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Psalm 124

A friend of mine was a pastor in New Jersey when 9/11 happened. When he heard about the attack he went up to the World Trade Center immediately; dropped everything and went. He spent months there at the site counseling people who had lost loved ones, counseling the workers cleaning up the site, counseling the police officers and firefighters who needed to talk, needed to cry, needed to know God was still God. He was an official counselor for awhile, but then they ended that project, somehow he wasn’t notified, and kept his badge and kept doing his job of working with the people, kept praying. Long after all the other counselors and pastors had gone home, he was still there, still talking with people who needed to talk, still praying with people who needed to pray. Because of his service, he presently suffers from some depression, and has had to go into counseling himself. And, I’m sure, that dust that effected everyone’s lungs has taken its effect on his as well. Just so you know, he’s a pastor in San Francisco.

He would tell you that he was called to the World Trade Center site, it was a part of what God was having him do while he was on the East Coast as an interim pastor. Being a pastor, in fact, being a Christian is often a hazardous thing. We put our integrity on the line all the time; we are constantly trying to live to God’s glory and not our own, which is hard, frequently frustrating and sometimes depressing when we fail. We put our love on the line with people who don’t care, we put our hope on the line all the time. My friend should have gotten hazardous duty pay from his church, but didn’t. Actually, most serious Christians should consider themselves to be on hazardous duty. We live our lives before a holy and mighty God, and yet we are frequently acting in ways contrary to His will. That’s hazardous. It is hazardous trying to deal with other people; trying to help them grow in their relationship with God and others. Very often those trying to help can be accused of all sorts of things.

Psalm 124 is about hazards, hazards those obedient to God face, and the help found in God which is always close at hand. Please follow along in your Bibles.

If the LORD had not been on our side—
let Israel say—
2 if the LORD had not been on our side
when men attacked us,
3 when their anger flared against us,
they would have swallowed us alive;
4 the flood would have engulfed us,
the torrent would have swept over us,
5 the raging waters
would have swept us away.
6 Praise be to the LORD,
who has not let us be torn by their teeth.
7 We have escaped like a bird
out of the fowler’s snare;
the snare has been broken,
and we have escaped.
8 Our help is in the name of the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

Let’s pray.

We’re slowly going through a series of interesting Psalms as we work our way slowly toward Easter. These Psalms are numbers 120-135 and they are called the Psalms of the Ascent. They were the songs the Jewish pilgrims would sing on the road to Jerusalem. But they weren’t just songs people would sing on the way to Jerusalem, but songs the Jewish pilgrims would sing as they traveled to Jerusalem to perform the rituals of faith; celebrating the feasts, offering sacrifices. We have it recorded that as a young man, Jesus himself went up to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover feast; along the way He and his family would have sung these songs. You see, these were trips of purpose, not random travelings. They were going up to where God was, up at the Temple at the top of Jerusalem. They were going to worship, headed through rough and unsafe lands on their way to God, but they went nonetheless. I think we can draw a parallel between them and us, that we too are traveling with a purpose, to worship God with our lives as we head to where God is, and that someday we will stand before God, guilty but pardoned, worshipping in wonder and awe for eternity. But we still travel through foreign and unsafe lands, we travel to God here on earth, where things are twisted and wrong, but after a while all the twistedness, all the wrongness loses its wrongness because we are so immersed in the nuttiness of this place.

And in that nuttiness, of the lies that people tells us, and the lies we might like to believe because it makes our lives easier, there are many hazards. The world is a hazardous place for believers, all sorts of things exist to distract us from God, to lure us off the straight and narrow in pursuit of something that leads us away from God. It could be the promise of an awesome career, it could be the promise of fame and notoriety, it could be the need to be the most popular, or the need to feel superior to others. Hazards, they are all hazards. There were hazards then, there are hazards now as we pilgrimage toward God. These hazards try to capture us, try to ensnare us and keep us trapped in ways of living that fall short of God’s best for us. Listen to the psalmist describe it for us.

Just so you know, anytime you see the word “lord” in all capital letters in the text, like we have it today, it means that the word there actually was the name of God, Yahweh, rather than the actual word ‘lord’. The Jews had both words; so when you see the word Lord and it is not in all capital letters, then the word actually was Lord. But when its all in caps, like today, it is a substitution for the name Yahweh. Which is why I like this psalm, it uses God’s name. Listen, if Yahweh were not on our side, we would have been toast. If Yahweh, the name God gave to Moses out of the burning bush a thousand years or so prior, if that specific God hadn’t been on their side, Israel would have been sunk. Israel would have sunk into the depths of worship of other Gods like Baal. If it weren’t for God’s grace, the Babylonians would have dispersed the Jews permanently, and certainly not allowed them to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple. If it wasn’t for God, what hazards would we have fallen into? A life bent on acquiring more stuff? A life centered on the glorification of our wonderful selves? A life of alcohol or drug abuse, of spouse abuse, or child abuse? I think we can all look back on our lives and see the hazards, that if it weren’t for God, we would still be stuck in those old lives.

When I look back on my life, I think one of my hazards was politics. I loved politics when I was doing it. I worked for a lobbyist in Washington DC, and I worked another time for a congressman. I loved politics. I never got to the point where my ideas actually got onto the table of serious discussions on how the country should proceed, but I still loved what I was doing. Even more, I loved winning in politics. I got out of politics and political stuff because it came to be more about winning rather than what was right. I wanted to win at all costs, no matter who got hurt, no matter if it was right or wrong. That lifestyle and job was a hazard to me. That lifestyle would have swept me away; much like what the people in the psalm feared.
That’s an interesting image, to be swept away. In the deserts around Israel there are gullies that fill up quickly with water when there has been a rain. The rain doesn’t even have to have fallen close by. If it fell up in the mountains, then there is the possibility that the gullies will fill with water draining out of the hills, and the people caught in the wrong place can be swept away, torrents of water overwhelming us. Sweeping us away, if not for Yahweh, my life would have been swept away into the murky world of politics, the amoral world of winning the next vote no matter what the cost. We have all seen what that world can do to decent people. Overwhelmed, as if they were in a gully when the water rose up, and swept them away. You probably seen decent people who were swept away from where they should have been, doing things they shouldn’t have because they were swept away.

And if not for the Lord, then what? If it weren’t for God, I would have been addicted to the power that politics contains. If it weren’t for the Lord, what is it for you? How has God saved you from the person you were heading toward being? You see, we need to be able to witness to others about how God has saved us. The proper stance of a Christian before God is one of witness; this is where I was heading, and then God saved me. The proper stance before God is not one of apologetics-though certainly that is needed from time to time. But it has been my experience that most people want to hear not dry theology, but my experiences, the times I was saved, rather than theory. People don’t want theory about God, they want to know God shows up, and what happens when He does; that Yahweh loves them and here is the proof. Apologetics are invaluable for keeping us on track theologically, making sure we don’t annoint someone at presbytery as our Savior. But in the real world, the world we live in, the world of this psalm, people want to know hat God shows up, and God saves us. This is a psalm of witness, it is not a psalm explaining away all the bad things that happen to people. It does not create a case to prove that God shows up and helps, it does not explain the various forms God’s presence and help takes. Instead, it is a joyous song sung by those going up to Jerusalem of God’s help. I pray that we all would have that sort of testimony, that sort of witness to God’s mercy and presence, His help in times of need. Hey, if it weren’t for God I would have been a political hack; what about you?

There’s also not just the painful life we avoided through God’s grace, mercy and calling, but there is the pain we’ve escaped. We were in real trouble, but we escaped, praise God. Not only did we avoid a hazard, but we escaped. And when I say that, when the psalm says that joyfully, then I hear about it from people. You see, often I hear people say, and possibly you’re thinking it now, that’s all well and good but what about my problem? What about me? Where’s God in my life? I haven’t escaped from this cancer, this problem with my child, this situation at work, this pain I’m going through. Being a Christian is hazardous; each day we put our trust in the God who we’ve never seen. In a scientific world where everything we’re sure of can be examined, poked and prodded to make sure we understand it, we persist in believing in the God no eye has seen, and no ear has heard and no mind can probe. We persist in putting our hope in God, that He knows us and loves us. That is not easy, but it is the life and walk of the faithful.

Everyday we Christians put ourselves on the line, not just at the World Trade Center. We put our love on the line, we put our faith on the line, we put our faith and hope in Christ on the line every day; hazardous work. Psalm 124 calls to us through all that, if not for the Lord, we would be lost. No doubt, no second guessing. It’s all about Him.

6 Praise be to the LORD,
who has not let us be torn by their teeth.
7 We have escaped like a bird
out of the fowler’s snare;
the snare has been broken,
and we have escaped.
8 Our help is in the name of the LORD,
the Maker of heaven and earth.

This is joyous, when we realize we were snared, caught, dead, and then suddenly the snare broke, and we flew free out of the traps set for us. Joy, the understanding that we escaped, in Christ Jesus we were set free, the snares set for us, the traps of sin we fell into sprung onto us, grabbed us, and then Jesus grabbed us back, out of the traps, set free to follow Him. Joy! What joy there is in having escaped what we deserved. We shouldn’t be people who sit around and condemn other people; instead we should be full of joy like birds who have escaped from a snare, escaped from a life that held nothing but death. That would have been me, a dead man working in a dead job in politics somewhere, hoping and searching for meaning in one job after another, hoping and wishing somehow I was making a difference in the world. But I’m not there, and neither are you. You weren’t left to follow other gods, you weren’t left to seek after the things of this world, more and more stuff to clutter our houses and minds. We escaped, and that should bring joy. And we should try to help others discover the joy we have.

We all know people who are trapped as we were-trapped in pointless jobs, without love, without meaning, without hope, without joy. We know people who are trapped by their own arrogance and pride, thinking that they know everything there is to know about life, that they have life wired. They are trapped by their own mistaken knowledge that they know the meaning of life, or maybe they think there is no meaning, no purpose, no God, no one to answer for their sinful lives. We all know people who are trapped by their greed, trapped by their inability to see anything in life more than their next purchase, their next big buy that will make them feel good and important, trapped because of what they see others as having.

We know people who are trapped by their lusts into marrying younger and younger spouses, desiring only physical relationships with people, or into the degrading and life killing world of pornography. We know people who are trapped by their angers, their feelings of entitlement, by their frustrations at how life has turned out. We know people whose anger and resentment over wrongs in the past traps their behavior in the present, limits their ability to make friends and be a friend, trapped, like we were. But we escaped; the waters threatened to sweep us away, but we were saved, caught in the net, but set free. There is joy to share there, all us escapees, all of us who have Jesus as our Lord and Savior. There is joy in our good fortune, and praise for the God who made it happen. Praise and joy to last our whole trip up to God, ever upwards we travel in joy despite the circumstances, knowing that we have been saved out of a snare. That joy should color our lives, from every interaction that we have with other people, to every prayer session we have with God. Joy at our escape, at our good fortune should permeate our lives. And we should want that escapee joy for others. We live not to condemn others, but like Christ Himself, to lead others to the joy we have discovered in God through Christ.

Psalm 124 is the joyous song of someone who has looked deeply, closely into pain. And he discovered God was there, entering in with us, ultimately setting us free. And as those on the other side of the cross, looking back to the cross rather than forward to it like the pilgrims who were going up to Jerusalem to worship, we know better the joy! We know better what the cost setting us free was, we know better the pain and blood, the agony of the Friday, that Good Friday when Jesus set free those who would accept His offer of freedom through Him. We know the cost, and we know the joy that comes from finally deciding that Jesus died for us, and that we will hereafter live for Him.

This is the joyous cry of us pilgrims heading upwards toward God, that our help, always and forever is in the name of the Lord, in the name of Yahweh, who made heaven and earth.

Let’s pray.