Psalm 103

Psalms 103:1-2

all that is within me: The Hebrew title, which this page's text does not show, reads simply A Psalm of David, though the psalm supplies its own introduction: bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name, addressed to the psalmist's own heart before it reaches a single reader. Forget not all his benefits, the second line's charge, sets the whole psalm's business as an act of memory, cataloguing what God has done so nothing good is allowed to slip from mind. Henry and Spurgeon both note the self-address, a man preaching to his own soul before he preaches to anyone else.

Psalms 103:3-5

The list of benefits opens with pardon and healing named together, forgiveth all thine iniquities, healeth all thy diseases, sin and its consequence answered in the same breath. Redeemeth thy life from destruction and crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies moves from rescue to coronation, a delivered life given the ornaments of a king rather than merely spared. Thy youth is renewed like the eagle's closes the list with an image the older writers read as vigor restored rather than years literally reversed, strength renewed the way the eagle was popularly thought to renew its plumage.

Psalms 103:6-8

The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed turns the personal benefits outward to God's government of the wronged in general, before the psalm names where Israel first learned this about him, he made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel. Verse 8, the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy, is the Lord's own self-declared name from Exodus 34:6, the words he spoke of himself to Moses on the mountain, quoted here rather than merely echoed. Delitzsch traces the formula through the Psalter's repeated use of it as the nation's settled confession of who God is.

Psalms 103:9-12

He will not always chide answers a real fear, that a God who has justly been angry might stay angry, and the psalm denies it plainly, neither will he keep his anger for ever. He hath not dealt with us after our sins measures mercy by what did not happen rather than only by what did, and the two pictures that follow give it spatial size, as far as the heaven is high above the earth for the mercy itself, as far as the east is from the west for the sin it removes. Spurgeon lingers on the east-west image particularly, noting that east and west, unlike north and south, never meet, so the distance named has no closing point.

Psalms 103:13-14

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him gives the psalm's warmest picture, mercy compared not to a ruler's clemency but to a father's ordinary tenderness toward his own household. For he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust reaches back to the man's own making, the same dust named at Genesis 2:7 and pronounced over him again at Genesis 3:19, and reads God's pity as built on his own intimate knowledge of what he formed. Henry notes the comfort is not that God overlooks human weakness but that he never forgets its cause, remembering the frame he himself shaped.

Psalms 103:15-16

As for man, his days are as grass, as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth turns from God's permanence to man's brevity, the same grass and flower imagery the earlier laments use for a fading life. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more presses the point further than mere shortness, a life that leaves no trace once it ends, forgotten even by the ground it grew on. The pair sets up the sharper contrast the next lines draw between man's vanishing days and the Lord's mercy that does not vanish with him.

Psalms 103:17-19

from everlasting to everlasting: But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him answers the grass and the wind directly, the frailty just described set against a mercy with no beginning and no end. Unto children's children extends the promise across generations rather than to one man's lifetime, conditioned on to such as keep his covenant and to those that remember his commandments to do them, obedience named as the shape mercy is met in rather than its price. The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom ruleth over all closes the unit by grounding the whole promise in a kingship no successor threatens and no time limits.

Psalms 103:20-22

The closing call widens the choir outward from the psalmist's own soul to the whole of creation, bless the Lord, ye his angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word, then all ye his hosts, his ministers, then all his works in all places of his dominion. The psalm ends exactly where it began, bless the Lord, O my soul, so that one man's private resolve to remember God's benefits closes as the last voice in a chorus that includes angels and everything he has made. Spurgeon calls the return of the opening line the psalm coming home, the widest possible praise still gathered back into the single soul that started it.