Psalms 135:5–7

Psalms 135:5 — "For I know that Yahweh is great"

The Hebrew verb yāda' ("to know") is crucial. This is not speculative theology but covenantal, experiential knowledge — the same verb used when Israel "knew" God through the Exodus events (cf. Exod 6:7). The psalmist is not offering a philosophical proposition but a personal testimony born of encounter. The comparative "great" (gādôl) is reinforced by the second half of the verse ("above all gods"), which frames Yahweh's greatness not in isolation but in explicit contrast with the pseudo-deities of surrounding nations (cf. Ps 95:3; 96:4). This is not polytheism qualified — it is a rhetorical demolition of false gods: they exist as objects of human projection, while Yahweh alone acts with sovereign freedom.

The liturgical setting of Psalm 135 (a Hallel psalm likely sung at the great Temple feasts, with its catchphrase Hallelujah bookending the whole) means this personal confession ("I know") is simultaneously a communal proclamation. The individual voice does not replace the congregation; it models the testimony that each Israelite — and each Catholic — is called to offer within the worshipping assembly.

Psalms 135:6 — "Whatever Yahweh pleased, that he has done"

This verse is one of Scripture's most concentrated expressions of divine omnipotence and freedom. The Hebrew kōl ʾăšer-ḥāpēṣ ʿāśāh — "all that he delighted/willed, he has done" — links God's action not to external compulsion, necessity, or fate but to His own delight (ḥāpēṣ, also rendered "pleasure" or "desire"). This word choice is theologically electric: God's acts flow from an interior disposition of love and joy, not from obligation. The scope is total — "in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps" (v. 6b, the verse's full form in the MT). Heaven and earth together constitute totality in Hebrew idiom; the addition of "seas and all deeps" (tĕhômôt) deliberately echoes the pre-creation chaos waters of Genesis 1:2, asserting that Yahweh's sovereignty extends even over the most primordial, unruly forces of the cosmos.

Psalms 135:7 — "He causes the clouds to rise from the ends of the earth"

The verse (which in the MT also includes lightning and wind: "He makes lightning for the rain; he brings forth wind from his storehouses") presents meteorological phenomena as direct instruments of divine governance. The image of "ends of the earth" (miqqĕṣēh hāʾāreṣ) emphasizes universal reach: Yahweh's creative activity is not localized to Canaan or Zion but extends to the uttermost horizons. The "storehouses" of wind (ʾôṣĕrôtāyw) draw on ancient Near Eastern cosmology that imagined cosmic warehouses from which God dispensed weather, a metaphor also used in Job 38:22 and Jer 10:13. The psalmist borrows this imagery not to affirm a primitive cosmology but to assert the personal, deliberate agency behind what might otherwise appear to be impersonal natural forces. Nothing in creation is self-running; everything is continuously upheld by Yahweh's active will.

Typological and Spiritual Senses

In the typological sense, the cloud imagery anticipates the pillar of cloud in the Exodus (Exod 13:21) and the cloud of the Transfiguration (Matt 17:5), both of which are theophanies — visible manifestations of God's presence and voice. The clouds of verse 7 thus prefigure the ways God veils and simultaneously reveals Himself in salvation history. In the allegorical sense, the Church Fathers read "the ends of the earth" as the nations called to worship, and the clouds rising as the apostolic preaching that carries the divine word to all peoples (cf. Isa 55:10–11). In the moral sense, the psalmist's "I know" challenges every believer to move from inherited religion to personal, tested faith.

Catholic tradition illuminates these verses with singular depth at several levels.

On Divine Omnipotence and Freedom (CCC 268–271): The Catechism teaches that "God is the sovereign master of his plan" and that "nothing is impossible with God" (CCC 276). Verse 6's assertion that God does "whatever he pleases" is the scriptural bedrock for this teaching. Crucially, the Catholic tradition — especially as articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 25) — insists that God's omnipotence is not arbitrary power but an expression of His perfect nature. Because God is Goodness itself, what He "pleases" is always and only good. There is no tension between divine freedom and divine love.

On Creation as Continuous (CCC 301): Verse 7, with its present-tense participles (mַעֲלֶה, "he causes to rise"), reflects what Catholic theology calls creatio continua — God's ongoing sustaining of the created order. The Catechism affirms: "God did not create the world and then leave it on its own" (CCC 301). Every rising cloud is, in this light, a sacramental sign of God's present, immanent care.

Church Fathers: St. Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos 135) reads the psalmist's personal knowledge of God's greatness as a call to interior transformation: "He who has not yet known God in the depths of his heart has only heard about Him with the outer ear." St. John Chrysostom sees in verse 7 an invitation to eucharistic wonder: the same God who orders the weather provides the Bread of Life. St. Athanasius, in Contra Gentes, invokes Yahweh's sovereign freedom over all creation as the decisive refutation of pagan fatalism: history has a Lord, not merely a mechanism.

On False Gods (CCC 2112–2114): The implicit contrast with the idols of the nations (vv. 15–18) frames verses 5–7 as an anti-idolatry confession. The Catechism's treatment of the first commandment draws precisely on this psalmic tradition when it warns that idolatry "perverts an innate sense of God" by substituting the creature for the Creator.

For a contemporary Catholic, these three verses offer a pointed corrective to two of modernity's most pervasive errors: the reduction of God to a private feeling, and the naturalistic habit of seeing the world as a closed, self-sufficient system.

Against the first error, verse 5's "I know" calls every Catholic to examine whether their faith rests on lived encounter — through Scripture, sacrament, prayer, and suffering — or merely on cultural inheritance. The psalmist's confidence is not arrogance; it is the fruit of attention.

Against the second, verse 7 invites us to a recovered sense of wonder before creation. The next time you see storm clouds build on the horizon, or feel wind shift before rain, the psalmist asks: can you perceive the hand of the living God in this? This is not naive supernaturalism but the contemplative gaze the Church calls for — seeing the world as creation, not merely as nature. In a culture saturated by meteorology apps and climate data, the Catholic is called to hold scientific understanding and doxological wonder together without collapse. The clouds still rise at God's word. Praise is still the only fully adequate response.