Thirteen times in six verses, this psalm says the same word: praise. No request, no complaint, not even a reason given beyond what the psalm itself assumes everyone already knows. After a hundred and fifty psalms of lament, war, confession, doubt, and joy, the whole book simply ends here, in one long, undiluted shout.
A study in Psalm 150 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 10 min read
Praise God In His Sanctuary
“Praise ye the LORD. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in the firmament of his power.”
Psalm 150:1
Two locations open this psalm, as far apart as any two places could be — the sanctuary, one small building in one small nation, and the firmament, the entire visible sky. Praise belongs equally in both.
Praise Him For His Mighty Acts
“Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his excellent greatness.”
Psalm 150:2
“According to his excellent greatness” sets an impossible standard on purpose — not praise sized to what a worshiper feels like giving, but praise deliberately measured against a greatness no single song could ever actually match.
Praise Him With The Sound Of The Trumpet
“Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with the psaltery and harp. Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with stringed instruments and organs.”
Psalm 150:3-4
Six instruments are named in two verses, covering every family of sound the ancient world had — brass, strings, the dancer’s own body, wind. Nothing capable of making a sound is left out of this list on purpose.
“Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.”
Psalm 150:5
The loudest instrument available gets the final, emphatic word before the psalm turns to its closing line — two full lines given to cymbals alone, nothing quiet or restrained about how this particular praise is meant to sound.
Let Every Thing That Hath Breath Praise The LORD
“Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD.”
Psalm 150:6
The instruments fall away in this last verse, and the invitation widens past every one of them — not only trumpets and harps and cymbals, but anything that simply breathes, the same lungs that drew air in the very first place now asked to spend it on praise.
This is where the book of Psalms ends, and it is worth noticing how it gets here. Psalm 1 opened with a choice between two paths, a tree by the water and chaff blown by the wind. What follows across a hundred and fifty psalms is nearly every possible experience a person can have with God along that path — triumphant confidence and honest despair, careful confession and raw, unfiltered grief, quiet trust and desperate pleading, doubt named without flinching and joy sung without restraint. The book does not resolve all of that into a single tidy conclusion. It resolves it into this: praise, offered by absolutely everything that has breath to offer it, in a sanctuary and under an open sky, with no instrument left silent and no reason given beyond who God is. Praise ye the LORD.
