The praise in Psalm 145 is fueled by recounting abundantly rich truths that are put forth about God’s greatness and goodness. If God’s greatness is most notably manifested in his power, God’s goodness is most clearly seen in his love. Both are essential to equally understand not only because both qualities are represented in Scripture, but because we need to grasp both in order to relate to God faithfully. This is because, throughout Scripture, our God is put forth both as a majestic King and a kind Father.
This means that if he was powerful and not loving (great and not good), he would be unapproachable and not worthy of praise for acts of personal goodness. However, if he was loving and not powerful (good and not great), he would be very approachable, but could not be fully trusted because he would lack the ability to accomplish his good desires. Thankfully our God is both great and good and our understanding of these attributes of God can be often discerned by our praise to God because of these attributes. And I’m not mainly referring to singing a few songs on Sunday mornings, but how often and quickly we exalt God for his powerful and loving work in our lives.
For instance, if we lose sight of his greatness, we won’t fully submit to him in godly fear and we will fail to acknowledge all the ways his power is at work in this world and in our lives. That can lead to trusting in our own strength or natural reasoning, instead of relying upon God’s power to do only what he can do. Additionally, if we lose sight of his goodness, we can easily become disillusioned with our circumstances and start to wonder if God even cares at all or wrongly assume that the Lord has an allotment of kindness assigned to us and we have already exhausted it. Moreover, there’s even a way to acknowledge his goodness gratefully, but instead of humbly praising him, we can presume upon his goodness by thinking that of course God would bless such a faithful and fairly decent person (Pharisee—Luke 18).
May we think of our great and good God rightly so that we may worship him rightly.