Psalms 145:3 Meaning Great Is Yahweh

Kibriyāʾ: Grandeur that belongs to God alone A saying of the Prophet has God calling grandeur his own cloak, worn by no one else. Calling God great is easy to say and harder to mean, because the words resize the person saying them. Someone carrying their own importance sets it down, and the relief in that is part of why praise comes out loud.

Ḥamd: Praise that credits the source Praise begins when a person sees that nothing good in their life was manufactured by them. The day, the breath, the people around them, all of it arrived from somewhere other than their own effort. Saying so out loud is the plain human response, like thanking a friend who quietly paid for everything.

I cannot count the praise that is due to you; you are as you have praised yourself: praise admits its own shortfall The Prophet said this with his face to the ground, after reaching for words and finding none. Anyone praising something enormous runs out of language long before running out of subject, and pretending otherwise shrinks the praise. Admitting the shortfall keeps it honest, the way people say they cannot describe someone they love and mean it as high compliment.

Tanzīh: Keeping God clear of every comparison Ibn Arabi uses this word for the refusal to file God under anything already known. Every search works by comparison, holding the unknown against the familiar until something matches, and here nothing matches. Coming back empty says more about the size of the subject than about how hard the searcher looked.

The inability to grasp is itself grasping: reaching the limit is the knowing Al-Ghazali quotes this old line whenever the mind runs out of room. Someone who has thought hard about God hits a wall and usually reads it as their own dullness or weak faith. Hitting that wall is the result, and the person stops feeling foolish and starts feeling the size of what they were reaching for.