For Your Glory
Praise the Lord
Praise the Lord, O my soul
O Lord my God, You are very great/You are clothed with splendor and majesty/You ride on wings of the winds You generate/Your Spirit alive in the water, wind, and flame/O my soul, praise, the One who wrapped the earth in His rain/Whose thunder makes for a brighter day/May the glory of the Lord endure forevermore/May the Father and the Son rejoice in what they’ve done/To reverse the curse of Adam for all who long to be reborn/From the dust of a new creation, we rise up and praise the Lord/O Lord my God, You created all/Everything we see, every creature large and small/Not one has a need You don’t already know/And the power to meet each need is Yours alone/O my soul, praise, the One who gives and takes away/Who hides His face to renew His grace/May the glory of the Lord endure forevermore/May the Father and the Son rejoice in what they’ve done/To reverse the curse of Adam for all who long to be reborn/From the dust of a new creation, we rise up and praise the Lord
O Lord, how many are Your works in all the heavens and the earth/The donkeys drink while the songbirds sing and Leviathan frolics in the sea/You, O Lord, sustain the hearts of men through gifts of oil, wine, and bread/And though sinners vanish in the end – this is for Your glory!/It’s all for Your glory!
Wowzers…I’ve been MIA on the blog here, friends. But, for good reason. Those of you who know me personally know that I was married in May and am moving states here at the end of the summer. It was pretty impossible to work full time, invest in a relationship more beautifully time consuming than one with any other human, write and produce music, and keep up a blog. So, the blog definitely fell off the radar for a while, as did writing music for a few months. But, I give you all of that to say: I’M BACK. And, those details play into the start of this song!
This song is from Psalm 104 – a beautiful Psalm of praise, which, at the beginning, struck me as a creation Psalm. It has imagery of God’s providence for all creatures and His establishment of the earth on its foundations. A good friend threw this Psalm out there for me to write about. It’s so cool I couldn’t deny the request, but it is the most difficult song I had to write for the record. It took me over a year.
When the Holy Spirit had given me a first verse and was committed to try to write it, but was extremely stuck, I asked a good friend to do homiletics on the passage and talk through it together (side note: if you don’t know what homiletics are, they are cool and you can ask me). That good friend happened to be the same good friend who had helped me with Psalm 19 the prior summer, who also happened to ask me on a date that day. And now he’s my husband. His name is Nathan, and he’s pretty great :). Not “very great” though – that’s reserved for God and Psalm 104 talks all about that. But, I digress.
Nathan brought to my attention that he didn’t think this Psalm was about creation, but about the flood. It talks about the earth being formed and the earth being set on foundations and THEN in verse 6: “You covered it with the deep as the a garment.” So, then, this seemed like it was more like a “recreation” Psalm rather than a creation Psalm. And because of the words in the psalm that say “you set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth” (doesn’t that sound like the flood?!?) – the pre-choruses finally had the space to take shape. “Oh my soul, praise, the One who wrapped the earth in His rain, whose thunder makes for a brighter day!” So, we see in Genesis 6, the earth is so corrupted that the Lord chooses judgement of the whole earth by floodwaters and preserves Noah and his family. Only through this judgement did the world become new.
Without this view, the verses at the end of the Psalm seem out of place. Verse 34-35 say “May my meditation be pleasing to him as I rejoice in the Lord, but may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more. Praise the Lord, O my soul.” But, when we see in them in the light of God’s judgement bringing about a restored creation – they make sense! And, the greatest fulfillment of this will be at the end of time when God fully judges the earth and the heavens and the earth pass away entirely, and He makes a new heavens and a new earth. With that in mind, how easy is it to see Jesus as the fulfillment of this Psalm?
If you still aren’t convinced, here are some other noteworthy verses from the Psalm: “All creatures look to You to give them their food at the proper time. When You give it to them, they gather it up; when You open Your hand, they are satisfied with good things. When You hide Your face, they are terrified; when You take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. When You send Your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth – May the glory of the Lord endure forever!” This too points not to creation, though our God is Creator, but to recreation. When He sends His Spirit, we are renewed. Wow. And, living on this side of the cross, we know that new life only happens through faith in Jesus – and His Spirit that renews us and gives us life comes to those who confess their sins and Jesus as Lord. So, the chorus was born: May the glory of the Lord endure forevermore/May the Father and the Son rejoice in what they’ve done/To reverse the curse of Adam for all who long to be reborn/From the dust of a new creation, we rise up and praise the Lord.
That is most of what I have to say – you’ll just have to listen for yourself, but one other tiny fun spot – much to my friend Haley’s rejoicing (she is the one who asked me to write the song), Leviathan got name dropped in the bridge 🙂
Can’t wait to share all these Psalm songs with you soon, friends!!