A PEOPLE OF PRAISE

Psalm 134 is the last of the fifteen songs of ascents (see 24 January). The ascent songs that began in distant, hostile Meshek and Kedar2 end, fittingly, in Jerusalem, the pilgrims’ longed-for destination. The psalmist commences with a call to ‘Praise the Lord’ (v 1) and concludes with a blessing (v 3).

The ‘servants’ who ‘minister by night in the house of the Lord’ (v 1) are probably the priests and Levites on night duty in the temple – tending the altar fire and keeping the sanctuary lamps burning through the night.3 To ‘stand every morning to thank and praise the Lord … [and] do the same in the evening’4 was also a specific duty assigned to the Levites. In the Old Testament, the same Hebrew word (abad) is used both for worship and service. Thus, praise is not confined to the lifting up of hands in the sanctuary (v 2) but extends also to the offering up of all areas of our lives as ‘a living sacrifice’.5 In God’s eyes, the sacred-secular divide simply doesn’t exist. As Paul urges, in 1 Corinthians 10:31, ‘So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.’

Praise is not the special preserve of priests, however. These ‘servants’ may also have included pilgrims keeping a Passover night vigil as a way of honoring the Lord who ‘kept vigil that night to bring them out of Egypt’,6 to make them His own people. Our redemption as God’s people is ‘to the praise of his glory’.7 Once all other aspects of its earthly mission are accomplished, the church will live on, for it exists for the ‘praise of His glory’. We are a people of praise. Our praise will never cease or diminish; rather, it will be purified and magnified!

‘When we’ve been there ten thousand years … we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, / than when we’d first begun.’8 Start rehearsing!