Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised; His greatness is unsearchable.
Parallel translations
- WEB Great is Yahweh, and greatly to be praised! His greatness is unsearchable.
- KJV Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable.
- NKJV Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; And His greatness is unsearchable.
- NASB Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised; And His greatness is unsearchable.
- NLT Great is the Lord! He is most worthy of praise! No one can measure his greatness.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
God is great and worthy of great praise, and His greatness cannot be fully searched out. Our worship can never exhaust how worthy He is.
Overview
David declares both the magnitude of God's greatness and its incomprehensibility; the more we know Him, the more remains beyond us. This 'unsearchable' greatness humbles human pride and fuels endless adoration. Paul echoes the wonder of God's unsearchable riches now revealed in Christ (Romans 11:33; Ephesians 3:8).
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 11
- Ps 147:5Great is our Lord, and mighty in power; His understanding has no limit.
- Job 5:9the One who does great and unsearchable things, wonders without number.
- Rom 11:33O, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and untraceable His ways!
- Isa 40:28Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary; His understanding is beyond searching out.
- Job 9:10He does great things beyond searching out, and wonders without number.
- Ps 139:6Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
- Ps 48:1A song. A Psalm of the sons of Korah. Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised in the city of our God, His holy mountain.
- Ps 96:4For great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; He is to be feared above all gods.
- Rev 15:3and they sang the song of God’s servant Moses and of the Lamb: “Great and wonderful are Your works, O Lord God Almighty! Just and true are Your ways, O King of the nations!
- Job 11:7–9Can you fathom the deep things of God or discover the limits of the Almighty?
- Job 26:14Indeed, these are but the fringes of His ways; how faint is the whisper we hear of Him! Who then can understand the thunder of His power?”
Themes, concepts, people & topics
Resources, by level
Commentaries & study tools
Free animated overview and word-study videos for this book.
Sermons and teaching on this passage from across YouTube.
Clear, readable, conservative exposition — the best free place to start on any passage.
Matthew Henry, Barnes, Gill, the Pulpit Commentary, Ellicott, Cambridge, and more — stacked on one page for this exact verse.
The beloved Puritan exposition of this whole book — warm, devotional, and verse by verse (free, CCEL).
Hebrew/Greek interlinear, word definitions, and cross-references for this verse.
Christ at the center
The Psalms are Christ's own prayer book and a gallery of his portraits — the suffering one of Psalm 22, the risen Lord of Psalm 16, the priest-king of Psalm 110, the Son to whom the nations are given.
How Psalms 145:3 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
Each word below is tagged with its Strong’s number — tap one to see the underlying Hebrew word, its meaning, and every verse that uses it.