“BLESS THE LORD, O MY SOUL”

The Text, Psalm 103:1-22 (v. 1-2). Bless the Lord, O my soul; And all that is within me, bless His holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, And forget not all His benefits …

Lord, this is Your Word and these are Your words. Sanctify us by the truth. Your Word is truth. Heavenly Father, God of all grace, govern our hearts that we may never forget Your benefits but steadfastly thank and praise You for all Your goodness in this life until, with all Your saints, we praise You eternally in Your heavenly kingdom; through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen. (LSB p. 310)

Dear fellow redeemed in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

We begin this psalm by saying, “Bless the Lord.” It seems it should be the other way around. The Lord blesses us. At Thanksgiving we count our blessings from Him. We need Him to bless us. God doesn’t need our blessing.

What this really means, though, is that we are saying, “Blesséd be the Lord.” Bless here is similar to praise, but more specific. It means: “pronounce the Lord blesséd.” Blessedness is about everything being right, good, and nothing good lacking in any way. This is pronouncing God’s goodness to all, especially to us.

Why do we need to do that? Because the devil gets us to not do this, to “forget all [God’s] benefits.” Satan hides our blessedness. He gets us to say: “I don’t have this. I don’t have that. What have I wanted and not gotten? They have it better than me.” It’s a rejection of God’s goodness, to deny that He blesses you.

This is where the spirit of complaint comes from: from the devil. It replaces, “Blessed be the Lord,” with: “The Lord’s goodness to me is lacking.” Isn’t this where our self-serving ways come from, along with the willingness to go along with the world’s way of getting what you want with little regard for others? Isn’t this why you get impatient or demanding with others? It comes from a dissatisfaction and complaint with how life is going. It comes from not being willing to agree with the statement “Blessed be the Lord,” much less say it. We live as if everything in life depends on how well I do things, and not as if everything depends on God.

This is where Psalm 103 can help us. It begins, “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” and goes on to say: “And forget not all His benefits …” Psalm 103 has us following up the words of God’s blessedness with “all His benefits” or blessings to you, which are the works that He does for you:

Who forgives all your iniquities,

Who heals all your diseases,

Who redeems your life from destruction,

Who crowns you with loving-kindness and tender mercies,

Who satisfies your mouth with good things …

The Lord executes righteousness and justice …

Included here are the blessings of forgiveness, health and healing, protection and safety, nourishment with food and other daily needs like sleep, employment, and money. These are blessings from God that come through people: forgiveness through pastors; health and healing through doctors, nurses and pharmacists; protection and safety through government, police, and our military; food and other needs through farmers, grocery stores, employers, etc., and justice through police enforcing laws and judges and juries rendering just decisions.

These blessings – and many more – come through people, yet the psalm says they are “His benefits,” that He does these things. It is the Lord “who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases,” etc. We thank God for these things, we pronounce Him blesséd for continually bestowing these good things on us, and at the same time we’re thanking Him for people who are the means by which God provides us with health and healing, protection and safety, and so on.

But in that part of the psalm is one line that summarizes it all and is really the main thing: “He crowns you with loving-kindness and tender mercies.” Here we’re introduced to quite possibly the best word in the English language, “loving-kindness.” It’s a word that was pretty much coined by Miles Coverdale, a Lutheran who worked on one of the first published English Bibles; whose version of the psalms is still used in the Church of England.

This is the word he uses to express the Hebrew word khesedh, the concept of God’s grace and favor, mercy and kindness. It sums up what God is like. All these blessings we list, all we need in daily life, isn’t just mercy but “tender mercies,” don’t you love that, signs of His gentle, kind, soft and tender way with you that proceeds from this quality in God’s heart for frail, flawed sinners: loving-kindness. Though you don’t deserve it, He always has “loving-kindness” for you!

The psalm goes on to meditate on this grace, that God is “slow to anger and abounding in mercy,” that He isn’t at war with us, doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve, but He takes our sins and “removes our transgressions from us” so far that if you imagine how far it is from earth to heaven or from the farthest points west to east, it’s impossible to find; the point is, the sins are totally gone.

But we still have the problem – a temptation from the devil, really – of looking to what we have, for proof of God’s love for us. Or viewing our losses and what we lack as reasons to doubt God’s goodness to us. So the next section of the psalm, which I confess I’ve always had a hard time with, deals with us pastorally:

As a father pities his children,

So the Lord pities those who fear Him.

For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.

Then it talks about how we are like flowers of the field that blow away and are gone. This is about our mortality. It isn’t encouraging for us. It fills us with bitterness. We groan in anguish, we don’t want to think about it.

But the Lord does think about it. He hears your groaning. He knows your frame; He remembers that you are dust. He was there when Adam and Eve fell into sin and He said to them, “Dust you are, to dust you shall return.” He didn’t take pleasure in saying it; it was His judgment on sin. But He has loving-kindness for every person, from Adam and Eve down to all people, including you. We may want to avoid these words, but He didn’t avoid it. He would not.

These words are not simply a harsh reality for us; they become the gateway to His loving-kindness, the center of all His blessing of us, and the beginning of all our praise of Him.

Because He determined to know your frame in a unique way – He came down from heaven, took your frame to be His own when He became man. This is where Jesus comes in. So the true God never forgets but always remembers that you are dust, because He Himself choked on that dust in His degradation and death which He suffered for you.

He did this so that you would not come to nothing, so that your “place knowing you no more” would not be your end. Instead your risen Lord will raise you from the dust and will bring you to the place that He has been preparing for you. The angels will be there, whom we address in this psalm,. We call on them to “bless the Lord” with us, and when the Lord brings us to His heaven, which is your true place, you’ll bless His holy name side by side with them, and with all that is within you, forever and ever. Amen!