Psalm 148: Fully alive

By Tyler Tankersley

When you hear the word "worship," what comes to mind? Most church people will likely automatically think of musical worship or perhaps they may think of a worship service. Some of you might be experiencing some PTSD at remembering the "Worship Wars" that gripped churches in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Psalm 148 is a song about the worship of God. It teaches us that worship is about more than just music. Psalm 148 is a call for the whole cosmos to worship God.

The psalmist begins by calling upon the beings of the heavenly realm to worship God (v. 1-6). Angels and heavenly hosts are told to praise the goodness of God. The sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky are then commanded to worship God.

The surrounding ancient cultures worshipped the sun, moon and stars are separate gods. Like the writer of Genesis, Psalm 148 declares that these orbs are not separate gods but exist to glorify the one true God.

Then the psalmist moves from the heavenly realm to the earthly realm (v. 7-14) and continues to call for all beings to worship God. We are told that hail, snow, mountains, trees, and all animals are declaring praises to their Creator. Then, human beings are given the same instructions as the natural world: Worship God.

Which begs the question: How exactly does a mountain worship God? They don't physically sing or use emotional language to praise God. Instead, a mountain worships God by being a mountain. How do stars worship God? By being stars. The writer of Psalm 148 is not calling upon nature to do something out of the ordinary; the writer of Psalm 148 is daring to declare that the cosmos sings out worship to God by its very being.

St. Irenaeus said, "The glory of God is a human fully alive." Just like the mountains and the stars, humans worship God by being humans. Being fully alive in the Bible is about recognizing that God's will for our lives is for us to pursue our identity in the love and holiness of God. While musical worship is a wonderful starting place, the true worship of God is when we are a human being fully alive and pursuing God's will for our lives.

In the 13th century, St. Francis of Assisi wrote a hymn called "The Song of Brother Sun." The words were adapted into our modern hymn "All Creatures of Our God and King." Francis based the words on Psalm 148 and the song captures that all of creation worships God by being fully alive:

Let all things their Creator bless, / And worship him in humbleness, / O praise Him! Alleluia! / Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son, / And praise the Spirit, Three in One! / O praise Him! O praise Him! / Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!