Psalms 148:3 · World English Bible
Psalms 148:3 Meaning Praise Him
Praise him, sun and moon! Praise him, all you shining stars!
What does Psalms 148:3 mean?
Tasbīḥ: Glorifying God The Quran states that everything in existence glorifies God, though we miss how it does so. Calling out to things that cannot answer can feel like talking to yourself, or like starting something alone.
From the Sufism reading below.
Psalms 148:3 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Sufism
SUFISM
Sufism
Tasbīḥ: Glorifying God The Quran states that everything in existence glorifies God, though we miss how it does so. Calling out to things that cannot answer can feel like talking to yourself, or like starting something alone. Under this teaching, a person joins a chorus already going, arriving late rather than beginning it.
Āyāt: Signs In Quranic language, everything made stands as a pointer back to its maker. Attention easily stops at a beautiful object and settles there, and then the wonder has nowhere to go. Reading things as signs keeps the looking in motion: the eye rests on something bright, and the heart travels past it to whoever put it there.
Nūr: Light Al-Ghazali held that anything shining does so on loan, and that God alone is light to begin with. A person praising bright things can slide into worshipping them, or swing the other way and call them burning matter and nothing more. Ghazali holds both together: the brightness is worth marveling at, and it belongs to someone else.
Tajallī: Self-disclosure Ibn Arabi describes God showing something of Himself in every form, and never showing the same thing twice. That meets the worry that praise is a routine we repeat while the world stays flat and mechanical. Each thing carries a trace nothing else carries, so many voices add up to more than one voice said over and over.
Insān kāmil: The complete human being Ibn Arabi taught that a human gathers in one place what the rest of creation carries in scattered pieces. Next to things vast and old, one voice can seem too small to be worth adding to the pile. In his account, the mute praise of everything else finally becomes words in the one creature that knows what it is saying.
Sufism lensGo deeper in the app
Sufism lens
Live Psalms 148:3 today
- Step outside tonight before bed and look up for one full minute, phone in your pocket. Let the looking go past the sky instead of stopping at it.
- When you see something beautiful today, say it out loud to whoever is near you instead of photographing it. Shared wonder goes further than a saved image.
- On your commute or in a long line, pick one thing in view that you did not make and would not know how to make. Let it be bigger than your to-do list for a moment.
When something stops me in my tracks, do I let the wonder keep going, or does it end at the thing?
The same truth in other traditions
Tao Te Ching 25
Heaven follows the Tao, the earth follows heaven, and the human follows the earth. Each great thing is pointing past itself to what it came from.
Upanishads
The sun shines, but not by its own light. All brightness is borrowed from what shines behind it.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
Marcus looked up at the stars and said to picture yourself running with them, since that washes the grime of earthly life off you. The point of looking up was never the lights themselves.
Free · No account needed
Read all of Psalms 148 through 17 lenses
Lensightful opens every verse of the Bible through the traditions you choose. Save readings, ask a follow-up question, and get one verse a day.
Get Lensightful on the App Store