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1 Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous. Praise befits the upright. 2 Praise the Lord with the lyre; make melody to him with the harp of ten strings. 3 Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts. 4 For the word of the Lord is upright, and all his work is done in faithfulness. 5 He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. 6 By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth. 7 He gathered the waters of the sea as in a bottle; he put the deeps in storehouses. 8 Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him. 9 For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm. 10 The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. 11 The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the thoughts of his heart to all generations. 12 Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage. (Psalm 33:1-12 NRSV)
Dear Friend, we're about to study a kingly psalm. You will notice the authority and power behind each word, much like it was written by a king, and a king who knows and loves his God. A king who knows all that God has done and is capable of. A king who would not hesitate in giving an order to worship and praise God.
Psalm 33 does not ease into praise. Here is that king's command — rejoice, praise, sing, play — and then immediately tells us why. Not because life is comfortable or circumstances are favorable, but because of who God is and what God has done. The praise is grounded. It has reasons. And the reasons, when we look at them carefully on Trinity Sunday, turn out to be Trinitarian to their core.
The psalmist does not know the word Trinity. But he knows the Word of the Lord. He knows the breath of God’s mouth. He knows the steadfast love that fills the earth. And in naming those three things — Word, breath, steadfast love — he is tracing, however unknowingly, the outline of the God the New Testament will fully reveal as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Let us follow the psalm’s own path through the character of God.
The psalm’s account of creation is contained in two lines of extraordinary compression: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.”
Word and breath. Read in the light of the New Testament, these are unmistakably the Son and the Spirit — the two by whom the Father creates, through whom all things were made, by whose agency the formless void became a cosmos teeming with life and order and beauty.
The Word of the Lord is the same Word John identifies in the prologue of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” What the psalmist experienced as the commanding, creative speech of God — he spoke, and it came to be — John reveals as a person: the eternal Son, present and active in every syllable of creation.
The breath of his mouth is the ruach, the Spirit — the same breath that hovered over the waters in Genesis 1, the same Spirit who breathed life into Adam, the same Pentecostal wind that filled the upper room. When God breathes out creation, it is not a mechanical process. It is the personal, life-giving activity of the Spirit who has always been the one who enlivens, animates, and sustains every living thing.
The psalmist is in awe of what this means: “He spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm.” The universe is not self-generating or self-sustaining. It is held in existence moment by moment by the same Word and breath that called it into being. Trinity Sunday is the day we pause to feel the weight of that — that the ground under our feet, the air in our lungs, the light of this morning were all spoken into being by a God who is eternally Word and breath and the love that sends them both.
Before the psalm moves to creation, it gives us the character of the creator: “He loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.”
The phrase translated steadfast love is the Hebrew hesed — one of the most theologically dense words in the entire Old Testament. It is covenant love, faithful love, the love that does not give up when the beloved is unlovely, the love that absorbs betrayal and keeps coming. It is the love of a God who pursues his people through the wilderness and the exile and the silence and the cross. It is the love that, in the New Testament, takes a face and a name: Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, in whom all the hesed of God becomes visible and tangible and touchable.
The earth is full of it. Not a corner of creation is outside the reach of the steadfast love of the Lord. Not a person, not a situation, not a season so dark that the hesed of God does not extend there. The psalm is not speaking naively — it knows that nations rise and fall, that human plans come to nothing, that the counsel of the Lord stands while the counsel of the powerful is brought to nothing. But underneath all the turbulence of history, filling the earth the way water fills the sea, is the steadfast love of the God who made it.
On Trinity Sunday, we name that love Trinitarian. The Father’s love that sends the Son. The Son’s love that goes to the cross. The Spirit’s love that is poured out on all flesh. Three movements of the one hesed — the steadfast love that filled the earth before creation and has not diminished by a drop since.
The psalmist ends this section with a declaration that carries the whole passage on its back: “Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.”
On Trinity Sunday, we are invited to inhabit that happiness — not a shallow cheerfulness, but the deep, grounded, anchor-holding joy of a people who know whose they are. We are the people whose God is the Lord — the God who speaks worlds into existence by his Word, who breathes life into everything that lives by his Spirit, whose steadfast love fills the earth and has never known a limit.
The new song the psalmist calls for is not a song for easy days only. It is a song that knows what it is singing about — that has looked at the character of God and found there a reason to praise that does not depend on circumstances. Word and breath and steadfast love. Father and Son and Spirit. The same God, always, all the way through.
Sing to him. Play skillfully. Shout. Because the earth is full of his steadfast love — and that, on any Sunday and every Sunday, is reason enough.
PRAYER: Lord — Word who spoke us into being, Breath who animates us still, Love whose hesed fills the earth — teach us to sing the new song that knows your name, and to live as people whose happiness is rooted in you alone. Amen.
Have a great and blessed day in the Lord! OUR CALL TO ACTION: Find one moment today to stop, breathe deliberately, and name it as the breath of God — then let that awareness open into a word of praise, a note of gratitude, or a new song of your own, however small, offered to the God whose steadfast love fills the earth you are standing on.
I love you and I thank God for you! You matter to God and you matter to me! Say this out loud: “The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord.”
Pastor Eradio Valverde, Jr.
