Ps. 71.15 (all day long)

My mouth would tell / of your righteousness
of your salvation / all day long. 

Here we begin to see the content of the psalmist’s praise. His mouth “tells of your righteousness” and of “your salvation”. It would behoove us to pause and look at other references to this righteousness of God in this psalm: verse 2 speaks of the psalmist being rescued “in your righteousness”. There it is a force of rescue and redemption (it “sets me free”); it is a mode of God’s battle against the forces that seek to destroy his chosen ones. In verse 16, following his deliverance, the palmist says he would “come with an account of your mighty deeds…and commemorate your righteousness, yours alone.” Again, God’s righteousness is aligned with the enactment of God’s salvific power, his “mighty deeds”. In verse 19, the psalmist says “your righteousness…is heaven-high, the great things you have done. This verse is immediately preceded by his telling about God’s “mighty deed”. Once again, God’s righteousness is that power by which God accomplishes his wondrous deeds. Here, however, this ‘wondrous’ nature is given ‘vertical’ dimension: it is ‘heaven-high’. That which is praised in the historical deliverance of his people is here portrayed in its awesomeness by making it its comparison as great as anything imaginable. This is the ‘awe-someness’ of his righteousness. Finally, after being ‘restored to a good state’, the psalmist says he will praise God’s righteousness “all day long”. Not only is his praise something that reaches to the sky, absolutely, but it is also something that, in the psalmist, will ‘fill time’. In all of this we see God’s righteousness as not only his power to enact his will but something that is overpoweringly beautiful to the psalmist. It is an object of extreme delight. It not only fills his imagination (“as high as the heavens”) but also his will (“all day long”). It clearly expands beyond every boundary of which he can conceive. It dwarfs him and completely suffuses him. All he can do is participate in it. In these lines God’s righteousness is then referred to as his “salvation”. It is a clear connection in light of what we have seen above—this power of God to save and redeem those who are his. Finally, it is this power of god which is the content that is praised “all day long.” We alluded to this yesterday—this deep sense of perpetuity on the part of the psalmist. It is as if within his praise of God (within his Temple), he has moved into a mode of time that ‘stretches’ out to meet God’s ‘forever’. This is not mere hyperbole. The psalmist refers to it too frequently and, specifically, in situations where his language is clearly failing him. Further, verse 20 is instructive in this regard. There, the psalmist asks God, “..will you from the depths of the earth, bring us up again?” What is clear is that the redemption understood here as completely possible for God is nothing short of making the dead live again. This power is astonishing in the extreme. God’s power not only crosses every boundary but it brings those whom it seeks into his presence, his ‘forever’. God is his Presence. The psalmist senses this in an intimate fashion and therefore knows that to praise God “all day long” is to not praise him according to his own power, but according to that power that is God’s presence. This Presence is that which was opened by the covenant. Through the covenant God opens a ‘space within himself’. The physical manifestation of that is the Temple (where the psalmist now stands); the ‘moral’ manifestation of that is Torah. The response to that is liturgy and praise…”all day long”.