INTRODUCTION — THE PSALM WE RARELY READ OUT LOUD
There are parts of the Bible you read with a smile, parts you read with a tear… and then there are parts you read and immediately wonder, “Did God really put that in there?” Psalm 137 is one of those places.
It is Scripture at its rawest.
It is faith without makeup.
It is spirituality without airbrushing.
It is the cry of a people who had seen too much, lost too much, and suffered too deeply to sing polite songs anymore. It is the prayer of those whose world burned to the ground while the promises of God still echoed in their ears.
“By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept.”
That is not a metaphor.
It is not a figure of speech.
It is people collapsing on the banks of a foreign river with nothing left to hold onto but their memories.
And the strange gift God gives us in Psalm 137 is this: He tells us He is not offended by honest pain. He is not embarrassed by our questions. He is not shocked by our anger. He is not irritated by our grief. He is the God who allows wounded people to speak, and then preserves their words forever in His book.
That is already a sermon before we even reach verse 2.
Psalm 137 is not a gentle Psalm. It is not a Hallmark card. It is not a quiet prayer spoken in a sanctuary with stained glass and polished pews. It is a prayer shouted through tears by people who have been dragged from their homes, seen their Temple desecrated, and carried chains around their wrists.
This Psalm is not for the people who want neat theology.
This Psalm is for the people who say,
“God, if You want my heart, I need You to hear it all.”
Let’s walk through it.
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I. “BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON WE SAT DOWN AND WEPT” — THE IMAGE OF TRAUMA
The Psalm opens with geography, but it speaks the language of trauma.
The rivers of Babylon were irrigation canals that wound around the empire. They were the places where the exiles were taken to work, build, dig, and labor under forced servitude. And on those riverbanks the Jewish captives would sit at the end of the day, exhausted, dehydrated, grieving, overwhelmed, and broken.
If you’ve ever been in a place where your life changed so drastically that you could barely recognize yourself, you understand this Psalm more than you know.
The exiles didn’t just lose a war.
They lost their identity.
They lost their homeland.
They lost their sense of belonging.
They lost the Temple—the symbol of God’s presence.
They lost their entire world.
So they wept.
And God said, “Write that down. My people need to know that tears are not weakness. They are worship.”
There are moments in life when the strongest faith you can express is the faith that sits down and weeps. There is a holiness in honest sorrow. There is a sacredness in lament. And Psalm 137 tells us that God does not reject people who cry in foreign places.
Maybe your Babylon wasn’t an ancient empire.
Maybe your Babylon was a divorce, a diagnosis, a betrayal, a funeral, a failure, or a season when you didn’t know if God remembered your name.
But here is the promise:
God sits on the riverbank with you.
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II. “OUR CAPTORS DEMANDED SONGS” — WHEN SUFFERING MEETS HUMILIATION
Verses 2 and 3 give us the most cruel detail of the story.
The Babylonians said:
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”
This was not a request.
This was mockery.
They were saying,
“Where’s your God now?”
“You used to sing so loudly—why so quiet?”
“Go on—sing. Entertain us. Praise that God who couldn’t save you.”
Pain is hard enough.
Humiliation is worse.
And some of you know exactly what that feels like.
It is the pain inside your home coupled with judgment from the outside.
It is the grief of loss mixed with people who don’t understand it.
It is the heartbreak of your own Babylon accompanied by voices that don’t respect your suffering.
The exiles hung their harps on the willow trees—not because they didn’t believe anymore, but because their hearts had been crushed.
This is the part of the Psalm where faith feels exhausted, not abandoned.
There is a difference.
Sometimes faith grows quiet because grief grows loud.
And God is patient with that.
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III. “HOW CAN WE SING THE LORD’S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND?” — THE CRISIS OF WORSHIP
Here lies the theological center of the Psalm.
It isn’t simply:
“We are hurting.”
It is:
“God, how do we worship You now?”
This is the question of every exile:
“How do I trust God when the world does not look like His promises?”
“How do I sing when the song in me is gone?”
“How do I pray when I do not feel His nearness?”
“How do I believe when everything around me is unbelief?”
This is where Psalm 137 becomes timeless—because every believer will eventually stand in this place where their spirit asks:
“How do I worship in a season that feels foreign?”
The exiles asked because they thought worship was tied to location, to the Temple, to the land.
And God used Babylon to teach them a truth that carries all the way into the New Covenant:
You don’t need the land to worship God.
You need God to worship God.
The presence they thought was confined to Jerusalem walked with them to Babylon. The God they thought had abandoned them was sitting beside them on the riverbank.
Sometimes God allows a foreign place to teach you that His kingdom was never tied to geography—it was tied to His presence.
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IV. “IF I FORGET YOU, O JERUSALEM…” — HOLDING ONTO HOPE WHEN EVERYTHING FEELS LOST
Verses 5 and 6 represent the vow of identity.
The exiles say:
“I refuse to forget who I am.
I refuse to forget who God is.
I refuse to let Babylon redefine my story.”
This is one of the most important statements of faith in the Old Testament.
They could not sing yet.
But they could remember.
When you cannot worship loudly, you can worship by remembering.
Remembering is a spiritual discipline.
When life feels foreign, memory becomes an anchor.
What did the exiles remember?
They remembered Jerusalem.
They remembered God’s covenant.
They remembered His faithfulness.
They remembered His promise.
They remembered a future in which God would restore them.
This is how faith survives exile.
Faith does not always shout.
Sometimes faith whispers,
“I remember.”
Some of you today are living in your own Babylon. Your faith may feel thin. Your emotions may feel exhausted. Your spiritual energy may feel drained. But if you remember God’s faithfulness—even faintly—you are already beginning to sing again.
Memory becomes the seed of future worship.
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V. “REMEMBER, O LORD, THE EDOMITES…” — THE LONGING FOR JUSTICE
This is where the Psalm takes a turn toward territory we are uncomfortable with.
The Psalmist prays that God will remember what the Edomites did during the invasion—how they helped Babylon, how they cheered, how they shouted,
“Level it! Tear it down!”
This is a plea for justice.
Not revenge—justice.
The Psalmist is saying:
“Lord, I saw what they did. But I am not asking for the power to pay them back. I am asking You to be the God You promised to be—just, righteous, holy, and true.”
This is what makes Psalm 137 so spiritually mature beneath the raw emotion:
The Psalmist never says,
“I will repay.”
He says,
“Lord, You remember.”
It is the difference between vengeance and justice.
**Vengeance says, “Put the sword in my hand.”
Justice says, “God, I put my pain in Yours.”**
And that is exactly what the Psalmist does.
The preacher must make this clear:
This part of the Psalm is not God endorsing violence.
It is God revealing what wounded hearts feel—and then showing how they hand those feelings to Him instead of acting on them.
The Psalmist is not plotting murder.
He is surrendering judgment into God’s keeping.
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VI. THE HARD VERSE — “BLESSED IS THE ONE WHO DASHES YOUR LITTLE ONES AGAINST THE ROCK”
This is the verse that causes modern people to recoil.
This is the verse critics quote.
This is the verse pastors dread.
This is the verse that makes people close their Bibles quietly.
But this verse is not a divine command.
It is not a model prayer.
It is not a Christian ethic.
It is not even a description of God’s character.
It is a window into human trauma.
We must preach it honestly.
This is what a parent says when they have watched their own child die at the hands of an enemy. The Babylonians did this very thing—2 Kings 8, Isaiah 13. It was a common wartime atrocity in the ancient Near East.
This is not God ordaining violence.
This is God preserving the cry of a victim.
A victim who says,
“God, You saw what they did. If justice is real, then the pain they inflicted must not be ignored.”
We dare not sanitize this Psalm.
To remove its sharp edges is to erase the experience of every person who has ever suffered violence or injustice.
**The violent verse is not Scripture endorsing violence—
it is Scripture validating the wounded.**
And the honesty of this verse is what allows us to understand how the gospel answers the deepest cries of human suffering.
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VII. HOW THE GOSPEL MEETS PSALM 137
Here the preacher must lift the congregation’s eyes.
A. Jesus is the true Israelite who enters our exile
Jesus knows Babylon.
He knows mockery.
He knows injustice.
He knows humiliation.
He knows what it is to pray in pain.
He knows what it means to say,
“My God, why?”
He stands with the Psalmist.
But more than that—
B. Jesus absorbs divine justice to spare human sinners
The Psalmist calls for Babylon’s violence to be answered.
At the cross, Jesus—innocent, holy, pure—steps into that place of judgment.
Instead of Babylon’s children being crushed,
the Son of God is crushed.
Instead of the wrath being poured on the guilty nations,
it is poured on the sinless Christ.
This is where the Psalm points us:
Justice is real.
Injustice is not ignored.
But the final answer is not human retaliation.
It is divine mercy poured out through divine judgment at Calvary.
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VIII. JESUS TRANSFORMS THE CRY OF THE PSALM INTO A PRAYER OF REDEMPTION
Where the Psalmist cries,
“Repay them!”
Jesus cries,
“Father, forgive them.”
He doesn’t dismiss suffering.
He heals it.
He doesn’t trivialize injustice.
He redeems it.
He doesn’t ignore the wounds of Babylon.
He carries them in His own body.
Psalm 137 tells us what human pain sounds like.
The cross tells us what divine love does with that pain.
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PART THREE (˜1,500 words)
IX. WHAT THIS PSALM MEANS FOR US TODAY
Psalm 137 may be ancient, but its soul is modern.
Every person in your congregation has a Babylon.
It may be a past trauma.
It may be a present crisis.
It may be a memory that still aches.
It may be a grief they have never voiced.
It may be an injustice that has never been resolved.
Psalm 137 teaches us four transforming truths:
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1. God does not reject the prayers you are afraid to pray.
If Psalm 137 belongs in Scripture, then your rawest cry belongs in God’s presence.
He is not looking for polished language.
He is not impressed by perfect theology.
He is not startled by your anger, your grief, or your confusion.
He invites honesty.
Some of you have never prayed the prayer you needed to pray because you thought God would be offended.
Psalm 137 proves He will not.
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2. God stands with people in foreign places.
Babylon does not mean abandonment.
The exiles thought God lived in Jerusalem—
but God walked with them to Babylon.
And some of you think God was with you when life was good,
but disappeared when life became foreign.
Not true.
Never true.
He is the God of the exile.
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3. God hears the cry for justice—and answers it in His way and time.
Psalm 137 is proof that God does not dismiss injustice.
He remembers.
He sees.
He judges.
He heals.
And for the believer, justice is not merely a future event—
justice was poured out at the cross.
The cry of Psalm 137 and the mercy of Jesus meet in one place:
the cross is where God satisfies justice and offers forgiveness.
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4. Jesus heals what Babylon breaks.
The Psalm ends without resolution.
Jesus finishes the story.
He restores identity.
He rebuilds the ruins.
He wipes away every tear.
He brings us home from every exile.
He turns lament into praise, not by denying the pain, but by redeeming it.
This is the gospel through the lens of the hardest Psalm in Scripture.
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X. A PASTORAL WORD FOR THE EXILES IN THE ROOM
Some of you today are sitting by a river of your own making—
a place where you did not choose to go
but where life has placed you.
You’ve hung up your harp.
You’ve lost your song.
You’ve lost your strength.
You’ve lost your way.
You don’t feel like the person you used to be.
And Babylon has a way of whispering,
“Where is your God now?”
Hear me:
He is right there beside you.
He saw the moment your world collapsed.
He heard the words spoken against you.
He remembers what others have forgotten.
He does not rebuke your tears.
He does not hold your anger against you.
He does not despise your questions.
He invites you to bring it all—
every sorrow, every memory, every wound, every injustice—
and lay it at His feet.
Because the same God who preserved Psalm 137
also preserved a cross on a hill
where every cry of human pain meets the mercy of heaven.
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XI. CONCLUSION — “SING US ONE OF THE SONGS OF ZION”
Years after Babylon, God did exactly that.
He brought His people home.
He restored Jerusalem.
He rebuilt the Temple.
He turned lament into joy.
And He fulfilled every promise.
But the deepest fulfillment did not happen through a city.
It happened through a Savior.
Jesus is the final answer to the cry of Psalm 137.
He is the presence we thought we lost.
He is the justice we longed for.
He is the mercy we needed.
He is the healer of Babylon’s wounds.
He is the One who carries us out of exile and brings us home.
Psalm 137 begins with people sitting by a river and weeping.
The gospel ends with people standing before a throne and singing.
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APPEAL
If you are in Babylon today—
if life feels foreign,
if your heart feels tired,
if your song has gone silent,
if injustice has left a bruise on your soul—
come to Jesus.
Bring Him the Psalm you’ve never prayed.
Bring Him the truth you’ve never voiced.
Bring Him the pain you’ve tried to hide.
He will not turn you away.
He will not rebuke your honesty.
He will sit with you on the riverbank until your tears become a prayer
and your prayer becomes a song
and your song becomes praise
and your praise becomes healing.
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PRAYER
Lord, You know the exile places of our lives.
You see the tears we have cried in silence.
You hear the questions we are afraid to ask.
Teach us to bring every emotion, every memory, every wound to You.
Heal our hearts.
Do justice Your way.
Restore our song.
And lead us home by Your grace.
In Jesus’ name, Amen.
