Good morning. We are continuing this series called The Psalms of Ascents. They are short songs for long journeys. The Psalms of Ascents were believed to be travel songs. They were songs that would be sung by the Jewish pilgrims as they ascended up the mountain towards Jerusalem and towards the temple for the various festivals of the year like Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Tabernacles. As I mentioned last week, not only do some people see the Psalms of Ascents as travel songs, but they see them collectively as a metaphor for the spiritual life for our personal ascent up to God. Consequently, as people are learning to live everyday life like Jesus, these psalms can become a helpful aid for us on our journey towards Christ-likeness. As I mentioned last week, there are 15 Psalms of Ascents, but we are probably going to go through five or six of them. Last week, we looked at Psalm 120, which was really a psalm of distress. A psalm of crying out to God. Today, we are going to look at a little bit more comfortable-type psalm. Psalm 121. It does provide a lot of comfort. It is very poetic. It is just a nice psalm. As I mentioned before, it is a very good psalm to memorize. I thought we would read it together. It is only eight verses. We will read slowly and go through it together. (Scripture read here.)
A very nice psalm. A very poetic psalm. A psalm that I think most of us can really relate to it especially as Christians. Personally speaking, ever since becoming a Christian, I really have felt no sense of harm, no sense of danger, no fear. I have really had no harm come into my life. I haven’t even had so much as a cold or a fever since becoming a Christian. Debbie and I can attest to the fact that we have had no major illnesses. We have experienced no car accidents. We have had no unexpected bills come in the mail. No unexpected taxes due. We have had no parenting challenges or marital challenges at all. In fact, I would say we are pretty much immune from all the bad things that happen to the non-Christians. As most of you Christians can attest, once you become a Christian, life is nothing but a bowl of cherries. NOT! If life is a bowl of cherries, then why am I living in the pits so much? All kidding aside, we sometimes think that when we become a Christian all of a sudden life is going to be easy. The reality is it is not because we share a fallen, broken world with the non-believers. When we read this psalm, you can’t help but think it is nice, but is it realistic? Is this psalm just trying to fabricate some sort of poetic psalm that really has no truth to it? Is it that or is it the fact that just maybe the psalmist and indeed God have a different view of what it means to protect us and to preserve us from harm? Hopefully, as we get through this short psalm, we will be able to begin to come to some sort of conclusion regarding that.
As I already mentioned, the psalm begins with “I lift up my eyes to the hills – where does my help come from?” At this point, it is helpful to imagine yourself as a traveler in the fourth century B.C. traveling through the desert terrain of Palestine on your way to the temple in Jerusalem that slowly increases in elevation. When you are walking down the road where there are roads there is obviously going to be some rugged terrain. At some point, the person is going to lift his or her eyes up and see the hills and possibly mountains in the distance. We don’t know exactly what that person would be thinking and what is going through his or her mind, but we can speculate that when the person sees the hills or mountains in front of them, maybe they are thinking I am really not in shape for this journey. Kind of like me when I am trying to walk home all the way up the hill. I say I am not in shape for this. They could be thinking this looks like a physical test that I am not ready for. Or possibly, they are looking at the hills and saying I have heard there are bandits and robbers out there. I have heard there are some wild animals out there and maybe I should take a shortcut. It reminds me of a story from when I was growing up. I was about 10 years old. I was going up to the store and I had my bike. Down the road, I saw this big, mean dog coming towards me so I did what any other kid would do. I decided to run across the street to take a shortcut. I stepped off the curb and got hit by a car. Pretty much wiped out. Obviously, I am okay. The good news is I got a brand new bike out of the deal. For some reason it reminded of this story.
Again, we don’t know what the psalmist is thinking. Is he thinking he is afraid of the climb? Is he thinking about bandits? Is he thinking about wild beasts? Some people suggest, when a person looks to the hills they are reminded of the fact that there is some pagan activity going on in the hills. There have been altars built that are used to offer sacrifices for the various pagan gods. This is fourth century B.C. Everybody has not gotten to the point where they believe in one god. They believe in multiple gods. A lot of pagan gods. They would set up these shrines and altars around the hills of Jerusalem and begin to offer sacrifices and invite people in so that they could begin to get everything to result in a good crop or a good life. That was very common. The idea that some suggest is that this person looks to the hills and begins to think about those gods or goddesses they may be worshipping up there and maybe for a split second thinks maybe I should call on one of those gods or goddesses to help me through this mountainous terrain.
Now we don’t know how much time elapses between his initial thought in verse 1 and the thought in verse 2, but we can suspect that at some point the person gets this revelation. He begins to think my help doesn’t come from the pagan gods. They are just wooden figures and carved figures out of stone. He goes on to say “My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” This is a very significant phrase “the Maker of heaven and earth,” because it only appears about five times in the entire Bible. Five of the times are in the book of Psalms. Three of them are in the Psalms of Ascents. That makes sense because if you are going to go on a journey of the unknown, you really want to know who is riding along with you. You aren’t necessarily going to be concerned about how much money you have in your wallet, how much gas you have in your gas tank, how well the GPS system works, or whatever. You want to know that you have somebody that you can trust alongside of you in this unknown journey. About 15 years ago, I took a very long and arduous journey. It was a journey from St. Louis, MO to Johnson City, TN to begin my first year of seminary. It wasn’t a physically hard journey, but it was a very spiritually hard journey because I had just lost my first wife two weeks earlier. Here I was making this trip to seminary going down to study about a God that I wasn’t even sure I liked anymore because he just took away my wife. I was going through this spiritual struggle. Fortunately, as I look back, I know that God, the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, was with me the entire time. Some of you have experienced similar things.
As another side note, when we encounter this word LORD, capital LORD, we have to remember that the psalmist is being very specific about who he is talking about. He is not just talking about any god. He is talking about the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. There are normally three terms that are sometimes translated God or Lord. You have a word called Elohim, which we often see translated as God, but we also see it sometimes translated with a small god. Or we see the word Adonai. Adonai is basically a common word for lord, but lower case lord, which is basically a title of respect. But when you see the capital LORD, it basically draws attention that the writer is using a very sacred and special name. The underlying word here is Yahweh. A word that is very sacred and very holy. So sacred and holy that a lot of the Jewish people would not even mouth the word. That is the underlying word here. It is sacred and holy because it is the very name that God gave himself when he was talking to Moses. The story goes in Exodus where Moses met God at the burning bush and God told Moses to go meet with the Hebrew people to let them know that he was about to release them from 400 years of captivity in slavery to the Egyptians. Moses, being a little bit nervous about the assignment, said to God who should I say sent me? God’s answer was this “Say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your fathers – the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob – has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever. The name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.” He is talking about the LORD, the God, the great I am. He wants to make it clear that that is where he is looking to for help.
Once he gets the revelation that the help comes from the LORD, the creator of heaven and earth, then he proceeds to think about what kind of help this God offers me. He goes on to say “He will not let your foot slip – he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will not slumber nor sleep.” As you can imagine, going through the mountainous terrain is going to be rough on your feet especially since you just have sandals on instead of hiking boots. There is a risk that you may fall. If you fall, you may at a minimum sprain your ankle and at a maximum you may just die. He is suggesting that as long as God is walking next to me and I am walking down the pathway with him, everything will be alright. He will not let my foot slip. There is another psalm that seems to affirm this. Psalm 17:5 says “My steps have held to your path. My feet have not slipped.” A side note to think about, when you are on the path towards God, when you are within his will, he does protect you. He does keep your feet from slipping. He does that because he pays attention. Unlike some of the other gods and goddesses out there, he is not snoozing. He is not taking his afternoon nap similar to what I like to do and I am sure some of you like to do on a Sunday afternoon. He is not napping. Some of the gods back then were known to take naps. So much so that they would provide priests whose sole job it was to wake up the sleeping god or goddess when they need him or her. We see evidence of this in the story of Elijah. He was a prophet of God. A very Godly man who decided he was going to go up against the 450 prophets of the pagan god Baal. What he did was basically propose a contest. We both put our side of beef on the altar and call down our gods to bring down fire. The one who responds will be the one true God. As the story goes the prophets of Baal put the beef on the altar and began to chant, scream, and dance, calling down fire on the beef. It never happened. So Elijah starts mocking them and taunting them a little bit. He says “Maybe you need to shout louder. Surely he is a god! (The underlying word here is Elohim.) Perhaps he is deep in thought, or busy, or traveling. Maybe he is sleeping and must be awakened.” We know that, although the other gods were known to fall asleep at the wheel so to speak, the God of heaven and earth, the LORD who made the heaven and earth, is not going to be caught slumbering or sleeping.
Not only that, he is going to provide protection from the rays of the sun and also the rays of the moon. He goes on to say “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 other day we were looking at the book of Jonah. We know that God provided a shade tree for Jonah. We learned that shade is a symbol of God’s covering and protection. It is believed that the reason it is a shade over the right hand is because the left hand was used to hold a shield, which meant your right hand was exposed to harm. It says that he will provide shade for us from the sun. The sun will not harm you by day. If anybody has ever driven through the Southwestern United States or driven through a desert area, you know how dangerous the hot sun can be. It can result in things like heat stroke and, at a minimum, sunburn.
What about the moon? Here is says “nor the moon by night.” Back then, in 400 B.C., there was a superstition that the rays of the moon would somehow cause some sort of a negative effect on your brain and your emotions. The logic was just as the moon causes the gravitational pull on the tides in the sea, it has a gravitational pull on the fluids in your body, so you would end up with this excess moisture on your brain and would result in everything from emotional distress to seizures. In the New Testament in the gospel of Matthew, we see the underlying word that would normally be translated moonstruck as seizures. In Matthew 4:24 “News about him (him being Jesus) spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures (the underlying word moonstruck), and the paralyzed; and he healed them.” We also know that that word is sometimes translated lunatic. When you think about lunatic, you think about a little bit crazy. It comes from the idea of being moonstruck. Lunar. Moon. Lunatic. We see in the King James Version of the Bible, which is very hard to read sometimes, a father speaking to Jesus about healing his son, and he says “Lord, have mercy on my son: for he is a lunatic and sore vexed: for ofttimes he falleth into the fire, and oft into the water.” That is why I don’t like the King James Version because I just can’t pronounce the words right. It is the idea that we are talking about back then people felt they needed protection from their superstitions. It shows that God doesn’t only protect us from the real physical dangers but even of our superstitions that tend to play on our emotional mindsets or on the stress of our mind or anxiety.
This is all summed up very poetically in the nice poetic ending. “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.” Again, a very poetic ending to a very poetic psalm. The question is, again, is it true? Is it really true? Of all people, the person who wrote this psalm was living 2500 years ago. He was exposed to all sorts of danger and illnesses and disease and sickness and death and war and all this kind of stuff, so how can he make such a statement? He is either trying to fabricate the truth to try and provide some sort of a poetic comfort for his people and for us or maybe we understand protection from harm a little bit different than he does or God does. We have to think back that these are not simply travel songs that you sing on the road to Jerusalem, but these were collectively called a spiritual metaphor for the spiritual journey towards God. That might give us a hint that he might not be talking about physical things here. He is talking about the spiritual. When we take that stance on it, a couple things become clear. First of all, if it is a spiritual psalm that means it is intended for spiritual people. When I say spiritual people, I am talking about spiritual people who live under the covenant care of God. When I say the covenant care, I am talking about the promise by God to care for his people. When I am talking about that, I am talking about the Old Testament. The covenant people of God were the Jewish people, especially the ones that would call God Lord. The ones who would truly consider God as Lord. As the maker of heaven and earth. That covenant care extended up into the New Testament for each of us. The people that come in the New Testament, the covenant care has to do with the people buying into the promise that comes by way of Jesus Christ. In other words, as it says in Romans 10:9, “If you confess with your mouth ‘Jesus is Lord’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” We are talking about the children of the promise. Not only the Jewish people who called God Lord, but the people today who call Christ Lord. This is a psalm that is restricted to the covenant people of God.
The second thing that we want to emphasize and make clear and that I have been stating the whole psalm is that just because you become a Christian does not mean that your life is going to be easy. Christians are just as much prone to all sorts of things. The sicknesses, the illnesses, sunburn, slipping of feet, the accidents, marriage problems, and all that kind of stuff. Christians are subject to the same problems because they live in the same fallen, broken world as the non-believers. But having said that, I do believe that God sometimes provides certain physical care for people. He does answer prayers. We don’t know why, but he does answer certain prayers of his children. We have remembered from this psalm that it is not so much about the physical care for the body as much as it is the spiritual care for the person’s soul. In other words, God is more concerned about what is going on in here than what is going on outside. He wants to know what is going on inside the body because that is where the most damage can be done. Not in the body, in the soul. A good passage that I like the translation of the King James Version for this passage that alludes to this is the same Psalm 121:7. Instead of interpreted as “He will keep you from all harm – he will watch over your life,” it says “The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall reserve thy soul.” In other words, the enemy of our soul will have no power, no ability to come in and attack our soul. This is what is being protected by God. In other words, nothing will be cut off from God. Nothing will be cut off from his love or his purposes. Eugene Peterson, who I referred to last week that I am borrowing a lot from for this series, sums it up best. He says “The promise of the psalm is not that we shall never stub our toes but that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will ever have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us.” Do you get that? I think it is a very good summary. He would go on to say that “The trouble for Christians is not that they have trouble in the world. The trouble is how Christians respond to the trouble in the world.” In other words, they respond like a pagan would. Let’s go to my idols. Let’s go to get some advice from some maybe not-so-good secular friends. Let’s go get some advice from the latest talk show host or the latest blog or posting on the internet. Let’s go to technology. Let’s go get advice from those earthly idols. Now don’t get me wrong, there is some good advice out there for dealing with the physical realm, but it does very little for the spiritual realm. The only person you should go to for advice for the spiritual is a strong Christian or go directly to God, the Maker of heaven and earth. I am saying if we worship God, the Lord, the Maker and creator of the earth, here on Sunday morning that is the same God that we should carry out with us on Monday morning and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday. If he is a God of Sunday, he is the God of all the weekdays.
In closing, we have no promises as Christians that there won’t be any trouble. In fact, if you tell a Christian that when they become a Christian all their problems will go away, you are just lying to them. Even Jesus said “In this world you are going to have trouble.” We are going to have the problems associated with living in this broken world. The difference between a Christian and a non-Christian is he or she knows who is traveling with them. He or she knows that standing next to them is not just another cheap god or goddess. It is the Lord. It is the Maker of heaven and earth. Consequently, when the person continues to move forward in his or her journey towards Christ-likeness, he or she can do so confidently. The person knows that no matter what is thrown their way by the enemy or by the world, you know that everything is going to be right. Everything is going to be safe. Your soul is going to be protected now and forevermore. The apostle Paul sums it up best in Romans when he writes “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Let us pray.
