I Will Exalt You

“O LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you; I will praise your name, for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure.”

Isaiah understood a familiar principle found in the Psalms. We are to exalt God because he is God. When you read the Psalms, you get a distinct impression that to praise God is to exalt God. To exalt God is to give God the praise that rightfully belongs to him and the honor that is his by divine right. It is to truly fear and worship the Lord.

So Isaiah says, “you are my God;” and consequentially the prophet will exalt God. Exalting God is praising his name. And why should Isaiah praise the Lord’s name? Because he sees all that God has done – “you have done wonderful things.” The wonderful things that God has done are connected to his plans formed long ago. God acts according to his will, and all that he purposes, he does. God is to be exalted and praised for his works and his work. This is what we do when we sing praise to the Lord. We are acknowledging these truths about God. Can you imagine praising someone when you don’t know him or know what he’s supposed to have done? We usually give praise when there is something or someone to be praised.

Isaiah 25 follows the magnificent chapter 24, which was about the judgment of God upon the earth. This judgment of God displays the glorious reign of God. Even in the far off city of Babylon, God executes his reign. Isaiah sees a God who is never taken by surprise by anything because he is sovereign overall. He knows what is happening in Babylon and he knows what is happening in Jerusalem.

Isaiah seems to be saying in chapter 25 that Babylon (the foreign palace and fortified city – see vs. 2) will be destroyed. It was going to become a “heap,” “a city no more,” “a ruin,” “never to be rebuilt.” For those in exile, this was a comfort. God is a “stronghold to the poor and to the needy in distress” (vs. 4). Isaiah praises God so that others would praise God. Praise begets praise. Praising God is acknowledging God for who he is, so when we exalt him we make him appear higher than he is to others. We cannot make God higher than he is when we seek to exalt him. All we are doing is acknowledging his worth (in worship), and displaying his worth by lifting him in the sight of others.

This is why worship in the congregation is so important. True worship is spiritual in nature (John 4:23, 24). True worship is the exalting of God for who he is and for what he has done. It is putting God on display. True worship comes from the heart. True worship is not something done by some praise team up at the front. True worship is done by the congregation as a whole when each believer is taken up with the glories of Christ and God. So each believer has a personal responsibility in the midst of the congregation to worship God.

And true worship comes from a heart that is thinking, meditating, and believing all that God has revealed concerning himself. Is it possible then to sleep in the presence of God and then say we went to worship and I worshipped God? I don’t think so! Our hearts are incredibly deceitful. We easily deceive ourselves and we don’t know it. Isaiah the prophet was terribly afraid when God revealed himself in the temple in Isaiah 6. He cried out against himself because he saw who God was: “Woe is me! For I am lost” (Isa. 6:5). To exalt God, our hearts must be submissive and broken. To exalt God, we must come with prepared hearts as best we can. This demands soul searching before you come to worship God. Either you do this as the fruit of your spiritual experience on Saturday evening or Sunday morning, but you must do it. True worship is not just about getting up on Sunday and going to church. It requires time in adoration and meditation over God’s word. I would be the first to acknowledge that this requires diligence and discipline. Nothing worthwhile is worthwhile unless we have prepared ourselves. Sacrifice requires preparation.

In the Old Testament, you could never just appear before God with a defiled sacrificial animal. It had to meet God’s requirements (Leviticus 1-7). God warned the priests in Malachi’s time against this failure to have regard for God and his standards. They despised the Lord’s table when they offered blind animals (Mal. 1:7, 8). By offering a blind animal, the implication is that they reserved the better animals for themselves. So the profit was theirs and not God’s.

Principles of worship don’t change. Surely we can only be said to have worshipped God when we have worshipped according to his demands. In the church at Corinth, it was obvious that they had all kinds of problems in their services. The bottom line was that they were seeking to worship God as they pleased. They were not doing things decently and in order. They thought they were exalting God but they were merely exalting themselves. Paul condemns them for this (1 Cor. 11:17ff).

Praising God is not just singing a hymn, song, or chorus. Anyone can sing words. It is what the words mean and how you relate them to God that is important. It is acknowledging the truth about God in the words that we sing. This presupposes knowledge of the truth, doesn’t it? This is where preparation comes in so handy. Soil that is tilled is ready to receive the seed. If you have prepared the ground of your heart, it will be all the more ready to receive God’s Word. We must ask and look to the Holy Spirit to do this work in us. The knowledge of the truth is the ability to relate God’s Word to other words that we utter or sing. Knowledge without the ability to apply it is not of much value.

Thus worship is about the application. Exalting God is seeking to apply the knowledge of the truth about God to God. When we say, as Isaiah did, that God has “done wonderful things,” what are those wonderful things? There are wonderful things in general because of who God is and what he has done, but then there are wonderful things to us in particular. It is the ability to recall the goodness of God to ourselves that will cause us to respond in thanksgiving and praise. As usual, such recall takes effort. All memory work is hard work. When we exercise our minds in godly things they are more readily prepared to respond to godly things.

Little children learn a language effortlessly simply because their minds are growing and soaking up everything. They don’t understand all that they hear, but they hear, and eventually, through repetition (application), they begin to speak and use what they hear. They have that remarkable ability to connect words without even knowing how they do it. This is surely one of the most difficult things for us to do. Exercising the mind in memory work is not easy. It requires effort and repetition both for short-term and long-term recall.

Exalting God is about reciting the glorious truths about God. Isaiah’s response in Isaiah 25:1 is because of what he has just said about God in chapter 24. Experience in the truth prompts response to the truth. Isaiah is thankful that the God of chapter 24 is his God. God is not his enemy but his God. This is why he will exalt God and praise his name. As you come to worship God, try to recall God’s dealings with you. Come prepared and ready so that the application of the truth will be easier. What greater business can we as the people of God have than to exalt God?