Psalms | 2024
As you may know, I grew up in a large Assemblies of God church in Sacramento, CA. And as a good pentecostal church, we had not only a robe wearing adult choir, but a youth choir and a Childrens choir too. We did your typical 90s line up of Michael W. Smith, Twila Paris, Stephen Curtis Chapman and Point of Grace. But one year for our annual Spring Music Festival we did a song by this little group called the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir. And I had NEVER heard anything like it. For those who don’t know, the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir was part of a mega church called The Brooklyn Tabernacle in New York City. And their flavor of gospel music was quite a departure from the contemporary christian music I was used to listening to. I was mesmerized. It was the first time I had heard song lyrics copied directly from scripture. The song was called “My Help” and was taken from Psalm 121. I need you to listen to a little bit of it because there is no way my description can do it justice.
Psalm 121
I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
He will not let your foot slip—
he who watches over you will not slumber;
indeed, he who watches over Israel
will neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord watches over you—
the Lord is your shade at your right hand;
the sun will not harm you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord will keep you from all harm—
he will watch over your life;
the Lord will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore.
And so began my fascination with Psalm 121 and the ascension Psalms in general. The ascension psalms begin with 120 and culminate in Psalm 134. They would have been sung by pilgrims making their way to Jerusalem for festival days.
Years of walking with Jesus and I keep coming back to this Psalm over and over again. And these are the questions I keep asking:
1. Who is the God who keeps us?
2. What does keep mean?
3. Is it true that he keeps us from all evil?
Who is this God who keeps us?
Before we can even begin to contemplate the actions of God, we first must have some understanding of who God is.
Verses 1-2 say, “I lift my eyes to the mountains—where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
The “mountains” could have meant a couple of things to the ancient Hebrews. People living amongst them would often build their temples to the gods on the tops of mountains. They would plant groves of trees and set up shrines and invite people to offer acts of worship to appease their gods. But as we know, these were all lies and false promises of security. Even if you appreciate the mountains for their beauty and quiet strength, in the end they are just mountains. So the author is looking up into those mountains and asking “Does my help come from these hills?” And the answer is no. Help is not found in the mountains with their false promises or austere beauty. Help is found in God who made the mountains. Help comes from the Creator, not creation. Our God is the creator of heaven and earth. Psalms 121 tells us that the same God who separated light from darkness, who formed the land and seas, who created humans from dust, is the same God who keeps us from evil.
What does keep mean?
In verses 3-8, some form of the word keep is used six times. The Hebrew word here is “somer” and can be translated as preserve, watch or guard.
“Keep” in English is a bit of a passive word. But the actual Hebrew meaning is much stronger and more active. It is focused attention and alertness. It conveys protectiveness and provision. God isn’t just keeping us as in holding a place for us. God is actively watching over us, providing for us, protecting us.
I think it isn’t hard to understand that God is keeping us in the bigger things. I can look back at times when it seems clear that God was keeping me, like the decision to move to Colorado, the birth of my children, health scares and grief. But its a little harder to comprehend that God is not just with us in these highs and lows, but in the mundane, everyday moments too. Psalm 121 contains a couple of merisms. A merism is a rhetorical term for a pair of contrasting words or phrases (such as near and far, body and soul, life and death) used to express totality or completeness. In verse 8 the author says “the Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.” Coming and going then means every single aspect of your life in totality. Even those times when its hard to get out of bed in the morning, and the kids are fighting, and your coworker is not carrying their weight. Even as we drive to and from work or school, cook dinner and do the yard work. God keeps us, guards us, protects us, even then. Sarah J. Houser says, “Life may not be easy. We may suffer and struggle and grieve. But trusting God means believing who he is and building our life on that truth. It doesn’t mean building our picture of God based on what our life looks like.” In other words, we have to learn to trust that God does what he says he will do. Parents care deeply about the little things in their kids worlds: what they are eating, how they are sleeping, who their friends are. If we care that much about our children, think about how much God cares about his children. If God says he keeps us, protects us, guards us in every aspect of our life, then we should believe him.
Is it actually true that God keeps us from all evil?
This is a complicated question that I won’t be able to do justice to in just a few minutes. The presence of evil in this world is something that I think all of us think about. How can there be so much evil in this world that God made? Why doesn’t God DO anything about it? If God has the power to stop it, why doesn’t he? I can list off these questions quickly but there are no quick answers. Platitudes like ‘God works all things for good” and “God won’t give you more than you can handle” and “I can do all things in Christ who gives me strength” may be biblically true in a technical sense, but without context they do not do justice to the God’s powerful victory over sin and death nor God’s spirit of compassion towards his people. The arch of God’s story is bent toward justice and restoration. We see it time and again throughout Scripture and throughout history as God uses people and events to bring a little bit of the kingdom of heaven here on earth. God is in the process of bringing the world to rights. I don’t know why He doesn’t do it faster. I am sometimes baffled at the choice to use us, as frail and fickle and faulty as we are. And when you are in the thick of it with a sick child, the loss of a job, a health crisis, a rocky marriage, or financial troubles, its hard to hold onto the overarching story of God’s ultimate redemption. Because what does that mean for me right now?
We are not the first people, nor the last, to wonder why evil seems so prevalent. Our hope can only be found in a God who keeps promises. Evil will not have the last word. That may still feel like a platitude. The older I get the more I realize that the childlike faith that Jesus asks us to have is not really as simple as people have made it out to be. That kind of trust in God despite not knowing the outcome is much harder than it looks.
NT Wright says in his book Evil and the Justice of God, “The only thing to do is to hold the spectacular promises in one hand and the messy reality in the other and praise YHWH anyway.” That might be the hardest, and most courageous and most faithful thing we can do.
I have been coming back to Psalm 121 for 25+ years. Sometimes I read it with complete faith in the assurances it gives. And other times I read it when I am full of doubt and distrust, hoping to find some kind of comfort in the words. I think both postures are a perfectly valid way to come at the Psalms, and at Scripture in general. The Psalms invite us to feel all the ranges of human emotion, while reminding us of who God is and what God does. And so we hold both, together, at the same time.
Eugene Peterson writes, “The promise of the psalm—and both Hebrews and Christians have always read it this way—is not that we shall never stub our toes but that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us.”
This is echoed in Paul’s letter to the Romans and I want to end with this:
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen and amen.