Psalm 102: The Afflicted One Who Laid the Foundations of the Earth

Christ the Creator in the Prayer of the Afflicted

The official heading printed over Psalm 102 already tells the reader what the psalm is about: “The psalmist offers a prayer of the afflicted. Zion will be built up when the Lord appears in His glory. Though the heaven and earth perish, the Lord who created them will endure forever.”

That last sentence is the doctrine the Church has placed on the page. Heaven and earth are created. They will perish. The Lord who made them will not. The New Testament then names that Lord. Hebrews 1 takes the creation lines of Psalm 102 and addresses them to the Son. Jesus Christ is the Creator.

Among the later psalms assigned to this week’s reading, several are justly famous. Psalm 110 presents the Lord as King and Priest after the order of Melchizedek. Psalm 118 gives us the rejected stone and the cry “Save now.” Psalm 119 is the great acrostic love song to the Word of God. Psalm 102 does not announce itself with those same banners. It begins as a prayer of a crushed man. That is why it is so often passed over. It is also why it is one of the most astonishing witnesses to Jesus Christ as Creator in the entire Psalter.

The same voice that says, “My days are consumed like smoke,” is the voice of the One who “of old hast laid the foundation of the earth.” Real human anguish and the unchanging glory of the Maker meet in one Person. That is the gospel hiding in a prayer that looks, at first glance, like nothing more than sorrow.

Scripture is a unified tapestry. The God who spoke the world into being, who judged that world in the days of Noah, who stretched out the heavens, and who called Abraham is Jesus Christ. Psalm 102 belongs in that tapestry. It was written for the generation to come. We are that generation.

A Prayer of the Afflicted

English Bibles print a heading above Psalm 102. In the Hebrew text that heading is part of the psalm itself:

תְּפִלָּה לְעָנִי כִי־יַעֲטֹף וְלִפְנֵי יְהוָה יִשְׁפֹּךְ שִׂיחוֹ

Tefillah le‘ani ki-ya‘atof, velifnei YHWH yishpokh sicho.

“A Prayer of the afflicted, when he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the LORD.”

Four Hebrew words set the entire reading.

Tefillah means prayer, petition, the act of coming before God with empty hands. This is not a hymn of triumph. It is a plea.

Ani means poor, lowly, bowed down. The word belongs to those who have no leverage left except prayer. It is the same family of language Jesus used when He said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” The speaker of Psalm 102 is not a man managing his image. He is a man at the end of himself.

Ya‘atof means to faint, to languish, to wrap oneself as one collapsing inward. The sufferer is not merely sad. He is failing.

Siach is complaint, meditation, the pouring out of inner speech. This is not polished liturgy. It is the heart emptied before God.

The psalm has often been listed among the seven “penitential psalms.” That label is weak. There is no confession of personal sin anywhere in these verses. The wound is affliction, wrath borne, days cut short, and Zion in ruins. Derek Kidner was right to say the psalm has been misnamed. It is the cry of the afflicted righteous one, not the cry of a man cataloguing his own guilt.

Read that title first every time. If you skip it, you will treat the opening verses as generic sadness and miss the voice that Hebrews later identifies with the Son.

The Shape of the Poem

Hebrew poetry works by contrast more than by Western outline. Psalm 102 turns on one great “But You.” The structure is simple and devastating.

The first movement is the afflicted one (verses 1–11).The second movement is the LORD who sits forever and rebuilds Zion (verses 12–22).The third movement returns to cut-off days and then lifts the eyes to the unchanging Creator (verses 23–28).

That movement from faintness to eternity is not an editorial accident. It is the theology of the psalm. Human days are a stretched shadow. The LORD’s throne is not. Between those two facts stands Zion, the appointed time, and a people yet to be created.

“Hear My Prayer, O LORD”

The prayer opens with urgency that anyone who has walked through a dark night will recognize.

“Hear my prayer, O LORD, and let my cry come unto thee. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily.”

The fear is not merely pain. The fear is a hidden face. In Scripture the shining of God’s face is blessing (Numbers 6:24–26). The hiding of His face is the deepest wound a covenant people can name. The psalmist does not ask first for changed circumstances. He asks for God not to turn away.

Then the images come in a flood of their own. Days vanish like smoke. Bones burn like a hearth. The heart is struck and withers like grass. The speaker forgets to eat his bread. From the voice of his groaning, his bone cleaves to his flesh. He is like a pelican of the wilderness, like an owl of the desert, like a sparrow alone upon the housetop. Enemies reproach him all the day. Those who are mad against him swear by him. Ashes become his bread. His drink is mixed with weeping.

None of this is decorative. Hebrew poetry uses creation to tell the truth about the inner man. Smoke, hearth, grass, wilderness birds, and a lone sparrow on a roof are not random pictures. They are the world after judgment: dry, burned, isolated, unfit for ordinary life. Anyone who has stood in a desert canyon or walked a storm-stripped shoreline already knows this language. The earth itself can look like a prayer of the afflicted.

Then comes the line that explains the rest:

“Because of thine indignation and thy wrath: for thou hast lifted me up, and cast me down.”

Hebrew:

כִּי נְשָׂאתַנִי וַתַּשְׁלִיכֵנִי

“You lifted me up and You threw me down.”

Elevation, then casting away. If the speaker is only an anonymous exile after the fall of Jerusalem, the line still hurts. Israel had been lifted among the nations and then thrown down. If the speaker is also the Messiah in His humiliation, the line becomes Gethsemane and the cross. He was lifted up before Israel as the hoped-for King. He was then cast down under wrath that was not His own.

“My days are like a shadow that declineth; and I am withered like grass.”

The first movement ends there. No resolution yet. Only a dying man and a God whose indignation he does not pretend to manage.

“But Thou, O LORD, Shalt Endure for Ever”

The second movement begins with the hinge of the whole psalm:

וְאַתָּה יְהוָה לְעוֹלָם תֵּשֵׁב

“But thou, O LORD, shalt endure for ever; and thy remembrance unto all generations.”

Human days are smoke. The LORD sits. That contrast is the beginning of hope. The psalmist does not first feel better and then talk about God. He talks about God while he still feels like grass, and that is what keeps him from dissolving.

From the eternal throne the prayer looks at Zion:

“Thou shalt arise, and have mercy upon Zion: for the time to favour her, yea, the set time, is come. For thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof.”

Two Hebrew words for time matter here. Et is time as occasion, the ripe moment. Moed is appointed time, the kind of time God sets on His calendar, the word used for sacred seasons and for the meetings God Himself schedules. The restoration of Zion is not a human project that might get around to succeeding. It is a date on the Lord’s book.

The servants of the LORD love her stones and pity her dust. That is not sentimentality. After the Babylonian destruction, the stones of the temple and the city were rubble. To love those stones was to refuse the world’s conclusion that the story was over. Anyone who has walked the ruins of a biblical site knows the feeling. Dust is not nothing when the covenant still stands.

The result of the Lord’s arising is worldwide:

“So the heathen shall fear the name of the LORD, and all the kings of the earth thy glory. When the LORD shall build up Zion, he shall appear in his glory.”

Zion rebuilt and the glory appearing belong together. The psalm will not let us separate the Lord’s house from the Lord’s face. He does not send a memo of encouragement from a distance. He appears.

He will regard the prayer of the destitute. The Hebrew word arar pictures the stripped, the bare, the one left without covering. He will not despise their prayer. The God who sits forever is not embarrassed by weak voices.

Written for the Generation to Come

Then comes the sentence that reaches across the centuries and takes hold of the reader:

“This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the LORD.”

Hebrew:

תִּכָּתֵב זֹאת לְדוֹר אַחֲרוֹן וְעַם נִבְרָא יְהַלֶּל־יָהּ

Tikkatev zot ledor acharon, ve‘am nivra yehallel-Yah.

“This shall be written for a later generation, and a people created shall praise Yah.”

Nivra is the Niphal of bara, the same verb as Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning God created.” A people created. Not merely assembled from leftover tribes. Called into being. The psalm already looks past present ruin to a future congregation brought forth by the same power that made the heavens and the earth.

The short name Yah is the intense, compressed form of the divine Name. It is the Name inside “Hallelujah.” The created people do not praise an idea. They praise the LORD.

Elder Bruce R. McConkie applied this verse with characteristic directness. He said that by the mouth of an ancient prophet the Lord sent a message to us: “This shall be written for the generation to come”; it is sent to “the people which shall be created,” to a people who “shall praise the Lord.” “We are that people,” he continued, “a people who once again receive revelation, a people to whom God has given anew the fullness of His everlasting gospel, in consequence of which we praise His holy name forever.”

The Hebrew will also bear a wider reading that does not compete with that application. Every generation formed by grace becomes the audience for which this prayer was copied. You are not eavesdropping on a private exile’s journal. You are the later generation the text had in mind.

Why will they praise Him? Because He looked down from the height of His sanctuary. From heaven the LORD beheld the earth, “to hear the groaning of the prisoner; to loose those that are appointed to death.” The Hebrew calls them bene temutah, sons of death. He hears the groan of the bound and opens the way for those already marked to die. The purpose is “that they may declare the name of the LORD in Zion, and his praise in Jerusalem; when the people are gathered together, and the kingdoms, to serve the LORD.”

The movement is complete: one faint man, then Zion, then the nations. The personal cry becomes a missionary hope without ever becoming vague.

Strength Broken in the Way

The third movement does something honest. After the great vision of Zion and the gathered kingdoms, the psalmist is still dying.

“He weakened my strength in the way; he shortened my days. I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days: thy years are throughout all generations.”

Hope has not canceled frailty. The appointed time for Zion can be sure, and a man’s days can still feel cut off. Scripture never asks us to pretend otherwise. The faith of this psalm is not the denial of withered grass. It is the refusal to let withered grass have the last word.

What has the last word is the Creator:

“Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end. The children of thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall be established before thee.”

Hebrew of the climax:

וְאַתָּה הוּא וּשְׁנוֹתֶיךָ לֹא יִתָּמּוּ

Ve’attah hu, ushnotekha lo yittammu.

“But You are He, and Your years will not be finished.”

Attah hu is more than “You exist.” It is identity language: You are the Same One. Isaiah uses related speech for the LORD who says “I am He.” Creation is a garment. Garments wear out. The One who wears them, or rather the One who changes them, does not. The heavens He made will be folded. He will not be folded with them.

The psalm ends not with the sufferer’s death but with a lineage standing before the Unchanging One. Children of servants. Seed established. The story goes on because He goes on.

“Of Old Hast Thou Laid the Foundation of the Earth”

This is the doctrinal heart of the psalm. Everything before it is the cry of a dying man. Everything after it is the stability of the people who belong to the Creator. The middle claim is creation itself.

“Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands.”

Hebrew does not speak here of a universe that assembled itself. The earth has a foundation because someone laid it. The heavens are “the work of thy hands,” maaseh yadeka. Hands imply a Maker. The same hands that, in the gospel record, would be pierced are first the hands that formed the sky.

Then the psalm says something our age desperately needs to hear. The heavens and the earth are not everlasting in themselves.

“They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed.”

Creation is a garment. Garments are made. Garments wear out. Garments are folded and changed by the One who owns them. A cosmos that “waxes old” is a created cosmos. It had a beginning. It is not self-existent. It is not a machine that needed no Mind. It is a work of His hands, and He will change it.

That is why accidental-origin stories fail this psalm. If the heavens made themselves over endless ages, they do not “wax old like a garment” under the hands of a Lord who remains. If there is no Creator, there is no One left standing when the garment is folded. Psalm 102 will not grant that option. The world perishes. He endures. Therefore He made it.

The climax is identity, not poetry:

“But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.”

Attah hu. You are He. The Creator is not a force that evolves with the universe. He is the Same. Malachi will say it later: “For I am the LORD, I change not.” Hebrews will say it of Jesus: “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” Psalm 102 said it first of the One whose hands made the heavens.

Latter-day Prophets and This Psalm

Latter-day Saint use of Psalm 102 is concentrated and clear. The prophets have not treated the psalm as a relic. They have read it as a word to our generation and as a witness that the Lord of Zion is the Lord of creation.

The chapter heading in the official Latter-day Saint Bible is itself a prophetic summary: Zion will be built when the Lord appears in His glory, and though heaven and earth perish, the Lord who created them will endure forever. That heading already joins the two themes the psalm refuses to separate: the appearing of the Lord and the endurance of the Creator.

Elder Bruce R. McConkie is the apostle who placed this psalm most directly on the latter-day Church. In April 1977 he stood in general conference, drawing on an address first given in Lima, Peru, and said:

“By the mouth of an ancient prophet, and from the lips of one who lived 3,000 years ago, the Lord sent a message to us. The holy man of old who spake as he was moved upon by the Holy Ghost said these words: ‘This shall be written for the generation to come’; it is sent to ‘the people which shall be created,’ to a people who ‘shall praise the Lord.’ (Ps. 102:18.)

“We are that people, a people who once again receive revelation, a people to whom God has given anew the fulness of his everlasting gospel, in consequence of which we praise his holy name forever.

“The message which has come to us is that the Lord will ‘have mercy upon Zion: for the time to favour her, yea, the set time, is come.’ The message is that ‘when the Lord shall build up Zion, he shall appear in his glory.’ (Ps. 102:13, 16.)”

McConkie did not stop at comfort. He read the psalm as a commission. The set time has come. Zion is to be built. The Lord will appear in His glory. The people created to praise Yah are not a vague future crowd. They are a covenant people who have received the gospel again.

Notice what he selected. He did not first quote the creation verses. He quoted the verses that name us, favor Zion, and promise the appearing. That is not a denial of Christ as Creator. It is the pastoral use of the psalm: the Creator who will outlast the heavens has a set time to rebuild Zion, and He wrote the psalm for the last-days people who would praise Him.

The prophets have been equally plain that the Creator of Psalm 102 is Jesus Christ.

President Russell M. Nelson, writing of the Savior’s titles, placed Creator first among the mighty works of the Son. “Under the direction of the Father, Jesus bore the responsibility of Creator.” He cited John 1:3, Doctrine and Covenants 93:8–10, Helaman 14:12, and the Father’s word to Moses: “Worlds without number have I created; and I also created them for mine own purpose; and by the Son I created them, which is mine Only Begotten” (Moses 1:33). The same Lord who laid the foundation of the earth in Psalm 102 is the Only Begotten by whom the Father made the worlds.

In his conference address “The Creation,” then-Elder Nelson taught that the Creation itself testifies of a Creator. “We cannot disregard the divine in the Creation.” Grand as earth is, it is one of many creations. “By the Son I created them.” The psalm’s “work of thy hands” is the work of that Son.

Elder Mark E. Petersen, in the April 1983 address “Creator and Savior,” asked the question Psalm 102 answers and then refused the modern substitute. “And who was the Creator? Our Heavenly Father declares that it was His own Beloved Son who accomplished the mighty task.” He quoted John 1:3, Colossians 1:16–17, Moses 1:33, and the Lord’s own words to Joseph Smith: “Behold, I am Jesus Christ … who created the heavens and the earth” (D&C 14:9). Then the brother of Jared heard the same voice: “Behold, I am he who was prepared from the foundation of the world to redeem my people. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. … Never have I shown myself unto man whom I created” (Ether 3:14–16). Petersen’s conclusion is the conclusion of Psalm 102 applied to our century: “Christ is the Creator! Shall we not accept His word in preference to uninspired theories of men? Probably the greatest challenge to belief in Christ today is the fast-spreading denial that He is the Creator.”

The 1916 doctrinal exposition of the First Presidency and the Twelve, “The Father and the Son,” taught that Jehovah, who is Jesus Christ, is called Father as Creator, “the Father of the heavens and of the earth, and all things that in them are.” When Psalm 102 says the heavens are the work of His hands, Restoration doctrine names those hands. They are the hands of Jehovah, the Son of Elohim, the executive of the Father in the work of creation.

King Benjamin had already said it on the American continent: He shall be called “Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning” (Mosiah 3:8). Samuel the Lamanite said the same: “Jesus Christ, … the Son of God, the Father of heaven and of earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning” (Helaman 14:12). Jacob testified that “the earth was created by the power of his word” (Jacob 4:9). The psalm and the Book of Mormon are not two religions. They are one testimony that the Afflicted One is the Maker.

Doctrine and Covenants 38 adds the first-person seal: “Thus saith the Lord your God, even Jesus Christ, the Great I AM, Alpha and Omega. … I am the same which spake, and the world was made, and all things came by me.” Psalm 102 looks up at the heavens and says, “Thy hands.” Section 38 hears the Lord say, “I spoke, and they came.”

That is why Hebrews 1 is not an awkward Christian overlay on a Jewish lament. It is the same identification the Restoration makes on every page: the LORD of the Old Testament, the Creator of heaven and earth, is Jesus Christ.

Psalm 102 in the Book of Praises

The Psalter is not a random hymnal. Psalm 102 sits in Book IV (Psalms 90–106), after the collapse that ends Book III. Psalm 89 has asked, in effect, what became of the Davidic covenant when the crown was cast down. Psalm 90 answers with Moses and the eternity of God. Psalms 101 and 103 are the only Davidic headings in Book IV. Between them stands this prayer of the afflicted.

Canonically, the afflicted speaker answers the wound of Psalm 89 by clinging to the God who remains when kings fail and cities fall. Lament does not disappear. It is gathered into the confession that YHWH still builds Zion.

The poem also drinks from the restoration language of Isaiah: looking down from heaven, loosing prisoners, a people created, Zion rebuilt, nations coming to the Name. That language is not a late academic theory imposed on the text. It is the Bible interpreting the Bible. The God who created in the beginning is the God who creates a people after judgment. The Flood itself taught that pattern. The world that then was perished. The same Lord brought Noah’s family out and began again. Psalm 102 sings that pattern over Zion and, by the Spirit’s later witness, over Christ.

What Hebrews Does with This Psalm

Hebrews 1 strings Old Testament texts to show that the Son is greater than angels. After calling Him Son from Psalm 2 and God from Psalm 45, the writer says:

“And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands: They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.” (Hebrews 1:10–12)

That is Psalm 102:25–27. The Father speaks creation language to the Son. The afflicted prayer becomes a confession that Jesus made the world.

Several facts keep the interpretation honest and strong.

The Greek Psalter supplies the vocative kyrie, “O Lord,” in the creation line. The Masoretic Hebrew of that particular sentence does not print the divine Name there. The Septuagint does. Hebrews follows that Greek form, places “You” first for emphasis, and addresses the Son as the Lord who founded the earth. The same Greek word kyrios translates YHWH earlier in the psalm. The writer is not playing a parlor trick with pronouns. He is identifying the Son with the LORD to whom the afflicted one prayed.

Hebrews also sharpens the garment image. The Son will roll the heavens up like a cloak. Creation is not only old. It is a garment in His hands. That prepares the later argument of Hebrews. Created things can be shaken. The Son cannot. “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8) is Psalm 102’s attah hu spoken in the church’s own language.

Who is speaking to whom in the original poem? In the Hebrew flow, verses 24–27 can be read as the sufferer still addressing God. Some hear in the Greek of the preceding verses a reply from God to the sufferer. Either way, once Hebrews applies the Creator lines to the Son, the sufferer of verses 1–11 is no longer only an exile in Babylon. He is also the Incarnate Son, whose days were shortened, who was lifted up and cast down, who cried that the hour might pass, and who is nevertheless the One by whom the worlds were made.

Luke 24:44 is the governing rule. The risen Lord said the Psalms speak of Him. Psalm 102 is one of the places where that claim is not a homiletical stretch. The New Testament writer places the psalm inside the identity of Jesus.

Other threads belong in the same file even when they are not formal quotations. The hidden face and the unanswered day of trouble sit beside Gethsemane. The sons of death set free sit beside the prison language Jesus read from Isaiah in Luke 4. A people created to praise Yah sits beside the people formed to show forth His praises. Zion rebuilt and nations gathering sit beside the city of the living God and the New Jerusalem, where the former things pass away and He who sits on the throne makes all things new.

The Theology the Psalm Will Not Let Us Separate

Christ is truly man. The first eleven verses will not allow a distant, untouchable Messiah. He knows smoke-like days, sleepless roofs, taunt, ashes, and the sensation of being thrown down by the very God He trusts. Hebrews 5:7–8 is the prose of this poetry: prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears, heard in that He feared, learning obedience by the things which He suffered. If your Savior cannot pray Psalm 102, He cannot save the people who have to pray it.

Christ is truly God, and He is the Creator. The last movement will not allow a merely exalted creature. The hands that were pierced are the hands that founded the earth. He is not one item inside the cosmos. He is the One who will fold the cosmos. “Thou art the same” is not a motto for coping. It is the truth of His being. The Son does not age with the garment He made.

John wrote, “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” Paul wrote that by Him were all things created, visible and invisible, and that by Him all things consist. The Father told Moses that worlds without number were created by the Son. Psalm 102 stands in that same line. “Of old” is Genesis language. “The work of thy hands” is Maker language. “They shall perish, but thou shalt endure” is the difference between the creature and the Creator.

This is why the psalm matters for the debates of our age. The heavens are the work of His hands. They are not the accidental remainder of a beginning that needed no Beginner. They will perish. He will endure. A universe that wears out like clothing is exactly the universe Scripture describes: created in the beginning, sustained by His word, judged in the days of Noah, and destined to be changed by the same Lord. Stories that treat the cosmos as practically everlasting, and the Creator as optional, collide with this psalm. Elder Petersen was right. The great challenge of our time is the denial that Christ is the Creator. Psalm 102 will not grant that denial. The garment is wearing out because it was made. The Maker is not wearing out because He was not made.

Wrath and mercy meet in one Person. “Thou hast lifted me up and cast me down” and “Thou shalt arise and have mercy upon Zion” belong in the same prayer. The afflicted one bears indignation. The same Lord arises to favor Zion at the appointed time. That is the pattern of redemption. The Servant is struck, and Zion is comforted because He was struck.

Redemption is new creation. The people who praise Yah are an am nivra. Salvation is not only the repair of an old city. It is God calling a people into being, as He called the world into being. The Flood already preached that sermon in water and wood. Judgment ended a world. Grace began another. Psalm 102 sings the same music over Zion and over every soul the Lord creates anew.

Hope is written forward. The psalm knows it is not finished in the singer’s lifetime. That is mercy for every reader who will not see with his own eyes the full rebuilding he longs for. The appointed time will come. The people will be created. The Name will be praised. The seed will be established.

Zion is not a metaphor you must erase, and not a slogan you must inflate. The psalm loves her stones and her dust. It also expects the nations to fear the Name when the LORD builds her and appears in glory. In Christ the rebuilding has begun in His body, the living temple. It is not exhausted until He appears and the city whose builder and maker is God is unveiled. Keep both the concreteness and the fulfillment. Do not flatten Zion into a mood. Do not ignore the Son in whom the appointed time arrived.

The Same Yesterday, Today, and Forever

Psalm 110 will give you King and Priest. Psalm 118 will give you the rejected stone and the cry “Save now.” Psalm 119 will put a lamp to your feet. Psalm 102 gives you something quieter and, in its own way, more startling. The faint man on the roof is the Lord who laid the earth’s foundation.

That is why this psalm should not stay overlooked. It is one of the places Scripture lets us hear both the cry and the answer, and discover that they meet in Jesus Christ the Creator. He was lifted up and cast down. He is the Same. Of old He laid the foundation of the earth. The heavens are the work of His hands. He will change them like a garment. He will not be changed with them. He hears the groaning of the prisoner and looses the sons of death. He writes His mercy for the generation to come. When He builds up Zion, He shall appear in His glory.

We are that generation. The people which shall be created shall praise the LORD. Let everything that hath breath join them. The Afflicted One is the Creator. His years will have no end.