Faithfullee

Psalm 107: Let the Redeemed of the LORD Say So

Book V opened with a call that echoed the opening of Isaiah 40 — a summons to the scattered exiles to gather and testify:

"Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever! Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he has redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south." — Psalm 107:1–3 (ESV)

What followed was a fourfold pattern: four different groups of people in four different kinds of extremity — wanderers in the wilderness with no city to dwell in; prisoners in darkness and the shadow of death; those made fools by their sinful ways, sick and near death; those in ships who saw the works of the LORD in the deep. In each case the movement was identical: they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them. And after each deliverance came the same refrain: "Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man" (107:8, 15, 21, 31).

The fourfold pattern was not merely literary repetition. It was the psalm's theological argument: whatever the shape of the extremity — geographical, political, moral, maritime — the LORD's deliverance was available. No category of human crisis lay outside his reach. The redeemed were not a single type of person but a mosaic of different desperate people who had each cried out and been heard.

We find the opening line one of the most important commands in the Psalter: "Let the redeemed of the LORD say so." Not just experience the redemption. Not just remember it privately. Say so. Tell it. The act of testimony is itself part of the response to deliverance. The Psalter as a whole is an act of saying so — here is what God did, here is what it felt like, here is the refrain after every kind of rescue.

Psalm 110: The LORD Says to My Lord

Psalm 110 was the most quoted Old Testament psalm in the New Testament — cited or alluded to more than any other Old Testament text across the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles. Its two verses — "The LORD says to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand'" (110:1) and "You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek" (110:4) — generated the New Testament's most sustained reflection on the person and office of Jesus Christ.

"The LORD says to my Lord: 'Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.'" — Psalm 110:1 (ESV)

The psalm was attributed to David in its superscription, and Jesus himself used this to pose the question in Matthew 22: how could the Messiah be David's son if David called him "my Lord"? The logical force of the question depended on the psalm's Davidic authorship — a human ancestor did not normally address his descendant as superior. The answer, implicit in Jesus's question, was that the Messiah was both David's son (by human descent) and David's Lord (by divine nature and exaltation).

The second great declaration of Psalm 110 was the Melchizedek priesthood: "The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, 'You are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek'" (110:4). Melchizedek appeared briefly in Genesis 14 as the king-priest of Salem who blessed Abraham after the battle of the kings — a figure who was simultaneously king and priest, whose priesthood was not inherited through the Levitical line and had no recorded end. The Epistle to the Hebrews devoted five chapters (5–10) to expounding how Jesus's high priesthood fulfilled and surpassed the Aaronic priesthood precisely because it was of this older, more enduring order. Psalm 110 was the single verse on which that entire argument rested.

Psalms 113–118: The Egyptian Hallel

Psalms 113–118 formed the Egyptian Hallel — so named because they were traditionally associated with the Exodus — sung at Passover celebrations both in the temple and in homes. Jewish tradition held that Jesus and his disciples sang these psalms at the Last Supper: Matthew 26:30 records that after the supper "when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives." The hymn was the concluding portion of the Hallel.

Psalm 113 opened the Hallel with praise of the divine name and a declaration that overturned social hierarchy: the LORD, who sat high above all nations, who was enthroned above the heavens, condescended to "raise the poor from the dust and lift the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes, with the princes of his people" (113:7–8). The infinite greatness of God made his condescension more astonishing, not less — the higher the throne, the more remarkable the descent.

Psalm 114 was a poetry of cosmic wonder at the Exodus: the sea fled, the Jordan turned back, the mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs, at the presence of the LORD, at the presence of the God of Jacob. The past event became present reality in the psalm's imagination — the creation itself was still trembling at the memory of what God had done when he brought his people out.

Psalm 116 was a personal testimony: "I love the LORD, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy" (116:1). The love was grounded in experience — not abstract devotion but the relief of someone who had called and been answered. "The snares of death encompassed me; the pangs of Sheol laid hold on me; I suffered distress and anguish. Then I called on the name of the LORD: 'O LORD, I pray, deliver my soul'" (116:3–4). The Hallel included this personal voice alongside the cosmic sweep of the Exodus — individual deliverance and national deliverance were held as the same kind of story.

Psalm 117, the shortest psalm and the shortest chapter in the Bible, was the Hallel's moment of universal address: "Praise the LORD, all nations! Extol him, all peoples! For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the LORD endures forever. Praise the LORD!" Paul quoted Psalm 117:1 in Romans 15:11 as evidence that the Old Testament itself anticipated the inclusion of the Gentiles in the praise of God. Two verses. All nations. The shortest chapter in the Bible carried the widest invitation.

Psalm 118 closed the Hallel with the verse that Jesus quoted at his triumphal entry and that the crowds threw back at him as he rode into Jerusalem:

"The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This is the LORD's doing; it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it." — Psalm 118:22–24 (ESV)

The rejected stone that became the cornerstone was one of the Old Testament's most compressed images of reversal — the thing dismissed as unusable turned out to be the thing everything else rested on. Jesus applied it to himself explicitly (Matthew 21:42), and Peter used it of the resurrection in Acts 4:11. The "day that the LORD has made" became, in Christian reading, the first day of the week after Passover — Easter morning.

What strikes us is that Jesus went to Gethsemane with Psalm 118 still in his ears. The last song before the arrest was about the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone. He knew the whole arc. He knew what came after rejection. And he went to the garden anyway.

Psalm 136: His Steadfast Love Endures Forever

Psalm 136 was an antiphonal psalm — every one of its twenty-six verses contained the same response: "for his steadfast love endures forever" (ki le'olam hasdo). Whether it was sung by two groups alternating or by a leader and congregation, the repetition was the point: through creation, through the Exodus, through the wilderness, through the conquest, through every act of divine faithfulness from beginning to end, the same constant was true. The love did not expire.

The psalm moved through history — creation, Exodus plagues, sea crossing, wilderness, conquest — and at each point the repeating refrain interrupted the narrative to insist on the underlying reality. The events were different; the hesed was the same. Whatever varied in Israel's experience, God's steadfast love remained the structural constant. Twenty-six times. The repetition is the whole argument.

Psalm 137: By the Waters of Babylon

Psalm 137 was one of the Psalter's most raw and honest pieces — an exile lament that refused comfort:

"By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!'" — Psalm 137:1–3 (ESV)

The request of the captors was obscene — to perform the songs of the holy city for entertainment in the place of its desecration. The response was silence. "How shall we sing the LORD's song in a foreign land?" The question was not rhetorical but theological: the songs were tied to the place and the covenant presence. Singing them in Babylon would have been a kind of desecration.

The psalm's ending is famously troubling, and we want to address it honestly. The final verses call for the infants of Babylon to be dashed against the rock. "Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock." These words are in the Bible. They are not qualified within the psalm. They are the cry of people who watched their own children slaughtered by this empire, and they are bringing their full, unrefined rage to God — asking him to visit on Babylon what Babylon visited on them.

We do not think this psalm endorses infant murder. We think it demonstrates something important: that the Psalter makes room for the full range of what human beings feel, including the darkest impulses of grief-turned-to-rage. The impulse toward justice — the demand that evil be answered — is itself from God, even when its expression far exceeds what grace would prescribe. Rather than act out that rage, the psalmist brought it to God in prayer. That is what the Psalter invites: not the sanitizing of human experience, but the bringing of the whole of it — including the parts that embarrass us — into the presence of the one who can hold it. The imprecatory psalms (Psalm 69, 109, 137) do not teach us that these prayers are beautiful. They teach us that even this belongs before God, and that the God who receives the prayer is greater than the grief that produced it.

Psalm 139: You Have Searched Me and Known Me

Psalm 139 was the Psalter's most sustained meditation on divine omniscience and omnipresence — but it was not a philosophical treatise. It was a prayer, addressed directly to the God who already knew everything being said:

"O LORD, you have searched me and known me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways. Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether." — Psalm 139:1–4 (ESV)

The knowledge described was not surveillance but intimacy — the knowledge of someone who had been paying close attention from the beginning, who had formed the psalmist in the womb, who knew every day of a life not yet lived. "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (139:13–14). The formation in the womb was not an accident of biology but an act of deliberate divine artistry — the yatsar (form, fashion) language of the potter's work.

The divine presence was inescapable: "Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?" (139:7). The rhetorical questions were not expressions of desperation but of wonder. Heaven, Sheol, the wings of the morning, the uttermost parts of the sea — there was nowhere the psalmist could go that was outside the reach of God's hand and leading. The inescapability of God was experienced not as threat but as comfort: the same God who knew every thought was the one who led and held.

The psalm ended where it began — with an invitation for God to search and know: "Search me, O God, and know my heart! Try me and know my thoughts! And see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting!" (139:23–24). The psalmist who had begun by acknowledging that God already knew everything ended by inviting the searching — not because God needed the invitation but because the psalmist needed to make the posture explicit.

We keep coming back to "you knitted me together in my mother's womb." That image of God as the craftsperson attending to the formation of a single person — not a nation, not a people, but this one person, in the dark, before birth — is one of the most quietly astonishing things in the Bible. Every person reading this psalm was known before they could know anything. Attended to before they could attend to anything. The care that shaped each person is personal, prior, and intimate in a way that no subsequent neglect or abandonment can fully undo. We find that worth returning to, especially for people who have felt overlooked or discarded. You were knitted. By hand. With attention.

Last updated: March 3, 2026.