Exalting God

Nehemiah 9:5...Stand up and bless the Lord your God forever and ever! Blessed be Your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise.


       Recently as I was reading through the book of Nehemiah I came upon this verse which left a certain impression upon me. Israel has spent a quarter of the day in the Law of the Lord their God, and spent another quarter of the day confessing and worshiping the Lord their God. As i see it, as we begin this chapter we start out with a distant view of what's going on but each verse zooms in closer so that we can see with greater detail what was going on. But as I came to verse 5 it was as though my mind slammed the breaks and gave a real closeup of the last part of that verse ...Blessed be Your glorious name, which is exalted above all blessing and praise!


This seemed to stun me for a while as I pondered this for the next several days. I thought about the way we bless the Lord our God in our modern day churches. Money spent in building massive organs, fine tuning guitars, rehearsing vocal harmonies - all in an effort to bless the Lord our God and to exalt his glorious name and to do it with excellence, to do it to do best of our abilities. Now please understand this is not a criticism of how we praise Him in our settings of worship, this is how it is done today, but the truth of the matter which is stated in this verse was what rocked me. His name is exalted above all blessing and praise. 


God deserves all our praise, all our honor, and all our adoration for He alone is worthy. Rev 4:11...You are worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power...Rev 5:12...Worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom, and strength and honor and glory and blessing...Rev 5:13...Blessing and honor and glory and power be to Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb forever... There is no doubting that God deserves and is worthy of all of these including our worship. Yet, our purest form of worship, our purist form of blessing and exaltation is not sufficient nor does it rise to the standard of God's holiness. Even if all created things, past present and future, heaven and earth, physical beings or angelic beings, all that is beneath, in, on or above the earth with one mind in one accord all at the same time blessed and praised God as He is worthy of, all this simultaneous praise, honor and glory would not be sufficient to bless Him as He rightly deserves. Why? Because He is above all blessing and honor. Yet even though we cannot sufficiently bless Him, He non the less receives our efforts when done in purity of heart. Now that friends is something to think about.