Psalm 111

“He has caused his wondrous works to be remembered; the LORD is gracious and merciful.” (Psalm 111:4)

Psalm 111 is an acrostic: its twenty-two half lines begin with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in order, a form no translation preserves and which makes the poem a catalogue rather than an argument. It is also the first of a matched pair. Psalm 111 praises the works of the LORD and Psalm 112 describes the person who fears him, and the two share vocabulary line by line, so the second reads as the human echo of the first. The description in v. 4, gracious and merciful, repeats the self-revelation of Exodus 34:6, and the verb governing it is causative: God arranges for his deeds to be remembered, which is what a psalm like this is for. The closing line, that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, is also Proverbs 9:10, and it marks the point where a hymn turns into instruction. Heard after Christmas, the covenant remembered forever (v. 5) names what the season claims has been kept.

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