All your weakness and worries are enveloped in the unending strength and care God has for you. All of your guilt is swallowed up by remembering God’s great forgiveness in Christ. As we follow the command to praise God, we are actually the ones that benefit! All your problems are put into perspective when you remember that God in charge. As we praise God, our hearts focus on who he is and what he has done. Musicians grab an instrument and strum away to make beautiful music to God. When we praise God like the psalmist says, we remember his acts of power and his surpassing greatness. However, what if praising God is actually good for us? Take Psalm 150 again. He’s God, and he can get along pretty well without your praise. God does not need your approval in order to have self-esteem. God does not need you to tell him he did a good job. Is that the kind of praise God needs? No. He knows that I love him, and approve of the choice he just made.
Why? Does God need our praise? When my three-year-old son puts a banana peel in the garbage, just like I asked him to, I praise him! “Good job, son!” It’s important that I do that, so that he knows what he did was a good thing. In Hebrew, this psalm begins and ends with “alleluia!” And the psalmist is commanding: Praise the Lord, everybody! For what? For his acts of power, for his greatness. We can find “alleluia” in a place like Psalm 150:ģ Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,Ħ Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Allelu + ya, then, means “Praise the Lord!” Allelu is a command to a group of people: “Praise!” Ya is a shortened way to refer to the Lord. We get Alleluia from the Hebrew of the Old Testament. So what does it mean? As you listen to that Hallelujah Chorus in Handel’s Messiah, or as your classmate aces a test and as she’s running to give you a hug she screams, “Hallelujah! I got an A!” It surely is a good thing, but what does it mean? You should be ready to hear “Hallelujah” (alternatively spelled “alleluia”) fifty whole times. Get ready to hear the same word about fifty times in the same song. If you are someone who doesn’t like repetition, then as you hit “play” to listen to Handel’s Messiah, you better brace yourself. In 1741, an Englishman named George Frideric Handel composed a piece called Messiah.
0 kommentar(er)
