Ps. 72.18-20 (the glory of God)

Blessed be Yhwh God
the God / of Israel
who alone / does wondrous things.
Blessed be his glorious name / forever
and may all the earth / be filled / with his glory
Amen and amen
the prayers of David / son of Jesse / are ended. 

Here in these concluding lines we find something that seems very natural for the psalmist to proclaim and yet holds a rather starting insight for us. As a preliminary, let’s note the following as a schema detailing the relationship between the king in the psalm and how God is understood here: 1) earlier: earth was filled with a harvest; now: filled with the glory of God; 2) earlier: the king’s name ‘endured forever’; now: God’s name is forever blessed; 3) earlier: the king’s deeds are at the fore; now: the focus is God’s wondrous deeds; 4) earlier: the people blessed and found their blessing in the king and his name; now: it is God and his name. Important also is the fact that psalm began with the handing over of God’s justice and righteousness, while here it ends focused entirely on God. We have moved from the ‘agent’ of God to God (from the agent to the principal). Here is the astonishing thing about this: for the psalmist there is no competition or diminution to God when he mediates His authority to the king. God can hand over himself, non-competitively. This is a rather profound point: that in God’s giving, he is not lessened, even though everything receiving him is filled and ‘made more’. The king accomplishing these acts, as agent of God, does not in any way prevent these concluding lines from attributing the same acts to God alone, for his glory. It is as if the more God chooses to mediate himself through the king, the more glory actually redounds to God. This same principle inheres in the Temple: the more God comes to be seen as inhabiting the Temple the greater is he understood as reigning on high in the heavenly Temple. Mediation actually increases the liturgy and praise to God rather than diminishing it. What was previously understood as the ‘harvest’ of the cosmos, is here understood, within the praise to God, as the filling of the cosmos with “his glory”. We see that the abounding and explosive nature of the cosmos and the people is one that reveals the ‘glory of God’. This glory is what flows through the king “to the ends of the earth”; it is what makes of the people, who are usually ‘mere grass’, to “blossom forth like the grass of the land”. It is, in other words, that vitality that makes all of creation super-abound. And, importantly, it is what holds the blood of the poor and the lowly to be ‘precious’. The glory of God is that which adopts as kinsman all those who have none; the glory of God is his becoming father (vs. 12-14) in and through the king in an act of compassion just as profound as a harvest that reaches “to the mountaintops” (just as mountaintops are usually devoid of life, so too are the lowly usually without redemption; yet, in God’s king, both become the supreme examples of God’s reigning authority, his ‘glory’). It is in these concluding lines that we give the precise term to all of the actions undertaken by the king, empowered by God: glory. Everything in this psalm flows from and to it (even the act itself of mediation to the king).