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Praise the Lord.
How good it is to sing praises to our God,
how pleasant and fitting to praise him!
The Lord builds up Jerusalem;
he gathers the exiles of Israel.
He heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.
He determines the number of the stars
and calls them each by name.
Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
his understanding has no limit.
The Lord sustains the humble
but casts the wicked to the ground.
(Psalm 147:1-6)

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I spoke with someone recently who said something that has stuck with me. \u201cI\u2019ve listened to the Christian radio station all summer,\u201d they said, \u201cand it ticks me off. The music is all up beat and happy all the time, even when it\u2019s singing about hard things. It just rings hollow. It\u2019s not connected at all with reality.\u201d

Indeed, Christian music of our time has buddied up to God with four chords and a chorus to \u201cPraise the Lord with joyful songs.\u201d It doesn\u2019t dwell in the valleys. No minor keys. No dark days. Just \u201cpraise music.\u201d As if everything was good all the time.

But it\u2019s not.

Sometimes black men get shot in the back in broad daylight in front of their kids. Sometimes hurricanes hit the coast. Sometimes pandemics change our world into a fearful place of isolation. Sometimes moms and dads split up in divorce. Sometimes abuse happens. Sometimes depression smothers a life with darkness.

But these experiences get flattened into the same upbeat songs of praise on the Christian charts to a God who then begins to appear pretty well flattened himself. No depth. No grasp of evil. No connection with reality.

Psalm 147 also commands us to praise the Lord. But it takes care not to flatten God into a two-dimensional caricature of happy-clappy superficiality.

It tells us who this God is. He is a God who sees the trauma of those who have been ripped from their homes in war and exile, and he gathers them. He takes the time to see and to attend to wounds of the brokenhearted, binding up those wounds to begin the process of healing.

These are long, generational pictures of God\u2019s work of salvation in the lives of his people against the backdrop of evil.

And not only does he heal and restore, he also moves with just vengeance against the wicked\u2014setting things right\u2014even as he sustains the humble.

God is not a flat, superficial deity with a painted smile on a cloud, removed from reality any care about this world or our lives: he is intimately involved in understanding our darkest moments and acting in power to set things right in real lives.

But it doesn\u2019t happen over night. Wounds don\u2019t heal instantaneously. The exiles of Israel didn\u2019t return for 70 years. Sometimes our times are hard. Worthy of lament, of anger, of grief as we face the real evils and troubles of this world.

In times like those, our praise may not rise in four chords and a major key. In fact, our praise may not rise at all. We may find ourselves in a different psalm: of lament or of petition. But the hallelujah of praise is not squelched at all by a minor key. Indeed, it sometimes takes the entire Psalter of real experience lived in valleys and shadows, longings and petitions, fear and anger, before we can come back to submit ourselves in free, willful obedience to these high end notes of praise.

We experience life in three dimensions. And we must. It\u2019s there that we discover the deep contours of a powerful God who moves and acts in justice, restoration, and healing over the long years and seasons of a life. Not only the seasons of easy praise, but the seasons of hurt, injustice, and exile too.

Praise in two dimensions is hollow. But the praise of Psalm 147 lives in three, a praise that acknowledges the evil of this world and the reality of the God who meets it. How good it is to sing this kind of praise to our God.

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