“Psa. 113:4     The LORD is high above all nations,

                        and his glory above the heavens!

⁵           Who is like the LORD our God,

                        who is seated on high,

⁶           who looks far down

                        on the heavens and the earth?

⁷           He raises the poor from the dust

                        and lifts the needy from the ash heap,

⁸           to make them sit with princes,

                        with the princes of his people.

⁹           He gives the barren woman a home,

                        making her the joyous mother of children.

             Praise the LORD!” (Psalm 113, English Standard Version)

We have a way-beyond-the-starry-heavens God, who is also incredibly down to earth. Not just down to earth, but down in the dust and the ashes with us.

I found Derek Kidner’s words even more energizing than the coffee I drank this morning. I quote him at length.

“‘Far down …’

The challenge of verse 5, Who is like the Lord our God?, meets us, expressed or implied, throughout the Bible. It is put eloquently and at length in Isaiah 40:12-41:4, but it has its witnesses everywhere, even in the names of men and angels (Micaiah, ‘who is like Yahweh?’; Michael, ‘who is like God?’). Here this transcendence is memorably  [Vol 16: Psa, p. 437]  suggested by the perspective of verse 6, where the very heavens are almost out of sight below him. He is, as JB [The Jerusalem Bible] puts it, ‘enthroned so high, he needs to stoop to see the sky and earth!’²³

7ff. Yet he is anything but aloof. Verses 7 and 8 anticipate the great downward and upward sweep of the gospel, which was to go even deeper and higher than the dust and the throne of princes: from the grave to the throne of God (Eph. 2:5f.).

            Consciously, however, these verses look back to the song of Hannah, which they quote almost exactly (cf. 7, 8a with 1 Sam. 2:8). Hence the sudden reference to the childless woman who becomes a mother (9), for this was Hannah’s theme. With such a background the psalm not only makes its immediate point, that the Most High cares for the most humiliated, but brings to mind the train of events that can follow from such an intervention. Hannah’s joy became all Israel’s; Sarah’s became the world’s. And the song of Hannah was to be outshone one day by the Magnificat. The spectacular events of our verses 7 and 8 are not greater than this domestic one; the most important of them have sprung from just such an origin.

            But it would distort the psalm, and its values, to make verse 9 simply a means to an end. The psalm finishes with what seems an anticlimax, and it must not be disguised. It is here that God’s glory most sharply differs from man’s: a glory that is equally at home ‘above the heavens’ (4) and at the side of one forlorn person.

            There is plainly much more than rhetoric in the question of verse 5, ‘Who is like the Lord our God?’”

Nina Totenberg, long-time NPR reporter, tells a wonderful story about her father. Roman Totenberg was a world-renowned violinist and teacher, who lived to be 101 years old. He was teaching students—quite literally—on his death bed. Nina Totenberg tells the story of her father being asked by Franklin Roosevelt to perform at the White house.

Her dad “. . . had a few weeks earlier played for the king of Italy, and that affair was so formal that he had to borrow a top hat and cape from the Polish ambassador, and back off the stage so as not to offend the king. In contrast, after the performance at the White House, Eleanor Roosevelt served dinner in the family quarters, serving each of the performers from a sitting position on the floor in front of a table. As Totenberg would later recount, he thought to himself as he compared the two events, ‘This is the country for me!’” (https://www.npr.org/2012/05/08/152275442/roman-totenbergs-remarkable-life-and-death, accessed 11-07-2022)

A God so transcendent, yet so near to those who sit in the ashes—this is the God for me! And for you, too, I believe.