December 16th

Psalm 129

Amid all sadness

Psalm 128 is about the abundant blessings enjoyed by God’s people, and it paints a picture of domestic tranquility—a flourishing family, enjoying abundance around a table, and living in a peaceful city.  By itself, Psalm 128 presents the life of God’s people as one of harmony and overflowing prosperity.

But when we read Psalm 129 we discover something completely different. In this Psalm, the writer describes God’s people as being oppressed since the very beginning.    

There are two key theological insights in this poem found in verse 1-2 and verse 4.

“They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young”
    —this is how Israel tells it—
“They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young,
    but they never could keep me down.      [MESSAGE]

The pain Israel has suffered is pictured in dramatic images:  ‘they’ve sorely afflicted me;’  ‘they plowed my back like farmers; they made their furrows deep.’

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that empires tend to want to be rid of Jews because Jews abide by another set of laws and worship another Lawgiver.  Jews signify difference; tyrants who seek uniformity abhor difference.  Yet those empires that sought to crush the Jews – from Egypt to the Nazis – are gone.  And the Jewish people survive.    

The psalmist reminds us how insubstantial evil really is:

⁶     Let them be like grass on a roof
    that dies before it can be pulled up,
⁷     which won’t fill the reaper’s hand
        or fill the harvester’s arms.
Evil is insubstantial.  It is ugly, but it not lasting, and to choose it is to become as nothing (think of Hitler’s lonely suicide in a Berlin bunker).  Evil disintegrates on its own and the ultimate evil is not to participate in the exchange of blessings between God’s people.

This leads to our second key insight:

Verse 4 says, “But YHWH is righteous; he has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.” In other words, God delivered his people from oppression in the past. Therefore, they can continue to trust him amid their present suffering. Psalm 129 is a call to remember the Lord’s past faithfulness as we endure ongoing hardship. That’s a message that, in fact, permeates the entire Bible.

When the Bible says God is righteous it is saying that God is always in right relation to us.  That the Lord is righteous is the reason that Christians can look back over a long life, crisscrossed with cruelties, unannounced tragedies, unexpected setbacks, sufferings, disappointments, depressions – look back across all that and see it as a road of blessing and make a song out of what we see.  ‘Sorely have afflicted they me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me.’   God sticks to his relationship with us.  The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment that God makes to us.  Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness.  We survive in the way of faith not because we have extraordinary stamina but because God is righteous. 

If the history of Israel (and the church) is one great passion narrative, then the creativity of God is one great resurrection.  Like the apostle Paul we take great comfort from God’s great act of salvation in Jesus Christ.  Romans 8 provides a litany of assurance.

³¹ So what are we going to say about these things?

If God is for us,

who is against us? 

³² He didn’t spare his own Son but gave him up for us all.

Won’t he also freely give us all things with him?

³³ Who will bring a charge against God’s elect people?

It is God who acquits them. 

³⁴ Who is going to convict them?

It is Christ Jesus who also pleads our case for us.

³⁵ Who will separate us from Christ’s love? Will we be separated by trouble, or distress, or harassment, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? ³⁶ As it is written,

We are being put to death all day long for your sake.
    We are treated like sheep for slaughter.

³⁷ But in all these things we win a sweeping victory through the one who loved us. ³⁸ I’m convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers ³⁹ or height or depth, or any other thing that is created.

We may trust Christ our great Shepherd whose love will follow us all the days of our lives.

A good message to remember this Christmas season.

[See #114 HWB In Thee is gladness’]   

This blog will return on January 6, 2025, Deo Volente!