If you need help finding ways to praise God, just look to the Psalms.
If you’re new here, each week we all learn about and memorize a Bible verse together. We’ve put the verse(s) into song to help you learn the verse and recall it during your day. If you’d like to see the archives of all the verses we’ve done so far, you can find our posts here and a list of all the YouTube videos here. On to this week’s verse!
Great is our Lord, and abundant in power;
his understanding is beyond measure.
Psalm 147:5 (ESV)
Devotional
I find the word “abundant” here to be a wonderful choice of words to describe God’s power. He’s not just powerful, he is abundant in power! Abundant means plentiful. These words often mean that you have so much of something, that you have more than you need. God has more power than he needs! I guess that will always happen when you have infinite power. In any case, this makes me think about God’s power slightly differently than when I hear that he has infinite power. When I am in need, and I’m praying that God will do something for me, I often doubt. Sometimes I’ll remind myself that he can do anything, since he has infinite power, but thinking about it as abundant power, it brings to mind that it isn’t difficult. He’ll have plenty of power left over when he’s done, so it won’t be a bother to use some of it on you.
Think about it as someone with $999,999,999,999,999,999 that loves you. He’s more than willing to spend a few measly dollars on a billion dollar mansion for you if he thinks it’ll be good for you. That would only bring his total down to $999,999,998,999,999,999. He can do some investing and gain back that billion in no time. That was one millionth of one percent of his money. It might take you several hundred lifetimes to earn that much money – several thousand more to save up that much money – but to God the cost is worth less than a penny is to you.
Now let’s move to the next line: “his understanding is beyond measure”. This brings up a similar picture. If something is beyond measure, then it’s quite likely to be abundant. In fact, this emphasizes just how abundant we’re talking. Let’s assume God has $1 more than I mentioned at first. Now imagine all of his money is comprised of $100 bills in little bundles of 100 bills. How many bundles would he have? 100,000,000,000,000. That’s 100 trillion stacks of 100 $100 bills. You’re not going to try to count all of those, are you? Didn’t think so. Even if you could count 100 of those stacks every second (good luck counting that fast), it would take you 31,710 years to count them all. If you’re a young earth believer, the world hasn’t even been around that long! I think that’s the definition of “beyond measure”.
And this is about more than just his power. This is about his understanding. I don’t know of any standard units of measurement for wisdom and understanding, but if there was one, God’s numbers would be higher than we can even make a chart for. Just think about the fact that God thought up every single rule that governs physics and chemistry and every branch of science you can think of. He created life, and the immensely complicated systems that exist inside every living cell, and larger living things made of countless cells. After all these years, scientists aren’t even close to discovering everything that God knows and created.
Knowing that, don’t you think you can trust God to know what’s best for you and the world? Let’s praise his awesome power and understanding and keep these amazing attributes in mind when we pray.
