1 Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name.
2 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits:
3 Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases;
4 Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies;
5 Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle's.
6 The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed.
7 He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel.
8 The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.
9 He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger for ever.
10 He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.
11 For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.
12 As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.
13 Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.
14 For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.
15 As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
16 For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
17 But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's children;
18 To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them.
19 The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens; and his kingdom ruleth over all.
20 Bless the Lord, ye his angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word.
21 Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure.
22 Bless the Lord, all his works in all places of his dominion: bless the Lord, O my soul.
Introduction
Someone has said, “I care not who writes the laws of the land, so long as I can write the songs.” If you want to understand a nation or a generation, you should study its music. We can learn much from the sports, the amusements, the laws, and the humor of a nation. But to discover the heart and soul of the people, to understand their deep feelings and most cherished aspirations, you need to know their songs.
The book of Psalms is the hymnbook of Israel. In it, more than anywhere else in the Old Testament, we find the heart of Israel. In this collection of hymns Psalm 103 stands like a towering mountain peak above the rest.
It is a hymn of thankful praise to the God of all grace. In its own way, it is perfect, unapproachable. You could not alter it except to mar it. It is a work of supreme devotional art by a religious genius and must take a place with the great anthems of the ages. It is one of the beautiful and special treasures of the Old Testament.
Within this psalm there is no prayer, no supplication, and no word of complaint. It is all the purest of praise.
The psalm divides itself into four logical parts. The first division, verses 1-5, is an expression of praise to God for his personal blessings. Praise does not spring up like a root out of dry ground. It grows out of our knowledge of an experience with God. This hymn grows out of one person’s deep sense of gratitude to God who had forgiven him of his sins and delivered him from a sickness that threatened his very life. He had gone to the grave and then was brought back to health. Some of you know what that means.
He begins, “Bless [praise] the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me [my entire being, all my insides or inward parts], bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.”
What are the benefits the psalmist is talking about? They can be seen in the five verbs of the next three verses: forgiveth, healeth, redeemeth, crowneth, and satisfieth.
He is praising God who “forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” The size, strength, and comparative longevity of eagles explains the simile.
Second, he praises God for his eternal grace (unending, everlasting grace that led to those blessings). His personal experience quickens his historical imagination. In a moment of truth he moves from his own deliverance to that of his people. He is back in the days of Moses. He remembers the Exodus, the long journey through the wilderness, the entrance into the Promised Land and sees behind it all the loving hand of God. The opening and closing verses of this section (verses 6-19) stress the universality of the Lord’s benevolence (verse 6) and rule (verse 19), and he sees what God did through Moses and to Israel as typical of the way he treats people. Both the revelation through Moses and the whole of the history of Israel itself were exhibitions of God’s grace to the whole world.
Through Moses he made known his steadfast love to all people. They are an example, a testimony of his power and grace to all people. There is scarcely any other passage in the Old Testament that presents the fact that God is love as well as this.
Israel is an exhibition, an expression, an example of God’s love. He shows justice and righteousness to all who are oppressed and Israel is Exhibit A. Israel had sinned but the Lord was merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and full of mercy. He is compassionate, reluctant to anger, and overflowing with unchanging love. He doesn’t hold grudges. His loving kindness is seen in his slowness to anger (verse 8), his quickness to forgive (verse 9), and his not punishing them according to their deserts (verse 10).
Then there follow three of the most beautiful examples of God’s love found anywhere.
He says, “For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.” The psalmist had no idea how high the heavens are above the earth. He could only look up into the sky with his naked eye and know that it was an immeasurable distance. He knew that the vastness of space could not contain God’s mercy.
We know so much more about that vastness than he did. We know that the farthest object that we can see in the universe is perhaps 13 billion light-years away. Light travels at a speed of 186,000 miles per second. To know how far 13 billion light-years is, you would have to multiply 186,000 by 60 seconds in a minute. Then multiply that by 60 minutes in an hour. Then multiply that by 24 hours in a day. Then multiply that by 365 days in a year, then multiply that by 13 billion. That’s how far the farthest object we can see in the universe is.
Imagine that the thickness of this page represents the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles, or about eight light-minutes). Then the distance to the nearest star (four and one-third light-years) is a 71-foot-high sheaf of paper. And the diameter of our own galaxy (100,000 light-years) is a 310-mile stack, while the edge of the known universe is not reached until the pile of paper is 40 million miles high—more than a third of the way to the sun!
How vast, how immeasurable is the mercy of God!
Next, he says, “As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.” Though the psalmist did not know how far the heavens are above the earth, neither did he know how far the east was from the west. His world ended at the Strait of Gibraltar. He believed that beyond that point was the end of the world. To travel beyond that point was the drop off into nothingness. Today we know that the circumference of Earth is 24,901 miles. But that does not measure how far the east is from the west.
What does God promise to do with our sins? He has promised to remove our sins as far as the east is from the west.
Don’t miss the greatness of this promise. He does not promise to remove our sins as far as the north from the south, but as far as the east is from the west. The reason for expressing the promise this way is: there is a limit to the northerly and the southerly directions. There is a North Pole and there is a South Pole. If you travel north far enough you will eventually reach the North Pole. Once you have reached the North Pole and go beyond it, you are then traveling south. If you keep traveling south, you will eventually reach the South Pole. Once you have reached it, and go beyond it, you are then traveling north again. So there is a limit to how far you can travel to the north or to the south. But there is no limit to the east or to the west. You can begin traveling in an easterly direction and never come to the end of it. You can travel in a westerly direction ad infinitum.
Then the psalmist says, “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.” Though we may not understand how high the heavens are above the earth, or how far the east is from the west, we do understand a father’s love. While we may not understand it perfectly until we see it in Jesus Christ and hear the story of the prodigal son, we are introduced to it here. God loves us like a father loves his children.
The extent of God’s love is even more remarkable in the light of the fact that God knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust. We are like the grass that grows and withers, like the field that blossoms and fades. In time we are gone as though we have never been. But his love is not the fact that our days are all numbered like the field, for against the temporality of man, he places the eternity of God. He knows we are frail but he bestows fatherly love on us in our weakness. We are ass dust, grass, and flowers. The fatherly love of God to his people is shown to generation after generation. We come and go but his love is constant. His forgiveness and love for such insignificant creatures as men must lead to universal adoration.
Then in verse 19 we have the third division of this psalm. He sees this God who has helped him personally and who loves the whole world as the God who reins over all the universe. God’s dominion over everything. His throne firmly fixed above and over all makes his personal interest in us and his love and mercy toward us even more remarkable and deserving of praise.
The psalm closes with a universal summons for praise (verses 20- 22). He calls on the angels, the ministering servants of God, and all the created works of God in all places to join with him in a mighty chorus of praise to God. He includes all creatures, all places and all things.
We sometimes sing:
Praise God from all blessings flow;
Praise him, all creatures here below;
Praise him above, ye heavenly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
That’s what this psalm is—a great doxology to God.
But what are his benefits to you and me? What do we have to praise God for? Here is a picture of the full measure of God’s love: he accepts men as they are and loves them with a love that is not related to what they do. That brings all his benefits to us.
What are these benefits?
1. Full forgiveness. The first benefit for which we ought to praise God is the full forgiveness of our sins. This whole passage is shot through and through with that great truth. The Lord forgives all of our iniquities. He has not dealt with us according to our sins. And as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
These verses show how completely he has dealt with our sins. With the forgiveness of sins comes a deliverance from guilt and a sense of peace that many do not know. If the world could grasp this truth and enter into God’s forgiveness, it would do more for the health and healing of the souls of men than any other thing that could be done.
One of our men sent me some sermon notes made by his little daughter several years ago. She must have been seven or eight at the time. The sermon was entitled, “How to Be a Christian.” One of the steps she listed was “Throw away your sins.” She probably got that idea from what Corrie Ten Boom, who said we should throw our sins into the middle of the sea and put up a sign, “No Fishing.”
Technically, we cannot throw away our sins. But the Lord can. He has promised in Micah 7:19 to cast our sins into the depths of the sea. The deepest point in the ocean is the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. There the ocean is 36,070 feet deep. That’s almost seven miles. It is equivalent to 25 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of one another.
The highest point on the earth is Mount Everest in Nepal. It is 29,029 feet high. This means that the deepest point of the ocean goes farther into the heart of the earth than the highest mountain reaches into the sky. That’s an inkling of how far the Lord cast our sins from us when he forgives them.
Peter emphasizes the same truth when he says, “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19). The word blot means “to erase.” In ancient days paper was so rare and expensive that it was used again and again. And the ink of that day had no acid in it, so it didn’t bite into the paper. It just lay on the page and dried. To erase it and make the paper useable again, one needed only to take a damp sponge and wipe across the page. Thus every trace of dried ink could be removed and the paper was as good as new again. The word blotted describes the process of erasing. That’s what God promises to do with our sins.
When you begin to think of praising the Lord, don’t forget this benefit—the full forgiveness of sin.
2. Constant companionship. I once called Marietta Crowder’s mother to express my sympathy at the loss of her son. Years ago, her husband had died. Just a few weeks before her sister had died. Three days earlier she had buried a son in Dallas. Another son was dying with cancer in North Carolina. I said to her, “You have really had a hard time lately, haven’t you?”
I was trying to comfort her in her sorrow. Instead she preached to the preacher. She said, “Yes, but we have such a great companion with us to hold our hand, don’t we?”
A companion to hold our hand—we all need that. As Sam Shumaker said, “Everybody has a problem, is a problem, or lives with a problem.” In the problems of life, we need a great companion to hold our hand. That’s one of the benefits from our Lord. David had that companion when he walked through the valley of the shadow of death. The three Hebrew children sensed the presence of the companion holding their hand when they were cast into the fiery furnace. The apostle Paul said concerning his first appearance before the tribunal of Caesar that nobody stood with him, all of his friends forsook him. Then he adds, “Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me … and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion” (2 Timothy 4:17). Jesus spoke of that companion when he said, “And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever” (John 14:16).
God is committed to watching over us, but he is not overly protective because he does not want to smother our spiritual growth. He does not save us from these experiences but he comes to be by our side in them.
Paul speaks of the Lord as “the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3). The Greek word for comfort is “parakleo.” It means “to call alongside of.” It describes that companion we all need.
We do not know what will happen to us in the future. But one thing we know won’t happen. We won’t ever walk alone. We will always have a great companion to walk with us and to hold our hand. That’s one of the benefits of following him.
3. The hope of heaven. The third benefit that comes to all of us is the hope of heaven when we die. But I can hear someone say, “Don’t talk to me about pie in the sky by and by. I’m interested in a chicken in the kitchen tonight.” That’s a part of the “instantism” that is so prevalent in our world today.
We had better be interested in the life to come. Whatever path we take in life ultimately leads to the grave. Whether a man dies in the community where he was born or whether he sets foot on the moon, makes little difference as far as the end is concerned. The grave awaits all of us. Medical science may prolong our life, and even improve the quality of our life, but ultimately the doctor always fails—each patient he has will die.
This psalmist reminds us that God knows our weakness and frailty: “He remembereth that we are dust.” It would help if we remembered that. It would save us from expecting perfection out of ourselves. It would deliver us from driving ourselves unmercifully as though we would live forever. It would save us from anchoring ourselves too much to this world.
We are as dust. Our days are as the grass. We are like flowers, daises of the field. The wind whispers over it and it no longer is there. Its very location is no longer discernable.
When we know the Lord and share in his benefits, death holds no fear for us. Shortly before his death, I spoke with Dr. Morris Ford, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Longview. He had lived a long and fruitful life in God’s service. Now he was at the end of life. He said to me, “Death is the least of my worries. It will be the greatest event of my life.” When I shared his comments with a mutual friend, the friend said, “Morris is in the hope stage of life. Meeting the Lord is very near and very precious to him.”
Anybody who knows the Lord as Savior can face death that same way.
Do you know these benefits in your life? I hope you do and I hope you can praise the Lord for them.