Praising God in Life and Death

“It is not the dead who praise the Lord, nor any of those descending into the silence of death. But we will bless the Lord, both now and forever. Hallelujah!”

‭‭Psalms‬ ‭115‬:‭17‬-‭18‬ ‭CSB‬‬

“For the dead cannot praise you; they cannot raise their voices in praise. Those who go down to the grave can no longer hope in your faithfulness. Only the living can praise you as I do today. Each generation tells of your faithfulness to the next.”

‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭38‬:‭18‬-‭19‬ ‭NLT‬‬

Staring his death in the face, Hezekiah prayed and wept before the Lord and asked for more time. (2 Kings 20) 

For reasons that we don’t understand, God granted Hezekiah his request. It’s a mistake to see his prayer as a magical formula for extending life or to accessing God’s healing, but we can take a significant lesson from what happens next.

After Hezekiah is healed, he offers another prayer to God, recorded in Isaiah 38, “for the dead cannot praise you; they cannot raise their voices in praise…only the living can praise you as I do today.”

This is not a declaration of the absence of Heaven—it’s poetic language, and we expect poetic language to be at times imprecise and to use imagery more than it uses text-book type language. Hezekiah is not teaching that there is no such thing as Heaven where we praise the Lord. Indeed, Scripture, which does not contradict itself, says many times that the people of God will praise Him in Heaven in His presence forever.

So what is Hezekiah’s point? It’s in the last half of the last sentence - “as I do today.”

Hezekiah is making a powerful claim. We, the living, have a unique responsibility to praise the Lord. Hezekiah had survived a fatal sickness by God’s mercy. He had looked death in the face. What was his response? To praise the Lord. Hezekiah had come out of his ordeal, his crisis, with the overwhelming sense of responsibility to praise the Lord.

Though we might not say that “the dead do not praise the Lord,” we can share this sense of calling that Hezekiah has - to praise the Lord while we live on this earth.

We will offer a different kind of praise to God in Heaven. In Heaven, we will know God fully even as we are fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:12) This should and will affect our praise. Perhaps it will be more pure. Perhaps it will be more unhindered.

But here, on earth, we have a unique responsibility to praise God while we live. While we are still in the presence of suffering. While we have experienced God’s deliverance, but our final deliverance is yet ongoing. We praise the Lord.

The dead do not praise God in the same way that we do. God has called us, those living on Earth, to praise Him in the way that we can now - as sufferers who are in the middle of our struggle and in desperate need of His sustaining help. 

The Psalmist in Psalm 115 makes a very similar point. “We will bless the Lord, both now and forever more,” says the psalmist. As long as God continues to deliver us from our own death, we will continue to praise Him. As long as we have life on this earth and breath that we draw by the grace of God, we will continue to praise Him.

When we stare death in the face, it’s a reminder to us of this promise - that we still have a calling to praise the Lord.

And when we lie in death, as Hezekiah and the psalmist eventually did, we will praise the Lord for all time. We will see Him face to face and we will praise Him with a perfection that we couldn’t have hoped to achieve on Earth. But we will have spent our lives practicing. Then our faith will become sight.

Many of us will stare death in the face before our time comes to die, whether it’s the death of our loved ones or our own death. Even before this happens to us, let us praise the Lord. Let us worship Him fully. Let us praise Him for what He has done for us, and let us teach the generations yet unborn to praise Him also, for all the things that He has done for us.

I don’t know why God chooses to give some life, like Hezekiah, and to allow death to come too soon to so many others. But we can use the looming presence of death as a reminder to praise God. He is worthy of our praise no matter what happens. When we praise Him in the middle of our crisis, we are offering Him something beautiful. We do war against the enemy by praising God in the middle of what the enemy meant for evil. God will overcome all our suffering at the end of all things, but while we wait for final deliverance and the opportunity to perfectly praise Him, we praise Him now.

These kinds of teachings and these kinds of moments in our lives help to recenter our priorities. If we will let Him, God will remind us that what we’re meant for on Earth is to praise God. When disaster comes, there’s an opportunity for the most important things to emerge from the clutter of the every day. God wants to teach us to make praise rise to the top. That doesn’t mean we don’t have grief or pain in the middle of the situations we’re in, but it does mean that God can grow this beautiful thing out of what’s happening to us: a heart that praises God no matter what.