¹Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name.

Spiritual growth comes through knowing God and learning to praise Him. Lest we become redundant or vainly repetitious in our worship and praise with minimal vocabulary, we find language in the Psalms that stimulates our souls to greater expression and appreciation for the Lord and what He has done for us. If our task, as Jesus taught, is to “know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (John 17:3), then Psalm 103 rises to the upper echelon of a deeply profound knowledge of God.

What we read in this psalm is brought into laser-like focus as we contemplate the cross of Christ. Reciprocally, the crucifixion explains more clearly what we generally learn about God in the OT, and the OT helps us understand how God reveals Himself in and through the crucifixion. In Christ’s death, we see in clarity and more precise detail the wonderful fulfillment of the character of God. Everything written leads up to the pivotal point of supremely and magnificently displaying the Lord’s character and His movement toward us. A passage like Psalm 103 helps us to see God’s character with a view toward the cross.

The knowledge of God leads (or at least it should lead) to worshipping Him. This psalm is bookended with calls to bless the Lord (vss. 1-2 and 21-22). The psalmist poetically calls out to himself three times, and twice, he calls out to creation to do the same. What does it mean for a mere human to bless the Creator God of the universe? To emanate those words from a sincere heart is first to remind ourselves that we exist for God’s benefit. To be sure, His blessing of us has tremendous benefits, as we will see shortly, but these are penultimate when we align our lives to benefit Him. And we do that by knowing Him, praising Him, and making Him known in all we do and say. In other words, we bless Him when we are God-centered. My life is ultimately not about me!

This psalm is all about God, so what does it teach us about Him? Contemplate this list of benefits that leads us to worship and bless Him:

• • 3a – He pardons our sins – Jesus became our sacrifice (Heb. 10:12)
  • 3b – He heals our diseases –Jesus overcame the world in all its fallenness, which will be fully realized at His return (John 16:33)
  • 4a – He redeems our lives – Jesus neutralized the condemnation of the Law against us (Gal. 3:13)
  • 4b – He crowns us with lovingkindness and compassion – In Christ, we are God’s trophies of love (John 3:16, Rom. 5:8)
  • 5a – He satisfies us with good things –Jesus satisfies our spiritual hunger and thirst (John 6:35)
  • 5b – He renews our youth like an eagle (see Isaiah 40:31) – in Christ, we have become new creatures, the old things pass away (2 Cor. 5:17)
  • 6a – His deeds are all righteous – His greatest work of righteousness is found in Jesus who justifies the ungodly (2 Cor 5:21, Rom. 3:21)
  • 6b – He defends those who are oppressed – the cross is God’s solution to the injustices of societal stratification by creating a leveling field, a beautiful picture of even those of the lowest stature in life being accepted by God (Isa. 40:4-5, Rom 6:23).

Isn’t our God amazing? As we meditate on these benefits, do not our hearts respond by seeking God’s benefit? He is blessed when our thoughts turn to Him, the giver of all these benefits.

The knowledge of our Lord’s deeds leads us to knowing Him in His character. Verse 8 extolls four aspects of the kind of supreme deity we believe in:

• • He is compassionate
  • He is gracious
  • He is slow to anger
  • He is abounding in lovingkindness.

The rest of the psalm builds on this knowledge of God. As degradingly low as our sin is, His lovingkindness highly exceeds and overwhelms it (vs. 11). Using human perspective to convey an eternal truth, we relish the truth of verse 12: “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.” When we understand David’s background of sin with Uriah and Bathsheba, we accelerate our appreciation of God’s greatness. Without diminishing the wrongness of David’s sin, we see the NT truth, “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rom. 5:20b).

While the Lord doesn’t wipe out the memory of David’s sin, this godly man is an exemplar of one who “fears the Lord” through obedience and loyalty to God. His sin did not terminate his relationship with God! That is why he could write verse 12. David never worshipped idols! That is the key. Even in his sin, David did not abandon loyalty to God but abjectly confessed his sin before the Lord (see Psalm 51, 32).

This psalm could only be written by someone completely overwhelmed with God’s vast and impressive love toward him. Believers everywhere will never cease praising God as we contemplate all He has done for us in showing grace upon us. An Irishman’s expressiveness captures the thrust of this psalm, “The Lord Jesus has forgiven me all my sins, and He’s never going to hear the end of it.” (BBC). Is it any wonder why the apostle Paul prayed:

“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.” (Eph 3:14–19)