world worships. We are created to worship, and you cannot help it. There are things that you value more than anything else. That thing you value more than anything else is what you worship. It may be the things you have. Some people value their wealth. Some people value the pursuit of wealth. A young person may have a dream of what he wants to do in life or to achieve, and that becomes an overwhelming thing to him. That dream could be the thing he values more than anything else. Those things you value more than anything else are what you are worshipping. This passage, among many in God’s word, is teaching us, instructing us that the most valuable thing, the most valuable person to worship is God Himself. There is nothing that compares with Him, nothing. God alone is worthy of our worship.

Understanding God’s Name and Nature

This Psalm begins with the command for us to praise. We are to praise the Lord. “Praise the Lord. Praise, O servants of the Lord. Praise the name of the Lord.” The instruction here is to the servants of the Lord. This passage is addressing those people who belong to the Lord, who have been purchased. In our case, as Christians today, you can see it very clearly from the New Testament perspective. We have been purchased by the Lord Jesus Himself, who paid for us, redeeming us from a place of sin, from the kingdom of darkness. We become His. If you are not a servant of the Lord, then you do not belong to Him. We belong to the Lord Jesus. We are His servants. That’s a New Testament truth that is indisputable. No matter who you are, if you are truly a Christian, then you are a slave, a servant of God. There is no greater honor in this world than to be a servant of Christ. You might remember how the Apostle James begins his epistle. It’s an interesting thing because James was an earthly brother of the Lord. He was one of the Lord Jesus’s half-brothers. He grew up in the same house that the Lord Jesus grew up. He ate the same food. He may even have slept in the same bed. He knew Jesus as a brother all his life. In the early church, James was one of the leaders of the early church. He carried a great deal of authority. Nobody could point to any negative thing about James. He was the primary leader of the church in Jerusalem. How does he begin his letter? He begins the letter, “James, a bondslave, James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.” It tells you who Jesus is by someone who knows. He is the Lord who is worthy of all of our service, of all of our worship. So this passage is addressing the servants of the Lord and instructing us what we are to do. We are to praise Him. We are to give honor to His name. Verse 2 calls attention to the name of the Lord. Verses 1 and 2, the word name is repeated several times. “Praise the name of the Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth, from the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the Lord is to be praised.” It calls our attention to the name of God, to His name. The very first word is, “Praise the Lord.”

When you see the word Lord in all caps, three times in this passage it mentions the word name. But look how many times the actual name of God is mentioned. If you look in your Bible, if it’s like mine, if you see the word Lord in caps and small caps, they distinguish it that way to let you know that it is the name that is there. When the Jews would come across the name Yahweh, we sometimes say Jehovah, the same word describing the same thing, the same name of God, praise Yahweh, praise Yahweh. When the name is mentioned, they would say Adonai, which means Lord. So it’s translated as Lord in our Bibles. But when it is the actual name and not the word Lord, they put it in capital letters so that we know. Look how many times it shows up this way in this Psalm: in verse 1, in verse 2, in verse 3, in verse 4, and in verse 5. It’s over and over again, the very name of God is in this Psalm. It’s calling attention to the name. Why is it calling attention to the name of God? We need to think about the name of God. The word Yahweh itself, what does it mean? It’s something of a question because it’s difficult to understand exactly the meaning of the name. As I said a few moments ago, we may not even know exactly how to pronounce the name because the Jews did not pronounce it. When we say Yahweh, that is as far as we know today the most likely meaning. When we say Jehovah, that is probably not as correct. There is a good reason we say that. The letters Yahweh in English would be Y H W H. In Hebrew, you just get four consonants. It was not until the Middle Ages that they put the little vowels in. When the Masoretes in the Middle Ages put in the vowels for the name of Yahweh, they put the vowels in not for Yahweh, but for the word Adonai, because when they would come to that passage, it was a little reminder that we are not saying Yahweh, we are saying Adonai here. When you put the vowels for Adonai together with the word Yahweh, you get something like Jehovah. That is how we say that. It’s an English word for the name of God. It’s probably acceptable to God, but that is likely not the way it was originally pronounced. So people today say Yahweh, but you do not know exactly how the name was pronounced. It is a word where the letters form the verb of being in the Hebrew language. That is why in the Old Testament, God, when He first introduced Himself to Moses, says, “I am.” “Who is it that is sending you?” “I am” is sending you. The very name of God has to do with His existence, His being.

God’s Transcendent Glory

These are some of the things we need to learn about His name. The fact that He has a name and that He has revealed His name to Moses and to us means that He is a person. People have names. The idea of the personhood of God is indicated by the fact that He is named. He is not impersonal. He is not like a force. He is a personal God that we worship. The fact that He has called Himself is based on the idea of existence, being. It calls attention to the fact that God is eternally existent. He has no beginning. There is no end. God is eternally forever existent. That tells us a lot of things about God. It means that God is beyond what we can know in Himself. We cannot imagine. Is it difficult to imagine something going on forever and ever? We have eternity written in our hearts, it tells us in Ecclesiastes. We imagine and we expect an eternal future. Yet, because we are finite creatures, it is hard for us to comprehend something like eternity. God is eternal. He never changes. He is completely trustworthy because He never changes. The key verse in this Psalm is verse 5.

Who is like the Lord our God, who is enthroned on high?

Who is like the Lord our God, who is enthroned on high? The answer is, no one. No one is like the Lord our God. God is infinite and glorious. We cannot know exactly what He is like. Our minds cannot comprehend God in an ultimate sense. You cannot wrap your mind around God because God is far too great, too wonderful for us to be able to comprehend Him. We will never be able to do that. We are never going to fully know all there is about God. It will take eternity to come to an understanding of who God is because God is eternal. So He is greater than we can imagine. He is far greater than we can imagine. The only way that we can know anything about God is for Him to tell us about Himself. God is spirit. What can you know about a spirit? It is invisible. Unless the spirit communicates to you, you are not going to know the mind of the spirit. The only way that we can know something about God is for God to tell us, and He does that through His revelation, especially through His holy word. He tells us things about Himself. Even then, you cannot wrap your mind around Him completely. You cannot comprehend Him in any complete way. The language that the Bible uses represents God bending down to us, to our level, which is one of the themes of this Psalm as we read it.

When we start thinking about God and when we come to the Bible, and we ask ourselves, who is like God? The Bible describes God to us using figures of speech. The Bible takes something that we are familiar with and uses that to teach us something that is true about God, but that thing is not like God in any ultimate sense. For example, God is a Father. By that, we know that just like a father has compassion on his children, the verse in Psalm 103:13 says, “Like a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear Him.” God is like a father in that a father has compassion on his children, and God has compassion on us. We learn something about God by relating Him to an earthly father. Is an earthly father like God? Not in any ultimate sense. God is far beyond it. We cannot comprehend God completely because God transcends all of this. God is outside of all of this. When God created, take all of the universe, everything that is in this universe that God created, everything. All of the cosmos, everything that has been created by God. Think about all of that. God is not in it. He created it. If you think of all the stuff of the universe, think of it as a Venn diagram, a circle. This circle represents all the created things. God is out here. He is on the other side of that circle. He created it outside of Himself, and He is not part of it. Is it any wonder that we cannot completely comprehend Him? The Bible uses these figures of speech. We used one of them in a song a while ago, the solid rock. God is like a solid rock. That means that He is absolutely trustworthy. He is the foundation that we can trust. He will be there. In this uncertain world where all sorts of things are happening, God is a solid foundation. We can trust Him. Does it mean that God is a rock? Hardly. It is a figure of speech. God is a strong tower. He is a fortress, the Scripture says. All of those figures of speech teach us a truth about God. As we come to know these truths about God, it increases our trust and our knowledge of Him. We get to know Him better. But the knowledge of God is an infinite process. So we are learning these things about God. As we learn these things about God, when we truly learn them, it should stir our heart to worship and praise Him. That is what this Psalm is all about. This Psalm is about instructing us in who God is so that we recognize how glorious He is. He is our glorious God. Sometimes in the Scripture, we learn about God through the things that He has done. The passages call attention to something that God has done, the creation of the universe. We know that God is a mighty creator. He is infinitely powerful. We can get that from that. It also talks about God:

• interceding
• working miracles
• doing all sorts of glorious things

And that is to teach us truths about who God is. So He creates, He brings deliverance, He works miracles. But in all these things, He is transcendent.

God’s Humility and Redemptive Power

Look at verse 6. That calls attention to the fact that God is transcendent. “Who humbles Himself to behold the things that are in the heavens and the earth.” He humbles Himself. “Who humbles Himself to behold the things in the heavens and in the earth?” God humbles Himself to bend down to look at the heavens. The vastness of the stars, the infinite universe, its greatness is beyond our imagination. We cannot comprehend the universe. The distance between the stars is measured in light years and in thousands of light years. If you could travel at the speed of light, it would take you thousands of years to go from some stars. The nearest star to our sun is apparently four light years away. If you could travel at the speed of light, it would still take you four years to get to the closest one. There are vast numbers of stars and galaxies, thousands of galaxies and millions of stars in a galaxy. When God looks at that, He has to bend down. That is the idea. If you are thinking of God in a physical way, and this is an analogy, God has to bend down just to see the stars. He is far greater than anything that we can comprehend or imagine. God is glorious. He bends down even. He stoops low so that He can even see the heavens. You might remember in the book of Genesis in chapter 11, the nations getting together because they all spoke one language. They decide to build a tower to heaven. They are going to come together and do this great event. The Scripture says, God came down to see what was going on. He came down there just to see what they were doing. What are they up to down there? That is a figure. It is the idea that God is so great. He is beyond us in that way. God is glorious. He is absolutely wonderful. He is absolutely glorious. When we are thinking about God, we recognize that He is above all things. “The Lord is high above all the nations; His glory is above the heavens.” He is way above the nations. You might remember the passage in Isaiah where it explains to us that all of the nations of the world, which are powerful and great to us, you think about armies and conflict and wars and the power. Sometimes you have nations that put all their military on parade so that people can be impressed by the mighty power they have, or they send their jets over in a display of power. It tells us in the book of Isaiah that all the nations together are like dust on the scales to God. That dust is too insignificant. That is exactly what that passage means. The nations, the power of the nations in relation to God is absolutely insignificant. It is nothing to Him. God is that great. God is that glorious. He is that powerful. He is that wonderful. He is way beyond anything that we can possibly comprehend. He is more than we can ever imagine. He is the God who stoops, who humbles Himself to behold the things that are in the heavens and the earth. Why does He do that? Why does God humble Himself? He humbles Himself so that He can raise up the poor. He has pity on the needy person. He humbles Himself to lift them up. He humbles Himself to lift us up. That is the God that we worship. He is not just a glorious God, an infinite God. He is not just a transcendent God. He is not just immense. That is the old word that theologians used to use years ago. The immensity of God, they used to say. It is talking about the fact that God is so incredibly big. He is infinitely big. Yet, He is not just immense in that way. He is also imminent. He is right here. He bends down to us. He comes down to us in order to raise us up. That is the story. This Psalm was one of the Psalms in the series of Psalms that expresses praise to God because of God’s deliverance. In Psalms 113 to 118, you can see how Psalm 113 is praise to the Lord. Psalm 115 talks about praise to the Lord. Psalm 116, all these Psalms are praising God. Psalm 117, “Praise the Lord, all nations. Laud Him, all peoples.” It is calling attention to the universal worship of God. That is part of Psalm 113.

The Universal and Personal Impact of God’s Grace

“Praise, O servants of the Lord. Praise the name of the Lord. Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and forever, from the rising of the sun to its setting.” That is saying that we are to be praising this great and glorious God. We are to be doing it all the time. We cannot do it all the time, can we? We take time to sleep and we are distracted by all sorts of things. But the name of the Lord is to be praised from this time forth and forever. That means continually. And from where? From the rising of the sun to its setting. That means geographically. As a little church, we cannot do that. You cannot do that individually. As a little church, we cannot accomplish that very far, can we? Though we try. Justin is part of this church. He and his wife are celebrating and worshipping God two hours before we started. Next week, Jared will be in Africa, so probably six or seven hours before we are worshipping, he will be worshipping the Lord. You get the picture. If you take that and you start thinking about worshipping God, we have a wonderful church here, but the handful of people that we are all together is important to God. But God is praised through our brothers and sisters who belong to Jesus Christ worldwide. There is no place on earth right now where there is not a worshipper of God, a true saved individual of God. As the sun passes around this world, as that process continues to happen, there are those people of God who are praising God and worshipping God. We are part of that. We are to be part of that great worship of God. We are to be worshipping Him, and His praise is to be eternal, and it will be eternal forever and ever. So He is our glorious Lord. He is infinite and mighty and immense. Yet He comes down to us. He bends to come down to us. The reason that He does is to raise the poor from the dust, to lift the needy from the ash heap. The picture of that ultimately is what Jesus Christ has done for us. Christ is the one who humbled Himself to save sinners. When Mary wrote her Magnificat, she borrowed from this Psalm and from Hannah’s Psalm. She calls attention to the fact that her soul exalts in the Lord and her spirit rejoices in God my Savior. When Jesus Christ came into this world, remember Philippians 2, in the passage where it says, “Jesus Christ, who although He existed in the form of God, didn’t regard equality with God as a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant, being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. And for this reason also, God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him a name which is above every name.” That is God bending down, to the place of entering into this world as a man, and the ultimate slave and servant. He gives Himself over to death for you in order to lift us up. When it says here, “He raises the poor from the dust and He lifts the needy from the ash heap,” that is what He has done for us. He has lifted us up from the mire and the dirt of this world and brings us up and seats us with the King of Kings in the heavenly places. That is what Jesus Christ has done for us. That is who He is. If you understand this, how could you not worship Him? How could you not praise His name? Bring glory to Him. There is nothing more precious, more valuable, more glorious than this infinite God who stoops to save. As we do these things, as we come to know God, it stirs our heart to worship Him. We are to worship Him. It says, “He makes the barren woman abide in the house as a joyful mother of children.” Those lines you find from Hannah’s prayer. It is a powerful example in the culture of the day, when the barren woman was a person who had very little respect. God is able to bring deliverance as He did for Hannah, as He did for Sarah, as He did for Mary. God can bring about glorious blessing. It is a gift of God that makes these transformations. Makes the barren woman abide in the house as a joyful mother of children. I was reading this past week, I happened to stumble across an article by a lady who, more than 20 years ago, she was a college professor and she was a lesbian. She had a pastoral friend, a man who was a pastor, who invited her over to his house to have dinner with his wife and family. His children were there. She comes in and he is absolutely kind to her. She is overwhelmed by that because she did not expect that. She thought she was going to be there to be condemned. She had a butch haircut and a series of earrings in her right ear, which signified her identity. She was shocked that that was the response. She decided she wanted to know more about it. She began to attend worship with them. They were going to a Presbyterian church. That Presbyterian church would sing hymns like we do, but they also had a book called Psalms for Singing, which were out of the Psalms set to music. They sang this Psalm. She was so enthusiastic about this because she wants to get to know God and she is expecting God to accept her just as she is. She is singing this Psalm with great fervor. Then she gets down to this last phrase which says, “He makes the barren woman abide in the house and a joyful mother of children.” She thinks, “Oh my goodness.” That is chauvinism. It confronted her with the way she was thinking. This is probably the verse that brought her to the Lord. Is it not amazing how God can use some amazing verses to bring people to the Lord? Because it confronted her with the way she was thinking, and she realized, “Wait a minute. I am not measuring up to the way God thinks.” As a result, she came to the Lord. God changed her thinking. She married a man who became a pastor. They had children. She was the fulfillment of this very verse. It is a remarkable story, and it is true, and it has happened probably thousands of times. God reaches down and saves the individual person. He reaches down and saves the poor individual, raises him up to the Lord, to sit with princes, to sit with the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. He saves the downcast person, raises them up. This is the thing for all of us. Is your trust in this great God? Is your praise to this great God? Have you experienced that lifting up that only God can do through His bending down to us? Let me close with that and pray for us.

Closing Prayer