Psalm 117
Praise the LORD, all you Gentiles!
Laud Him, all you peoples!
For His merciful kindness is great toward us,
And the truth of the LORD endures forever.
Praise the LORD!
Psalm 117 is memorable as the shortest psalm in the Hebrew hymnbook, the shortest chapter in the Bible, and (someone has calculated) as the center chapter of the Bible. All of that, I suspect, is intended to draw it to our attention. God does nothing without a purpose. There must be a purpose for including a psalm of just two verses and only 17 Hebrew words.
It is a messianic psalm. It is quoted by Paul in the New Testament in connection with the work of Christ. It includes a Passover invitation from Israel to the Gentiles, to come and join them in their Passover. As Rotherham says, "We heartily thank them for this their Passover invitation." And we hasten to join them — only we will join them on the ground not of a foretelling Passover but of a fulfilled Passover.
Then, too, this is a millennial psalm. It looks forward to the day when Jesus will reign, when Israel — regathered to the promised land and dwelling in peace and security as head of the nations — will invite all peoples to come to Jerusalem and join intheir annual feasts of thanksgiving.
Israel belongs to the nations. It was never God's plan that the Hebrew people should exclusively and selfishly hug their blessings to themselves, snapping and snarling at other nations with a doginthemanger attitude. Even in their punishment and dispersal among the nations, they are a universal reminder to all that God is sovereign in human affairs: That Jewish dispersal gave wings to the gospel.
The Jews had already spread the concept of the one true God to all nations by the time of Christ. In their law and through their prophets, the world saw evidence of their access to higher truth. When the gospel evangelists went from city to city they always made straight for the synagogue. It was the Godfearers among the Gentiles, orbiting around the outer fringes of Judaism, attracted by what they heard, repelled by what they saw, who first embraced the gospel among the nations.
Finally, this is a missionary psalm. Paul appealed to it in Romans 15 to show that God always had loved the Gentiles. The Jews indeed were given light from God which the Gentiles neverhad, but they were never given love from God which the Gentiles did not have. God loves Gentiles just as much as He loves Jews. That is the missionary message of this psalm.
It was because "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son." It is not just the world of the elect as the extreme Calvinist would say, or just the world of the Jew as the rabbis ofold would have said. It is the world in its totality.
Short as it is, the psalm divides into three parts.
I. THE CALL TO PRAISE (117:1)
