Psalm 125
We come this morning to the sixth of the psalms of ascent, Psalm 125. These psalms, 120 to 134 are psalms the Hebrew pilgrims sang as they made their way up to Jerusalem for the three annual festivals. Each psalm speaks to a part of the journey. Psalm 120 starts out with the theme of repentance, the beginning of any journey to God. Psalm 121 speaks about God’s providence in protecting us on our journey. Psalm 125 speaks about our security in God.
Security is a big issue here in Rabat. It is impossible to be unaware of the need for security while living here. I noticed this particularly when I returned to the US this past ten days. Ann picked me up at JFK airport in NY and we went to Newark airport in NJ to pick up my daughter Caitlin. We left my suitcase and computer in the car and went into the terminal to wait. I had a strong sense of uneasiness and finally figured out it was because the suitcase and computer were exposed, not in a concealed trunk. After just five months, I am conditioned to not leaving anything in the car so the window will not be smashed and the contents of the car taken.
Here in Rabat we have to have security bars on our windows, leave nothing in the car, and avoid keeping a wallet in the back pocket or even front pocket. My keys were taken out of my front jeans pocket during my first month in Rabat. Since that time, I have not carried a wallet with me.
Security is not only a modern concern. In Judges 5:6 in the Song of Deborah, we find this concern for security. “In the days of Shamgar, son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the roads were abandoned; travelers took to winding paths.” It was too dangerous to take the easiest and most direct route, so for security purposes, travelers took the winding paths that were less dangerous.
The pirates of Sale contributed to people’s feelings of insecurity in this part of the world.
Psalm 125, the sixth of the psalms of ascent, focuses on security. But it is security of a different sort and that is the security of our Christian lives. In Rabat it is a question of the security of my possessions. In Judges it was a question of the security of my life and health. In this psalm it is a question of the security of our spiritual life. Our possessions can be taken from us. Our health and life can be taken from us. Can our spiritual life, our relationship with God be taken from us?
In the first years that I was a Christian, I remember thinking about this. I had decided to follow Christ. I had decided to submit my will to his will. But the parable of the seeds talked about different kinds of soil. Some grew and then withered, some grew and bore good fruit. What kind of soil was I? Others had started going to church and then wandered away. Was I the kind of Christian that would grow and bear fruit? And then I had doubts about my faith. Was what I believed really true?
I thought about my life in this way: I was in the river of life. Some times my life was placid and idyllic, floating along in the quiet, gentle current of the river, observing the beauty of the scenery around me, the birds and flowers and trees. Then I would come into a set of rapids and get battered around, hitting rocks and being pushed under the water. In these periods of struggle I would look for answers to my questions about life.
It was during one of these rapids that God picked me up and set me on a rock. I accepted God’s gift of life, salvation.
What a relief to be able to stand and not be smashing into rocks and struggling to breathe. For the first time in my life I was able to have a broader, wider perspective of life, looking out at the rapids from the security of a rock. But then after a time, into my Christian life came doubts. Had I made a good decision to follow God? Did God really exist? Or had I just fooled myself into thinking there was a God? The rock upon which I was standing became perilously small and slippery.
As time has gone by and I have experienced more of life as a Christian than life as a non-Christian, the rock has become more stable. It has grown to be an island upon which I can relax and even large enough for me to invite others to join me. Although doubts still visit me, they no longer threaten the rock upon which I stand.
Psalm 125 talks about this kind of security, security that makes our Christian life not a precarious slippery rock, but a solid rock upon which we can relax.
Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion,
which cannot be shaken but endures forever.
2 As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the LORD surrounds his people
both now and forevermore.
As the mountains surround Jerusalem. Jerusalem is not in a bowl of mountains like Santiago, Chile or Mexico City, but it is in a range of mountains that offered it protection from invaders. The old city of Jerusalem sat on Mt. Zion. It was surrounded on all sides, except the north, by deep valleys. It was the south-eastern hill of Jerusalem.
As the pilgrims approached Jerusalem for the three yearly festivals, the image of Jerusalem in the distance inspired many spiritual lessons. The psalmist who wrote Psalm 122 used the well built walls of Jerusalem to talk about the unity of the body of worshipers. The psalmist who wrote Psalm 125 uses the image of Jerusalem sitting on top of Mt. Zion to talk about our security in our relationship with God.
As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the Lord surrounds his people both now and forevermore. The solidity and grandeur of the mountains around Jerusalem was impressive. An army of men could not move any of those mountains. They were permanent, placed where they were for all time. These mountains had always been there and they would always be there.
The psalmist makes the point that the Lord has that same kind of permanence. The Lord has always been with us and he will always be with us. As unshakeable as are the mountains, equally unshakeable is the Lord.
“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Psalm 46:1 We don’t have to call long distance for help and wait for help to arrive. God, our help, is with us, at our side. He is, as David said in Psalm 139, “behind and before” us. Jesus in John 17 in his high priestly prayer for us, prayed for our protection from the evil one.
Scripture is full of God’s assurance of his presence and protection. Listen to Isaiah:
But now, this is what the LORD says—
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have summoned you by name; you are mine.
2 When you pass through the waters,
I will be with you;
and when you pass through the rivers,
they will not sweep over you.
When you walk through the fire,
you will not be burned;
the flames will not set you ablaze.
3 For I am the LORD, your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior;
The Lord surrounds his people as the mountains surround Jerusalem which sits on unshakeable Mt. Zion. Both now and forevermore. That is security!
But if I am so secure, why do I sometimes feel so unsafe?
One threat to our security is our feelings of depression and doubt. The psalmist describes people of faith as those who cannot be moved. But we are moved. We wake one day full of enthusiasm and energy and the next day with a dull sense of drudgery. We are moved by sadness, celebrations, success and failure.
Eugene Peterson talks about the saw-toothed history of Israel. One day they were celebrating their crossing the Red Sea and escape from the Egyptians, the next they were grumbling in the desert because they missed the leeks and onions of Egypt. One day they were marching around Jericho and taking that city, the next they were having an orgy for a Canaanite deity. One day they were pledging their loyalty to Jesus in the upper room, the next they were running for their lives, denying they ever knew Jesus.
My own life is no different. I rejoice that God helped me to sell my company and find a place where he can use me and then despair because I have not found a villa. God provides for us at the right time and in the right way and we rejoice and then we despair because it does not seem that our next prayer has been answered in the way we want.
But our feelings do not alter in any way what is true. There are some beautiful mountains visible from Los Angeles in the United States. Unfortunately there is also smog. I visited Los Angeles many times on business trips and for my first few visits saw nothing but the city and the smog. Then one trip, I awoke in the morning and looked out the window of my hotel room and there they were, the San Gabriel Mountains. They had always been there. My not seeing them did not make them go away. The presence or absence of smog does nothing to change the presence of the mountains.
How we feel does not alter the reality of the presence of the Lord with us.
I have talked about this with friends over the past few days as I have thought about this sermon and I do not think I will ever be free from this saw-toothed existence. What I need to remember and what you need to remember is that despite how we feel on any given day, the Lord surrounds us as the mountains surround Jerusalem, both now and forevermore.
We need to choose to live secure lives because of the reality of God’s presence and care which we believe by faith. Despite how we feel on any given day or any given moment, God is by our side, behind us, in front of us, under us, over us.
We sometimes feel unsafe because of our feelings of depression and doubt. A second source of uncertainty is the pain and suffering we experience.
In our own little slice of the world, here at RPF, in the past month, we have seen Eckart Diehl taken from Rosewitha. The man who replaced my wife Ann at Princeton University Press saw his wife go into the hospital to check on some bruising she was experiencing and two weeks later she died. Angela’s baby died during her Caesarean delivery.
Unpleasant things happen to us and to those we love. We become like Damocles who, in Greek legend, was invited to a banquet and sat feasting surrounded by opulence and luxury. He suddenly looked up and saw a sword suspended by a single hair over his head.
Like Damocles, we realize we are only a hair-breadth from impending disaster. If such terrible things happen to friends, when will they happen to me?
I have five sisters, four brothers-in-law and fifteen nephews and nieces. My father and I have several times talked about the Damocles sword that hangs over our family. We have had no significant accidents, deaths, attacks. How long will we be protected from the things we read about every day in the newspaper and see on TV?
The psalmist knew this. If anything, the psalmist was more aware of impending disaster than we are. We are protected by excellent medical care, hospitals, medications, national armies and a world-wide media. The psalmist had none of these. Life was more difficult, more painful in his time than it is for us today. Why did the psalmist not lose confidence?
The answer is found in verse three of this psalm:
The scepter of the wicked will not remain
over the land allotted to the righteous,
for then the righteous might use
their hands to do evil.
The key word here is “remain”. The scepter of the wicked will not remain.
It is easy for me to despair. I look at the continent of Africa and I wonder where there is any hope for the countries of this continent. The corruption, promiscuity, disease, poverty, war and hunger overwhelms me.
I see the lives of the men and women from West Africa who are losing the opportunity to marry and have a family and my heart breaks. I see people trying to make a business go here in Morocco and being stymied and I don’t know what to do to help.
In the United States I see the pathetic materialism and voyeurism of the culture and it makes me sick. The biggest shows are “Who wants to be a Millionaire” in which if you answer a series of not terribly difficult questions, you can win a million dollars and “Survivor” in which sixteen people have been put on an island where every move they make is watched and each week, one person is voted off the island. The survivor gets a million dollars. These most popular shows are an indication of a sick culture, much like the falling Roman Empire where the most popular entertainment was going to the coliseums to watch people get torn apart by lions and bears.
If this evil was permanent, if there was no hope for God to send his Spirit and bring revival, then it would be too much for us to handle. We would give up and join with the evil.
But we will not be shaken because we believe that evil will not endure. There will come an end to evil. American culture will be transformed by Christian revival. The corruption and war in Africa will not last forever.
Over and over again in the history of the world evil has flourished, but only for a short time. Evil is always temporary. Evil will be utterly banished at the end of time when Jesus comes to claim his own.
We sometimes feel so unsafe because of our feelings of depression and doubt. We sometimes feel unsafe because of the pain and suffering we experience. Another threat is the fear of defection.
Can we lose our faith? I wrote a paper on this subject in seminary. The question is known as the Doctrine of Perseverence. Once saved, can we lose our salvation?
The Scriptures are full of assurances that we cannot lose our salvation, but there are exceptions. There is Judas, one of the hand-picked twelve disciples of Jesus who betrayed Jesus and hanged himself in despair. There are Hymenaeus and Alexander from I Timothy who, “made shipwreck of their faith.”
What I think is clear is that God is not the one who ever walks away from us. God is always present with us, encouraging us, enticing us to follow him into deeper and deeper obedience and love. But he also gives us freedom.
Phil Yancy writes about a friend who called him for advice. He asked if Phil thought God would forgive him if he divorced his wife. Yancy replied that God can forgive anything, but to willfully disobey God is to begin walking away from God and once that happens, it is hard to turn around. This friend divorced his wife, switched to a different church that was not concerned with Biblical teaching and gradually drifted away from his Christian faith.
But even in this case, I would say that Phil Yancy’s friend is not at the end of his life. His pilgrimage is not yet over. One of the most significant experiences of my life was seeing a chemist with my company come to faith at the end of his life. Ed DeVries was born in Holland in 1927. His parents were strict Calvinists and Ed rebelled against his religious upbringing for most of his life. He hid from the Nazis during WWII, emigrated to Canada and then the United States after the war. He wanted nothing to do with Christian faith, was disdainful of religious belief. He was a brilliant man but no one accused him of being a pleasant man. His wife divorced him when he could not comprehend why she would object to his having affairs with other women.
At the age of 69, Ed developed colon cancer and one day came to me to say he was leaving the company. I asked him why and he said that he was going to die and he began to sob. I asked him if it was finally time for him to consider his relationship with God and he asked the most incredible question, “Why would God want to have anything to do with me after I’ve ignored him all these years?”
Ed and I began to read Scripture together. He studied it on his own – to the utter and complete amazement of his colleagues at work – and Ed came to faith or perhaps returned to his faith, just three months before he died.
This is what I believe, when we come to faith, when we accept God’s gift of life, salvation, it is as if God implants a piece of metal in our hearts for which he is the magnet. No matter how much we struggle and turn away from him, there is always, continually, this gentle tug on our heart to turn to him, to draw nearer to him.
God never gave up on Ed. God never gives up on any of his children. And God will never give up on you.
We sometimes feel unsafe because of our feelings of depression and doubt. We sometimes feel unsafe because of the pain and suffering we experience. And we sometimes feel unsafe because of the fear of defection.
I was talking with one of the women of our congregation this week who said she did not know if she had ever experienced peace that passes all understanding.
I think that when we are feeling unsafe because of doubts or depression, when we feel unsafe because of pain and suffering we experience or when we feel unsafe because of the fear of losing our faith, it is time to crawl back into the womb and focus on God. It is time to step away from the momentary and transitory troubles we experience and focus on God. It is when we do this that we experience God’s peace that passes all understanding.
When we are being buffeted by a storm at sea with the wind and waves tossing us this way and that, it is time to pull into the safety of a harbor. When we are being oppressed by the hustle and bustle of modern city life with horns honking and cars cutting us off and people yelling and making rude gestures, it is time to step into the safety of our home and sit down in a comfortable chair.
When we are feeling unsafe, it is time to realize we are being held safely in the cupped hands of Jesus. We are protected from the evil in this world as chicks are protected under the feathered wing of the mother hen. It is time to realize that we are secure, safe in God’s harbor, God’s home. It is time to relax in God’s presence.
The psalmist concludes his psalm with this line:
Peace be upon Israel.
In a very real sense, what the psalmist is saying is, “Relax!”
Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion,
which cannot be shaken but endures forever.
2 As the mountains surround Jerusalem,
so the LORD surrounds his people
both now and forevermore.
Relax, you are safe and secure in God’s hands. Whatever you feel this week, whatever you fear, whatever you experience, you are safe and secure in the hands of God.
Relax!
