Sermon Notes

Of David
103 1 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. 2 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget all his benefits—3 who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, 4 who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy, 5 who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
6 The Lord works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed. 7 He made known his ways to Moses, his acts to the people of Israel. 8 The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. 9 He will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever. 10 He does not deal with us according to our sins nor repay us according to our iniquities. 11 For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; 12 as far as the east is from the west, so far he removes our transgressions from us. 13 As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him. 14 For he knows how we were made; he remembers that we are dust. (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, NRSVue)
103 1-2 O my soul, bless God. From head to toe, I’ll bless his holy name! O my soul, bless God, don’t forget a single blessing!
3-5 He forgives your sins—every one. He heals your diseases—every one. He redeems you from hell—saves your life! He crowns you with love and mercy—a paradise crown. He wraps you in goodness—beauty eternal. He renews your youth—you’re always young in his presence.
6-14 God makes everything come out right; he puts victims back on their feet. He showed Moses how he went about his work, opened up his plans to all Israel. God is sheer mercy and grace; not easily angered, he’s rich in love. He doesn’t endlessly nag and scold, nor hold grudges forever. He doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve, nor pay us back in full for our wrongs. As high as heaven is over the earth, so strong is his love to those who fear him. And as far as sunrise is from sunset, he has separated us from our sins. As parents feel for their children, God feels for those who fear him. He knows us inside and out, keeps in mind that we’re made of mud. (The Message, MSG)

This week’s lesson text comes from Psalm 103. It is a song of praise and thanksgiving that celebrates God’s fidelity through the lens of the Israelites who rebelled against God at Mount Sinai (Exodus 32-34). Calling our attention to the infinite depths of God’s steadfast love and mercy, this dialogical lesson invites all who hear, read, sing, or pray this psalm to respond to God’s goodness with immediate worship. As Hebrew poetry, Psalm 103 demonstrates the use of metaphorical language and creative grammatical structure to situate the psalm within its historical and theological context as liturgical music utilized in the corporate worship of ancient Israel and Judah.
Contemporary believers can benefit from reflecting on how this song functions as a template for worship. When the Psalmist says, “Bless the Lord, oh my soul,” he or she encourages all of the faithful—those who lived in the ancient past, those who lived during the times of the early Judaism and the early Church, and those who are living now—to bless God without reservation as they remember how God is the source of blessings. The imperative, “do not forget,” reminds hearers that remembrance is the fertile soil from which authentic worship sprouts. When we remember or sins, mistakes, and failures, we cannot help but bless God’s holy name. According to the psalmist, remembrance compels praise, thanksgiving, and worship because God remains steadfast in divine love, mercy, and forgiveness towards us despite our recalcitrance.

Psalm 103 is a song of praise and thanksgiving, within Book IV of the Psalter (Psalms 90-106), that celebrates God as Israel’s king. While last week’s lesson text (Psalm 93) celebrated God as the divine king because of God’s sovereignty, Psalm 103 celebrates God as the divine king because of God’s character. In Exodus 34:6-7 after Moses intercedes on behalf of the Hebrews who rejected God in favor of worshipping the golden calf, the Lord declares the Divine Name to Moses. God’s proclamation statement—the personal revelation of God’s name, God’s nature, God’s heart, and God’s ways to Moses—provides an intimate glimpse into God’s character, which is goodness. Perhaps more than any other biblical passage, this first-person description of God’s self is one of the most important theological statements for Israel. Known as an “attribute formula,” this proclamation outlines the central theme of this psalm: God’s love is steadfast, unmovable, and never failing—even in the face of human sin and rejection.
While the superscription “Of David” appears at beginning of Psalm 103, this designation is an honorific title, as was the custom of biblical literature and the ancient Near Eastern culture from which it comes. Although later biblical scribes ascribed authorship to David, modern biblical scholarship reveals these headings are later additions that seek to contextualize the Psalter with narrative portions of the bible and well-known biblical figures. Taken in its totality, Psalm 103 can be divided into three major divisions: verses 1-5, an opening personal exhortation to praise the LORD, verses 6-18, a description of the LORD’s character, and verses 19-22, a closing exhortation to corporate praise of the LORD. However, the printed lesson only covers the first two divisions.

1-2 O my soul, bless God.
From head to toe, I’ll bless his holy name!
O my soul, bless God,
don’t forget a single blessing!
In the opening verses of the lesson text, the Psalmist makes a personal plea to praise God. Utilizing the Hebrew verb barak, which means “to bless,” the psalmist performs a personal choral call and response as they marshal their entire body—everything from the top of the head to the soles of the feet—to offer total praise to God and God’s name. The distinction that the psalmist makes between God and God’s name introduces a theological reflection on how the name of God reflects God’s character. This particularity also introduces Exodus 34 as a theological conversation partner with Psalm 103. Exodus 34 recounts how God reveals the divine name to Moses in the wake of the golden calf incident (Exodus 32). God is furious with the Hebrew people because they violated The Decalogue by making and worshipping the golden calf, and in Exodus 33, God tells Moses that they must leave Mount Sinai and journey into the promised land without God’s presence. However, because of Moses’ intercession, God changes course and say’s the people will enter into the promised land with God as their escort.
In verse 2, the psalmist blesses God a second time, now with a focus on remembering every individual blessing God has bestowed. While the NRSVue translates these verses with the standard Hebrew grammatical structure—that is beginning the sentence with the verb, “to bless,” followed by the direct object and subject—the MSG translation reverses the grammatical structure. By putting the emphasis on the personal, individual praise from the “soul” of one who has experienced God’s liberating activity, the MSG highlights the importance of a person worshipping God with everything aspect of their personhood; mind, body, emotions, will, and motivations. Nephesh, the Hebrew word for “soul,” reinforces the idea of entire being of an individual.
3-5 He forgives your sins—every one.
He heals your diseases—every one.
He redeems you from hell—saves your life!
He crowns you with love and mercy—a paradise
crown.
He wraps you in goodness—beauty eternal.
He renews your youth—you’re always young in his
presence.
In verses 3-5, the psalmist continues the song of praise by asserting that God continually forgives every sin, heals every disease, redeems individuals from hell—literally Sheol or “the underworld” where everyone is separated from God’s presence—and provides salvation. Further, the psalmist says God crowns individuals with chesed and rechem in Hebrew—often translated as “steadfast love” and “mercy” in English. However, English translations do not adequately capture the fullness of what these words meant in ancient Hebraic/Jewish culture. Culturally speaking, chesed is more than steadfast love. It denotes the very nature of God as goodness, and the activity of God as that which promotes goodness at all times. Chesed is both God’s character and God’s resume. When God does chesed, God is demonstrating how to be good to people even though the people are not good to God.
Additionally, in ancient Near Eastern and Hebraic culture, rechem is the understanding that God has “womb-love” for humanity. Like a mother who has just given birth to her baby, God sees the messiness but kisses the Hebrew children anyway because God has womb-like compassion for them. No less than twelve times in this biblical text (see the words highlighted in red above), the psalmist employs these two words—chesed and rechem—to describe God’s character and activity towards humanity. God does chesed to the Hebrew children, as in Micah 6:8. God has rechem for the Hebrew children, as in Psalm 51:1.
Further, God wraps the Hebrew children in divine goodness, enabling them to retain youthful vigor because they are surrounded God’s presence. While the MSG tspeaks of renewed youth as being “always young,” the NRSVue invokes the language and imagery of Isaiah 40: “who satisfies you with good as long as you live so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.” For the psalmist, God’s goodness is the ultimate prescription for longevity.
6-14 God makes everything come out right;
he puts victims back on their feet.
He showed Moses how he went about his work,
opened up his plans to all Israel.
God is sheer mercy and grace;
not easily angered, he’s rich in love.
He doesn’t endlessly nag and scold,
nor hold grudges forever.
He doesn’t treat us as our sins deserve,
nor pay us back in full for our wrongs.
As high as heaven is over the earth,
so strong is his love to those who fear him.
And as far as sunrise is from sunset,
he has separated us from our sins.
As parents feel for their children,
God feels for those who fear him.
He knows us inside and out,
keeps in mind that we’re made of mud.
In the final verses of the lesson text, the psalmist expounds upon the goodness of God by again invoking Exodus 32 through 34 as commentary on God’s faithfulness in the face of human sin. In verses 6-7, the psalmist says God puts those who have been victimized by others, and themselves, back on their feet. In Exodus 34, God disclosed the most personal and intimate parts of God’s self to Moses, who was the people’s representative, after the Israelites broke faith with God and worshipped the golden calf. While God would have been justified in destroying them all, God forgives the children of Israel. Borrowing the poetic language of Exodus 34, in Psalm 103 the psalmist says God is “sheer mercy and grace,” “slow to anger,” “rich in love,” “not prone to scolding.” Most importantly, God doesn’t hold grudges! God refuses to treat us as our sins demand. Again, the psalmist utilizes chesed, (translated as “love” in the MSG), and rechem, (translated as “feel” in the MSG), to explain how God feels about humanity.
In the theologically rich lyrics of our enslaved ancestors, God’s love is “so high you can’t get over it, so wide you can’t get around it, so deep that you can’t get under it.” Further, although God knows us intimately as the creator, God does hold our humanity against us. The beautifully phrased poetic assertion that God, “knows us inside out, keeps in mind that we’re made of mud,” refers to Genesis 2 where God made humans (the adam) from the dust (the adamah) of the ground. That fact—the reality of our humble origins and fallen nature—still does not restrict God’s love towards us. While we can’t possibly deserve God’s love, nor can we expect to earn God’s love, Psalm 103 reminds us to remember—literally “not forget”—that Divine love overrides human sinfulness and disobedience. In fact, God “works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed” (v. 6, NRSV), despite their disobedience.
For contemporary Christians, the unresolved tension between the enduring love of God and human sinfulness should provide a reason for continuous praise and thanksgiving. While the psalmist admonishes the faithful to “not forget,” the psalmist also acknowledges that God “remembers” humans are dust and loves us anyway—in spite of our frailties. In fact, when the Gospel of John says, “God so loved the world that God gave his only Son,” the gospel writer is underscoring the invitation to worship that Psalm 103 extends. When we think of the goodness of God, everyone should, “bless the Lord, oh my soul, with all that is within me, bless his holy name!”

i. J. Clinton McCann Jr., “The Book of Psalms: Introduction, Commentary and Reflections,” in The New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Volume III (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2015) 273.
ii. James L. Mays, Psalms: Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching (Presbyterian Publishing Corporation: Kindle Edition) 327-328.
iii. John Goldingay, “Psalms,” in The SBL Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (New York: HarperCollins Publishing, 2023) 846.