No Place Like Home

There’s no place like home. You realize that when you’ve been away for a while: maybe on vacation, a business trip, or in the hospital. Home is a refuge. For when we’re at home, we’re surrounded by the familiar. Home is security and comfort.

There’s no place like it. But how do we know when we’ve found that special place called home? Someone will say, “Home is where the heart is.” It’s where you come to cherish the life and the people and culture of a given place. In that sense, probably we can all think of an earthly place of belonging, where we wouldn’t want to leave.

Yet God tells us about a different kind of belonging. We know the words of Philippians, “Our citizenship is in heaven” (3:20). Or what Peter says in his first letter, “To God’s elect, strangers in the world” (1:1). Or Hebrews 13, “Here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (v 14).

Point is, we might feel very much “at home.” We might feel that about this city, this state, this country—we like it here. Yet in this life, we’re strangers, even exiles. An exile is someone who doesn’t belong where he is. He’s got a different home, and his heart is set on returning. And that’s how we need to look at this present time.

Today we consider Psalm 137, which is a song of exile. The writer is unknown to us, but the mood of his heart is unmistakable. Here, one of God’s people, dragged away to a foreign land, thinks about the place he’s left behind. And as he sings, we his fellow exiles, join him. This is our theme,

God’s people sing of our longing for Jerusalem:

1) singing in exile

2) singing in devotion

3) singing in hope

1) singing in exile: That this is a song of exile is clear from its very first line, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and we wept” (v 1). The author is a man far from where he belongs—he’s in Babylon. Contrast that with so many of the other Psalms, where the background scenery is obvious, when God’s people are in their land, safely in Israel. They’re even sitting in church, you could say. Just look at the next Psalm, where David sings (138:2), “I will worship in your holy temple.” That’s more like it!

But this Psalm is different. The Psalmist isn’t near the familiar surroundings of the temple or the Promised Land. He’s in Babylon. And why? God’s people were taken here because of their grievous sin.

We read about it in Jeremiah 25. There God said through his prophet, “Because you have not heard my words…,” I will bring my servant Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon against this land and “this whole land shall be a desolation” and you will serve the king of Babylon for seventy years (vv 8, 11).

And of course it came to pass, as the LORD had said. Nebuchadnezzar came, and he pillaged the land, and destroyed the temple, and took away many Israelites to be his prisoners for many years. Babylon would become for Israel a new house of bondage, just like Egypt had been so long ago. This is why the Psalmist is sitting in Babylon and this is why he is weeping.

Try to picture him. He’s sitting by “the rivers,” which isn’t surprising, for water was abundant in Babylon. This was the land of the two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, plus many connected canals and streams. So in a way, this was a pleasant place, because a land of so many rivers will be a fertile and fruitful country. Yet it was so unlike the Israelites’ homeland. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t Israel, and it wasn’t Jerusalem. It wasn’t home.

The sons of Korah sang about Zion, the holy city, in Psalm 46, “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God” (v 4). If you know the geography of Israel, you’ll know that Jerusalem didn’t have a literal river. But she had God! He had always been the river in Zion’s midst, the God who continually poured out blessing on his people. And so these rivers of Babylon—broad and powerful as they were—were only a reminder of what God’s people had lost. No longer does God’s river of mercy run through Jerusalem!

So why has the Psalmist come to sit alongside these Babylonian rivers? Some say that the captives must’ve been working as slave laborers on the irrigation works; they were digging ditches and pumping water for their masters. Perhaps the river was just a quiet place to gather and pray, far from the noisy crowds of the big city. Maybe God’s people liked to use these waters for their ceremonial washing.