Bible Commentaries
Psalms 147

Verses 1-20

This psalm, like the preseding, is without title in the Hebrew or Chaldee; but is ascribed by the Versions to Haggai and Zechariah.

REFLECTIONS.

The people are here exhorted to praise God for all that he had done for Israel; the duty is pleasant to the grateful heart, and the sacrifice is comely in the eyes of God. He recalled the exiles of Israel to inheritance, to wealth, and to the service of his sanctuary. In this view, sinners owe much to redeeming love. God has made us a people who were aliens, and far from righteousness, and has given us an inheritance among all them that are sanctified.

They are called to praise him because of his perfections, and the wonders of his works. He telleth the number of the stars. At his fiat, ten thousand thousand suns shone forth, the image of his glory. Each became the centre of a sphere, surrounded with satellites or habitable worlds, to reflect the lustre, and to glorify the Creator in an eternal concert of praise. All these rolled off in orbits, balanced by gravity; and the harmony of all the spheres demonstrates the infinite perfections of the eternal God. And if he numbers the stars, and regulates their motions, he numbers his saints with more peculiar care, for they bear his image, and shall shine as the brightness of the firmament, and as the stars for ever and ever.

Jerusalem is exhorted to praise the Lord, for what, in a national view, he has done for her and her children. He had strengthened her gates, filled her granaries with wheat, had sent snow to give repose to nature in winter, and then melted it with the warm zephyrs of the spring. So will the Lord supply the soul with good, and warm the affections after cold with comfort.

Israel is next reminded of what she owed to God for revelation. She did not walk in the darkness and vanity of the gentile world. She had not to grope her way to truth and righteousness, as in the darkness of men alienated from the covenant. The Lord had given her statutes and judgments, pure and uncorrupted; whereas the heathen had but the fragments of Noah’s covenant, and these were varied in every nation, according to the humour of the people. What then shall the christian church render to God, who in these last days has spoken to us by his own Son.