Psalm 127
Psalm 127
A Song of degrees for Solomon.
1 Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it:
Except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.
2 It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up elate,
To eat the bread of sorrows:
For so he giveth his beloved sleep.
3 Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
And the fruit of the womb is his reward.
4 As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
So are children of the youth.
5 Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
They shall not be ashamed,
But they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.
He will not be … when he confronts. The verbs in the Hebrew are plural, and while they may refer to blessed fathers, generalized from the one father in the previous line, it seems more natural to understand the subject as the sons who are defending their father
In some sense God is at work in all human activity. “For in him we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28). “He makes everything work out according to his plan” (Eph 1:11). “The LORD has made everything for his own purposes, even the wicked for a day of disaster” (Prov 16:4). Yet the psalmist presumes that there is some sense in which God is not involved in some human activity. There are times when we can say, “God was not in that,” at least in some sense.
“Useless” here seems to mean “not producing the desired result.” Why do people build houses? Why do people strive to build safe communities? Why do people toil to earn a living? The answer appears to be found in the shalom [7965, 8934] that is a running motif in the Psalms of Ascent (120:6, 7; 122:6, 7, 8; 125:5; 128:6). People want “peace” in the full sense of the term, the absence of harm and the presence of tranquility with prosperity (see 122:6). When people strive for this good end without faith in God and in ways contrary to his principles, God is not “in it,” and they do not experience the shalom they are looking for. When people work with total dependence on self and without faith in God, their activities are “useless”—they do not produce the desired result. The desired result is shalom, but the actual experience is the opposite.
The two human activities of verse 1 are samples of a great area of life: its enterprises and its conflicts, the work of creating and of conserving. For each of them this verse sees only two possibilities: either it will be the Lord’s doing or it will be pointless; there is no third option.