Praise the Lord, all nations!
Extol him, all peoples!
2 For great is his steadfast love towards us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures for ever.
Praise the Lord!
This is the shortest Psalm in the Psalter, but it says a great deal, and its range of implication is enormous. The first lesson we must draw from it is one that the apostle Paul himself draws, and uses, in Romans 15:11. It lies in the contrast presented, in these two brief verses between 'us' and 'people' or 'nations', 'us' referring to the people of God and 'nations' to the Gentile world. What the psalmist is doing is to call on the nations of the Gentiles to praise God for the mercy God has shown to His own people. It is important to see the implications of this, for it is the recognition by the Psalmist of the real purpose of God's calling of His people, to be a light to lighten the Gentiles. This is one of the basic and fundamental ideas of the Old Testament and indeed of the divine revelation itself. The whole point in God having chosen Abraham to be the father of the faithful was that, 'In thee, and in thy seed, shall all families of the earth be blessed'. One sees, therefore, that this little psalm is dealing with fundamental issues, and with the main overriding theme of the Old Testament. In Genesis 10, God numbers the nations and, so to speak, bids them farewell, leaving them to their own devices, while he takes up this one, specially chosen people, that through them, in the long discipline of His dealings with them, He might in the fulness of the time bring forth from them a Saviour Who would be for all peoples. It is a sad fact of history that again and again the people of God lost sight of this truth, and therefore lost sight of the real purpose of their calling to be a 'light to lighten the Gentiles.' The narrow exclusiveness of Israel at different points in their history, their contempt for the nations around them and - paradoxically - also their desire from time to time to be 'like other nations' when the point of their calling was to be different from them - all this bears witness to the tragic blindness which so often jeopardised their very existence.