Welcome! Today we are looking at Psalms 123
and 124, continuing our series on the Psalms of Ascent. Each of these fifteen
Psalms, from 120 to 134, are notated in the Hebrew as a song “of ascents,” or
steps. As we have discussed previously, they may have been recited as a group
as people traveled to Jerusalem to gather together on the religious holidays
that required them to do so. Let’s go ahead and get right into Psalm 123.
Let’s
focus just on this first verse for a moment. Back in my younger, pre-Christian
days when I watched far too much TV, I used to watch a show called Magnum P.I.,
about a private investigator that lived in a guest room on a sprawling estate.
The thorn in Magnum’s side was the manager of the estate, the very British
Jonathan Quayle Higgins III. On several
occasions, Magnum wanted to borrow (without permission from Higgins) the
Ferrari on the estate. However, the grounds were guarded by two highly trained
Doberman Pinschers appropriately named Zeus and Apollo. Magnum would run to the
car, work as quickly as possible to break in to it, and before long Zeus and
Apollo would run toward him to attack him. Continuing to work on the lock,
Magnum would say, “Don’t look at the dogs. Don’t look at the dogs,” but would
invariably glance at them and then say, “Aw, you looked at the dogs.” Still, he
would manage to unlock the door in the nick of time.
I
don’t know about you, but I often seem to do the same thing with my
circumstances. “Don’t look at my situation, don’t look at my situation, aw, I
looked at my situation.” To lift our eyes to God, to set our gaze on God means
to take our eyes off of what is
troubling us, to force our minds to stop worrying, stop trying to think of
every possible outcome, to stop trying to imagine what it will be like if the
worst will happen, and so on. I like the picture of lifting our eyes. It’s a little ironic that when most of us pray,
we actually don’t lift our eyes, but instead do the opposite, bowing our heads.
There is of course nothing wrong with that; it is instinctive and also an
appropriate posture, one of servitude, of reverence, of respect. It is
interesting to me that bowing is seemingly a universal sign of respect, among
all cultures. Even dogs (like Zeus and Apollo) respond to a lowered head and
stance as a sign of submission, whereas standing straight up with eyes fixed
at them is taken as a sign of aggression.
And
so, by all means, we can continue to bow our heads, but even while doing so, we
lift our eyes. Yes, God is our superior, by all means. As it says, He is seated
on His throne in heaven. He is king, King of kings and Lord of lords. All of
heaven is subject to Him. All of earth is subject to Him. All of creation is
subject to Him. But He is also our hope. We
look to Him for help. We know that He
loves us and wants to help us. And so, with bowed heads, we lift our eyes to
Him. Don’t look at the dogs, don’t look at the dogs. Look to Him.
As the eyes of slaves
look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a female slave look to the
hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till He shows us
his mercy. – Psalm 123:2
In
our culture we don’t really have servants, so it is harder for us to understand
the picture this verse paints for us. The eyes of servants, it says, look to
their master’s hand. Picture a dinner feast, where there are guests and so the
master of the house is enjoying their company, talking and laughing through the
meal. Rather than call the servant and tell him or her what to do, the servant already knows
what to do; the courses of the meal have already been arranged. The only
question is when. When are some
plates to be cleared? When is a new round of drinks to be poured? When is the
next course of the meal to be brought out? The master does not need to tell
these things; he simply and subtly waves his hand, and a good servant then
brings the next things out; that is, the good servant is continually watching
the room, and more specifically is continually watching the master. There is no
looking at the dogs, only the master.
I
think this is a powerful picture of how our relationships should be with the
Lord. Number one, we are continually looking to Him, because He is our hope, He
is our king, He loves us, and He desires to help us. But number two, we are
continuing looking to Him because He is our leader and He has things for us to
do. And if we take our eyes off of Him, we will miss Him.
I
truly believe that the Lord speaks to believers through the Holy Spirit daily, multiple
times each day. It comes in inaudible whispers, ideas that somehow briefly,
quietly find their way to our hearts. They are often little things that help us
show love to other people. Sometimes it is someone to share something about our
faith with. It is words, or actions, sometimes both together. But we will never
hear these whispers from the Spirit if our eyes are not on Him. Just like the
servant who misses his master’s cues because he wasn’t watching his master’s
hand, we too can easily miss the gentle instructions from the Holy Spirit.
Those
of you on the worship team know another appropriate analogy to what I am
describing: how we watch one another for cues on how to stay together. I am often watching the guitarist’s hands,
especially at the beginnings of songs or when we are having some trouble
staying together. Isaac, when he is on drums, quite literally watches my hands
for cues on when to add special effects such as the chimes, and I also have
cues for when we are too fast or two slow. Daniel is learning to watch for
these cues too.
I
encourage you to train yourself to keep your eyes lifted up to God during your
day. People say that breakfast is the
most important meal of the day, but I disagree – I would say that spending time
with God in the morning is the most important meal of the day. It sets your
heart right. It gets your eyes off the dogs and on your Master. And through the
day, carve out little bits of time to “refocus.” It takes as little as a single
sentence in prayer to God, about 10 seconds. This may feel strange at first; to
me, it still feels subversive sometimes when I do it at work, for example, when
I do a little prayer (silently, in my head) in front of 100 students right
before I start to teach. And, well, it is
subversive! You are breaking perhaps the most important rule of our culture
– that it is secular. You are free to pray and do what you want on Sunday
mornings or in the privacy of your own home, but to devote yourself to God, to
serve Him, in the middle of work? At school? In the “real” world? That’s just
wrong, says the world. Well, don’t listen to the world. Don’t look at the dogs.
Let’s
look at the second half of this short Psalm:
Have mercy on us, Lord,
have mercy on us, for we have endured no end of contempt. We have endured no
end of ridicule from the arrogant, of contempt from the proud. – Psalm 123:3-4
One
of the things I love about the Psalms is that because they are not generally
narrative, but rather poetic, it is easy to see how to apply them to our own
lives. We don’t know who these people were that the psalmist is talking about –
are they outsiders, non-Israelites? Does this take place during a time of
exile? Or does this refer to non-Israelites in some town outside Jerusalem
where some Israelites live? Or does this refer to Israelites who were not
following after God who gave a hard time to the remnant of true believers? We
don’t need to know the answer in order to apply the verse to us.
Now
maybe you are not experiencing any contempt or ridicule or even just more
subtle, well, tensions over your faith. I can think of two possible reasons for
this – one is that you are in a stage and situation in life in which you have
been blessed to have no sources of conflict. If so, rejoice, because it is a
blessing to be free of these things. But the second possible reason is that you
are not engaging the world, engaging your “oikos,” your small group of people
who are a part of your personal and professional lives. If nobody knows you are
a Christian, they will think you are abiding by the rule of secularity and no
conflict will arise. I don’t think that is a blessing of God, but rather it is
an area you need to work on.
Recall
what Jesus said:
If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated Me
first. If you
belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not
belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the
world hates you. Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is
not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will persecute you
also. – John 15:18-20
And
2 Timothy 3:12 says that everyone who
wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. That is not to
say that we should seek out conflict, but if you are bold in Christ, conflict
will eventually come to you. And so the psalmist asks God for mercy. He is
being ridiculed, being held in contempt, and he asks God for mercy, chanenu. The ending is plural – have
mercy on us. Did you notice the
change from singular to plural in this Psalm? This occurred back in verse 2.
Our psalmist is not a lone ranger, but is in community. He is seeking to serve
God in community, and he is experiencing conflict in community as well.
This
is how it should be. Faculty Commons, the Christian faculty group I am
co-leading with Melissa and one other faculty member, experienced a mild form
of persecution this spring when a retired professor wrote an opinion piece to
the campus paper criticizing our group for publishing an ad welcoming students
to Clemson in this same paper. The opinion piece went beyond this, criticizing
us for daring to reveal our faith at all. The writer seemed to feel that
faculty should never reveal anything about their personal lives in the
classroom setting.
My
point is that this experience was one that we in Faculty Commons experienced together. I would say that this was good
for us – really good, because it drew us closer together and made us even more
committed to seeing that the group would not only be preserved, but in fact
continue to grow. Ironically, one new person joined our group because of the letter criticizing us!
I
would encourage you to dare to break the implicit rule of our culture that says
that religious faith stays in the closet. Come out of the closet and be
subversive! Open up your life and your beliefs to those you spend time with in
our “secular world.” If we all did this maybe the world would cease to be so secular.
This
plea for mercy, chanenu, is a common
prayer in the Psalms. It appears 30 times just in the Psalms. There are only
150 Psalms, so it occurs on average once every five Psalms.
To
plea to God for mercy is an intensely personal prayer. Do you talk to God like
this? Do you tell Him about your fears, your stresses, your worries? You don’t
need to first think about whether you have a mature understanding before you
pray! You don’t need to say, well, that issue shouldn’t upset me – if I was
mature in Christ, I wouldn’t be so flustered about this, so I don’t need to
pray to God about it. Wrong, wrong,
wrong, wrong, wrong!
It’s
OK to come to God with whatever is burdening us! In fact, God delights in us
coming to Him! If you were here during the sharing time last week I mentioned
how I was going through a decision about whether to take an administrative
position with my department. Mentally, I told myself that there was no bad
decision here, and that it shouldn’t be stressful to prayerfully weigh the
options and decide. But the reality is that on two separate nights I woke up in
the middle of the night stressed, and no longer able to go back to sleep. Part
of me saw this as foolish; that part of me told me to just get over it, that
many people had much more serious decisions to make, etc., etc.. But another
part of me said to pray, to pray for comfort, to pray for help – in short, to
pray for God’s mercy. And I believe God marvelously answered that prayer. By
Tuesday I was at peace with either decision; I had tentatively made a decision
to accept the position, but I decided to wait until Thursday to make my
intentions known. This gave God the opportunity of showing me something,
bringing circumstances or even my thinking to a point where I would choose to
take the opposite path if that was His will. My peace remained, and on Thursday
I formally accepted the position.
God
delights in us coming to Him with whatever emotions we feel. When was the last
time you asked Him for mercy, for help, in not only what you are going through,
but in what you are feeling? I encourage you to lean on Him in this way – you
will not be disappointed.
Let’s
look at the first half of Psalm 124.
If the Lord had not been
on our side—let Israel say—if the Lord had not been on our side when people
attacked us, they would have swallowed us alive when their anger flared against
us; the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the
raging waters would have swept us away. – Psalm 124:1-5
The
first thing I notice from this passage is that phrase “let Israel say.” This is
an ancient version of “Come on, everyone sing!” I love it. Again, we are in the
plural. All the people are encouraged to participate in this song, to take the
words to heart and sing them meaning them yourself.
The
second thing I notice from this passage is that people attacked them. That’s
bad, right? That’s a trial, a hard thing. And from the Psalm it sounds like it
was a really bad thing, that they were basically goners. They were out-weaponed
or outnumbered or both, and it looked hopeless. I love the vivid imagery –
being swallowed alive – I picture a giant monster grabbing them up by the
handful and stuffing them into his mouth. Then three pictures of death due to
being lost at sea or drowned: a flood, a torrent, and raging waters. I picture
something like one of the terrible earthquakes we have seen in recent years
that have triggered giant tsunamis that come sweeping over everything into villages,
sending boats careening into houses, and washing people away. The Psalmist,
which, in this case, is David, is saying, those people who attacked them had
every advantage; it was truly a hopeless situation. Except…
Except
for God. God did the impossible, a miracle. If it were not for Him, all would
be lost, but He was there. He was on our side. He brought us victory.
Now
it is encouraging to think on these things, and if you spend a little time
thinking about Scripture you will see that this is a theme that is repeated
over and over and over in both the Old Testament and the New. Things get
really, really bad, and God comes through and delivers His people from harm.
I’m
going to ask what perhaps is a strange question: Why spend so much time
remembering the bad stuff? This is not how we usually do things. I bet if I
looked at your photo albums (virtual or the old-fashioned kind), I wouldn’t
find a bunch of pictures of your trials. “Look, this picture shows my first F
in college. This picture shows when I was laid off from my job. This picture
shows when I had to go to the hospital because I was really sick. This picture
shows me right after my fiancé dumped me.” This is not normally what we do!
“Quick let’s make a song about all our worst experiences!!” OK, I’ll admit it,
country music does do this. But we generally don’t.
Yet
again and again you see this in Scripture. Anytime I see a disconnect between
what people today normally do and what I see in Scripture I become curious and
start to ask why? So why is this done repeatedly in Scripture? The answer is simple – because God does
deliver people. He doesn’t always keep us from pain and suffering, but He does
always keep us. Unless He comes back
soon, a day will come when He doesn’t even keep us from our ultimate enemy,
death. But He will overcome death. Death won’t be the end of us. We will be
resurrected, in new bodies, free of pain, free of our own sin nature, free of
enemies, free of all that could ever hurt us, whether in mind, soul, or body.
And we will be delivered. He will rescue us even from death, even from
ourselves, even from everything. And so we find these stories of God’s
deliverance again and again in Scripture because God is in the deliverance
business. That’s who He is, and that’s what He does. God even delivered Himself
from death; He did not stay dead, but rose from the dead. And so will we,
because of Him.
I
encourage you to think about some of the bad stuff you have gone through. Has
not God delivered you? Yes, there may have been pain, and there may have been
lasting consequences, but you are here, now, among a body of believers who love
the Lord like you, and who desire to love You with the love the Lord gives to
us. If that’s not deliverance, I don’t know what is. And even if you are going
through hard things now, you can rest in the testimony of the multitudes who
have written about how God has delivered them in the Bible and in countless
publications made after the Bible.
And
so, if the Lord had not been on our
side—let Clemson Community Church say—if the Lord had not been on our side when
we faced trials of all kinds, we would have been swallowed alive; the flood
would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters
would have swept us away. – Psalm 124:1-5
And
here is the second half of the Psalm:
Praise be to the Lord,
who has not let us be torn by their teeth. We have escaped like a bird from the
fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped. Our help is in
the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. – Psalm 124:6-8
Again we have the picture of a monster – this
time, not swallowing us whole, but chewing us up with its teeth. I’m not sure
which is worse. And then we have the picture of a bird that has escaped from a
trap. In the Hebrew it is a small bird. And what a picture this is for us and
how Satan tries to trap us with his snares. He entices us to sin, an expert in
creating lures for us, and then down comes his net upon us. We should be
trapped – but the Lord gives us a way out. We are saved.
He is our help, in Hebrew, ayzer. This is the same word used in
Genesis 2 to describe Eve. Usually in Scripture this word refers to a person, a
helper. Our helper is the Lord
Himself. He reaches down His hand to save us, to pull us out of the mess we get
into. Praise be to the Lord!
I want to spend my remaining time talking a
little about praising the Lord. My prayer for this series is that it would help
us all to grow in praise and worship of God. The first commandment is to love
the Lord, and our praise and worship of God is kind of a temperature indicator
of our love.
Now full-hearted praise and worship may look
quite different from person to person. For some people, it is full of shouts
and jumping up and down and dancing. For others it is much more serene, perhaps
with little outward movement at all but with tears streaming down their faces.
There is no right or wrong way to praise and worship God in this respect.
But some people feel detached from God. Some
people feel numb. Some people feel like their hearts just resist really
praising the Lord and worshiping Him. I want to talk about several reasons this
might be happening.
One reason is, quite plainly, sin. When we
continue in sin we create a breach in our relationship with God. The Holy
Spirit in us is grieved. God waits for us to repent, to turn back to Him, and
until we do, God feels far away from us. I have a hard time putting this into
words, but even our own hearts seem distant from us because when we become
Christians, when we put our faith in Christ, our hearts are changed so that
they are not just us but us and the Spirit together. This sin doesn’t have to
be overt stuff like sexual sin; it can be simply not spending any time during the
week with God, instead living a basically secular life for ourselves. In either
case, the effect on our ability to worship is quite similar.
Another reason we can feel unable to really
praise God is guilt. We have sinned and even confessed our sin to God, but we
still feel guilty. We have allowed Satan to whisper lies into our ears about
how God hates us, about our unworthiness, and so on. Satan typically mixes lies
with truth in order to confuse us, and it is true we are unworthy, but our
worthiness or unworthiness has nothing to do with God’s love for us. The truth
is that when we have confessed our sin, our relationship with God is restored;
indeed, God never hated us, even when we sinned, but we did grieve Him. It is
hard for us to really accept this because God’s love is not like our love. Our
love is always somewhat conditional; we will only take so much. But His love is
not like this. He died for us while we were yet sinners. And the depths of our
sin are so much greater than we realize, and the depths of His love for us are
likewise so much greater than we can begin to understand.
Another problem we can have is that we are
ruled by our emotions. Our minds and bodies in many ways are like an old car
that you have to warm up in the morning before you take it to work. Nobody
(well, almost nobody) feels like exercising first thing in the morning. You
need to start slow and get your body moving and eventually it will feel good.
Well, sometimes, our worshiping God is like this too. Sometimes we are just plain
tired, or not feeling well, or any of a host of other feelings. If we stop
right there without trying, we won’t accomplish anything, let alone being able
to really worship God. Lots of people don’t want to go to work in the morning,
but they do, because it is important. Worship is important! And the truth is,
just like exercise, as we spend time reading or speaking or singing truths
about God, it wakes us up spiritually, and we begin to get excited again about
how awesome and good God is and we want to
praise Him.
Yet another problem we can have is that we are
afraid of our emotions. Some of us,
for whatever reason, have learned, perhaps as a coping mechanism, to never get
too excited about anything. Maybe we are afraid of what will happen if we
really take down our walls, drain the moats around our castles. I think of the
old Simon and Garfunkel song “I am a rock, I am an island. Because a rock feels
no pain. And an island never cries.” If this describes you I would encourage
you first to try to really worship God alone. Listen to some good worship music
and sing along in your heart – or out loud, if no one is around. But really
allow yourself to feel. God will
never fail you. Even if you have been deeply hurt by others, He will never
betray you or leave you. If you will do this, you will find that the worst that
might happen is that you cry – a lot. That’s OK! It’s OK to do that here too!
We keep the church well-stocked with tissues. And all that will happen is that
a lot of people will come close and love on you.
Some people struggle to worship because of
bitterness. A church has hurt them, or someone in a church has done so, and
they choose to stay stuck in this pain rather than to forgive. We are to
forgive first of all because Jesus tells us to, but we also forgive because it
keeps us from destroying ourselves with bitterness. Really, I could have lumped
this situation in with sin, because holding on to bitterness is sin, but bitter
people often don’t see their bitterness as sin, so I wanted to keep this reason
separate. If this describes you, ask someone for help to break free.
Some people cannot really enter into worship
because of self-centeredness. Self-centeredness really has two forms, the proud
person who instead exalts himself as well as the falsely humble person who is
focused on how awful he is. Again, there is overlap with some of the other
categories we have talked about – this is again sin, and the falsely humble
person is often focused on guilt. My point here is that worship altogether requires
a forgetting of self; as we have seen
in Psalm 123, a true worshiper is like a servant who simply watches the hand of
his or her master. True worship is not about us at all, but about Christ.
If any of these descriptions seem to fit you,
I would encourage you with all my heart to have you take steps to change. Our
worship of God fuels our love for Him just as much as our love for Him fuels
our worship. To grow in the worship of God is to grow in loving Him, the first
commandment. Together our worship and love fuel every aspect of the Christian
life. We serve Him because we love Him. Please, take your eyes off the “dogs”
and lift them to God who sits enthroned in heaven!
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