Psalms 104:1 - Sermon Bible Commentary

Bible Comments

Psalms 104:1.

Greatness, if you look at it as something separate from you, and away, still more if you have a consciousness that it may be against you, is a matter of awe and terror. If you mingle it with yourself, as a part of yourself, and yourself a part of it, greatness, becoming a possession, is a grand thought and a pleasant one. So we unite the two clauses of the text. David could not have said the second with gladness unless he could have said the first with confidence: "O Lord myGod, Thou art very great."

I. If it is great to be at one and the same time infinitely comprehensive and exquisitely minute, to fill the widest and yet to be occupied by the narrowest, then what a God is ours! The unspeakably large and the invisibly small are alike to Him; and we stand, and we marvel not at the one or at the other, but at the combination of the telescopic glance and the microscopic care; and we confess, "O Lord my God, Thou art very great."

II. It is a great thing to stoop. He inhabiteth equally, at this very moment, eternity and that little heart of yours. The whole Gospel is only a tale of immense stooping how the purest demeaned Himself to the vilest, and how, "though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, that we through His poverty might be rich."

III. Some one has said that continuity is the secret of the sublime; the eye goes on and on, and finds no break, and calls it sublimity. Then what a sublimity there is in Him who century after century, year by year, without the shadow of a turning, has continued the same, "yesterday, today, and for ever"!

IV. Look at the wonderful greatness of His plan of redemption. The length, and the breadth, and the depth, and the height are all passing knowledge; and we have nothing to do but to humble ourselves in the dust and say, "O Lord my God, Thou art very great."

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,9th series, p. 257.

Psalms 104:1

1 Bless the LORD, O my soul. O LORD my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty.