Rise 3: HELP—Psalm 121
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Psalm 121
N:
Opening
Opening
Thank band and Alvin. Welcome. Introduce yourself. Mention Jonathan McKee last week, and let people know that the workshop is on our YouTube channel if they’d like to watch it, rewatch it, or share it.
Announcements:
Announcements:
Shine Focus Sunday. In a recent article called “7 Ways to Draw the Unchurched to Your Church” by Lifeway Research, they found that “31% of unchurched Americans say they’d more likely listen to Christians if their faith drove them to care for the needs of others,” and 22% said that “they would be more prone to listen to Christians if they saw them use their faith to solve problems in the community.” That’s why we’ve partnered with Shine, and why we are taking some extra time to highlight and focus on that partnership this morning. In the EHBC Life (aka, the bulletin), there is an insert for Shine with more information about that organization, and we are partnered with Shine to serve the community of Kennedy Middle School, which is just south of Lomas on Tomasita. Throughout COVID, we have had a hard time coming up with practical ways to serve that community. Because it is a public school, we are not allowed to proselytize on campus, but we can serve with our hands, feet, and attitudes as we have opportunity.
We have served in a couple of small ways, but we are now kind of in a “restart” phase, where the school is about ready to start talking relationship goals with us, and we need to see how capable we are as a church family to actually meet those needs. We will have that goals meeting with our Shine coordinator in the next couple of weeks, and if you’re interested in an opportunity to meet very practical needs for middle schoolers and their families, would you consider just letting us know? There is no ongoing obligation, and you will be able to help or pass on projects that will come up in the future with Shine. You can text the keyword “SHINE” to 505-339-2004, and then just complete the contact card that the link takes you to: it’s only your name and email address. We will be in touch when goals are established, so that we can match people to needs. Please consider getting involved in this great ministry opportunity to get outside the walls and make a difference in our community.
Business meeting tonight at 5:30.
MNM Offering $4,410, goal $8,000
Remember that we started the current series that we are in on the Psalms of Ascent by looking at Psalm 130, and I opened the series by considering the collection of these fifteen psalms into their grouping of 120-134. I believe that the best argument is that they were collected together around the time of the return from the Babylonian exile, as the Israelites were called to “go up” at the end of their Scriptures, 2 Chronicles in ours, when Cyrus gave the Israelites permission to return to Jerusalem after the Medo-Persian empire defeated the Babylonians (side note…we read the Isaiah prophecy about Cyrus this week in our church reading… that prophecy in Isaiah 44-45 was given well over 100 years before it actually happened!). They then were used in other worship settings, such as for people going up to Jerusalem for the three annual required feasts and as the Levites ascended the steps into the Temple. We started by looking at HOPE—we saw in Psalm 130 the hope that we have in the forgiveness that is offered to us in the Gospel of Christ, and the message of hope that we have the privilege of sharing with others. Then, two weeks ago, Trevor shared with us the message to LOOK from Psalm 123, connecting that ancient prayer with our prayer life today. This morning, we will look at Psalm 121 as we consider today’s focus on HELP. Let’s stand in honor of God’s Word as we read Psalm 121 together:
1 I lift my eyes toward the mountains. Where will my help come from? 2 My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. 3 He will not allow your foot to slip; your Protector will not slumber. 4 Indeed, the Protector of Israel does not slumber or sleep. 5 The Lord protects you; the Lord is a shelter right by your side. 6 The sun will not strike you by day or the moon by night. 7 The Lord will protect you from all harm; he will protect your life. 8 The Lord will protect your coming and going both now and forever.
PRAYER, asking the Lord for help now as we look at this Psalm.
Psalm 121 is the second of the Psalms of Ascent. In a way, it is the answer to the first one, Psalm 120:
A song of ascents. 1 In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. 2 “Lord, rescue me from lying lips and a deceitful tongue.” 3 What will he give you, and what will he do to you, you deceitful tongue? 4 A warrior’s sharp arrows with burning charcoal! 5 What misery that I have stayed in Meshech, that I have lived among the tents of Kedar! 6 I have dwelt too long with those who hate peace. 7 I am for peace; but when I speak, they are for war.
There’s conflict here, conflict that doesn’t sound that out of place today, to be honest. Obviously, the psalmist is dealing with deception, dishonesty, and strife. He wants peace, but those around him want war. It’s the beginning of the journey of Ascent: distress, needing rescue. So then we come to Psalm 121, and we find a question and an answer. First, the question:
1 I lift my eyes toward the mountains. Where will my help come from?
When Trevor preached two weeks ago, he mentioned Psalm 121 in his message. In Psalm 123, we said that the people who had arrived in Jerusalem were looking to the Lord, perhaps as they saw the Temple. Since Psalm 121 is before 123, at the start of the journey, we look to the mountains, the hills.
What does the psalmist mean by the “mountains?” There are four general interpretations of this reference, two “positive” and two “negative:”
“Positive” interpretation #1: The mountains, in their permanence and strength, remind us of the permanence and strength of God, and so as we lift our eyes to them, we are reminded to continue upward, lifting our eyes to the Lord.
“Positive” interpretation #2: From the perspective of most of Israel, Jerusalem is “up”. Therefore, looking to the mountains, to the hills, could mean that we are looking to where God is, because we are looking to the Temple, where His glory dwells.
“Negative” interpretation #1: From the perspective of Jerusalem, then, if an enemy were going to attack Jerusalem, they would come from the mountains. So the interpretation is that enemies are closing in on every side, and the people of God are in dire straits.
“Negative” interpretation #2: Again from the perspective of just about anywhere in Israel, or from anywhere else in the world (such as exile in Babylon) where the Hebrew people would need to make a journey on foot to Jerusalem, the mountains are an obstacle filled with difficulty and danger.
Given the text of the psalm itself, with each section including the concept of both danger and protection, it seems to me that neither of the “positive” interpretations work well for this. Also, while option 3, the first “negative” interpretation, fits with the ideas of protection and rescue, we need to keep in mind both the place of this psalm in the collection of the Psalms of Ascent and the “journey” language that appears throughout it. I, therefore, would suggest that the most appropriate interpretation of the mountains in this psalm is in line with the last option: that the mountains are seen as an obstacle or a danger to overcome on the pilgrim’s path to Jerusalem.
Why is this important? I’m glad you asked. It’s important because it colors how we read the rest of the psalm, and how we might interpret the imagery that we find there. It also colors our application of this psalm to our context today: If the psalmist sees the mountains as an obstacle and a difficulty to go through on his trek to the presence of God at the Temple, then we can identify with the writer as we face our own impediments and hardships in our own spiritual journeys.
So with the identity of the mountains in mind, we with the psalmist can ask the question, “Where will my help come from?” The psalmist answers the question that he raised, and gives us our first point:
2 My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.
1) God our strength.
1) God our strength.
The writer of Psalm 121 declares his deep trust that his help comes from the Lord, invoking God’s name, Yahweh, declaring Him to be the “Maker of heaven and earth.” This statement of God’s creative work isn’t merely some poetic device used to fill the line or sound more fancy. He’s using it as an identifier for the One he is declaring is his help with the mountains he faces. Yahweh is the Maker of heaven and earth. The God who MADE the mountains and everything in them, and the earth that they sit on, and the heavens that the earth resides in, is certainly greater than whatever trouble the mountains may bring. His strength is completely sufficient for His people’s need.
Consider another psalm of trust, Psalm 46:
1 God is our refuge and strength, a helper who is always found in times of trouble. 2 Therefore we will not be afraid, though the earth trembles and the mountains topple into the depths of the seas, 3 though its water roars and foams and the mountains quake with its turmoil. Selah
The mountains, no matter how they may appear to us, are not permanent. Earthquakes, erosion, man… all of these can change the face of the mountains, not to mention that this earth and all that it contains will be wrapped up and made new by God at the end of time. But God is unchanging, ever-present, and all-powerful, “a helper who is always found in times of trouble.” I like what Daniel Estes wrote about this fact in his commentary on the psalms:
“Fear argues that the mountains are too big, but faith asserts that the Lord is bigger than the mountains. By adding to the covenantal name Yahweh to the appositional phrase, “the Maker of heaven and earth,” the psalmist views the Lord as both the God of covenant and the God of creation. Because the psalmist has an intimate relationship with the infinite ruler of the universe, his Lord is both willing and able to help him in his time of need. No human problem is beyond the Lord’s purview.” (NAC, Psalms 73-150, Daniel J. Estes)
Where do we look for help, for strength, when we face difficulties in our lives, when those mountains loom large before us, and we wonder how we will ever cross them? The mountains of difficulty still must be crossed. Where will our help come from? As the other three points are kind of sub-points of this one, I’m going to address our biggest mountain, the one shared by all of humanity, first:
The biggest mountain that we face is the mountain of sin. And all of us are in the same boat. The perfect, holy, sinless God has given us life, and He desires that we would be in relationship with Him. But we look at God’s offer of relationship on His terms and we reject it. We’d rather go our own way, do our own thing, and make our own path. The fact is that we’re prideful, we’re selfish, we’re broken. We take the offer of relationship from Almighty God and say, “no, thanks… I know better what I need.” And that’s sin. And it separates us from God. Our biggest mountain is a mountain of our own creation, and all of us are guilty.
And unfortunately, once we sin, we can never get back to sinless on our own, according to Scripture. We can’t say we’re sorry enough, or do enough good stuff, or give enough money to get back to perfect, because as I said, we’re broken. We need to be remade, and only our Maker can do that.
But there’s a price to be paid: because God is a just God, He has to judge this mountain of sin that we face, and must condemn those who made it. That’s all of us. But since only God is perfect, God the Son came in the person of Jesus, and He lived life as one of us. Then on a different hill called Calvary, hundreds of years after these psalms were collected in this way, Jesus took the punishment for our mountain of sin on Himself, paying the penalty that we owe for the sin we’ve committed, dying in our place so that justice would be served and we could be forgiven through His blood.
And then Jesus beat the second biggest mountain we face: death. He rose from the grave and He ascended to His rightful place in heaven where He will reign forever. Anyone who trusts in what Jesus has done for their forgiveness and surrenders their life to His will and work ALSO receives eternal life with Jesus in heaven. This is what Paul wrote about to the church in Ephesus:
18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened so that you may know what is the hope of his calling, what is the wealth of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the mighty working of his strength. 20 He exercised this power in Christ by raising him from the dead and seating him at his right hand in the heavens—21 far above every ruler and authority, power and dominion, and every title given, not only in this age but also in the one to come.
I implore you who are hearing this right now who have never surrendered to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, never trusted in what He did on the cross to save you, never believed in the message of the Gospel: this is the biggest mountain you face: the mountain of unforgiven sin in your life that separates you from your God. And it’s only in God’s strength that that mountain can be moved. Give up, trust Jesus, and surrender to Him.
Then you can experience the fact that God is our strength. Like the psalmist wrote in Psalm 121, our great God is our help in times of trouble and difficulty. This beautiful passage in Isaiah 40 says it so well:
28 Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the whole earth. He never becomes faint or weary; there is no limit to his understanding. 29 He gives strength to the faint and strengthens the powerless. 30 Youths may become faint and weary, and young men stumble and fall, 31 but those who trust in the Lord will renew their strength; they will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not become weary, they will walk and not faint.
Those who trust in the Lord will renew their strength from His strength. He never wears out, never gets tired, never is confused or surprised, never does not know what to do and how to do it. His strength is limitless, so He can and will strengthen His people who rely on Him for His glory and purpose. Psalm 121 declares the psalmist’s trust in His help through His strength, help that is available to us as well.
As the psalmist continues in this psalm, he basically lists three ways that the Lord’s help is made evident. Each goes with a stanza from the psalm, and we will look at each point in turn:
2) God our support.
2) God our support.
The first way that God’s help by His strength is shown is in the fact that He is our support. One interesting thing to note is that, while the first two verses are in the first person (“I” & “my”), in the rest of the psalm, the psalmist writes in second person (“your” & “you”). We can’t know for sure exactly why this is. It could be that it is a dialog between a younger man (verses 1 & 2) who knows the truth that God is his help, with a wiser Jewish person who expands on what that means in the face of the mountains before them. It could be that it’s simply an internal dialog in the psalmist’s heart and mind. Or it could be that following his declaration of understanding that it is God who will help him, the psalmist’s response to that hope is telling others of the truth that he clings to in verse 2. Any are acceptable and don’t change the meaning. I like the last one, personally, that after answering his own question in verses 1 and 2, the psalmist is now testifying to the rest of the people about God’s strength to help them.
3 He will not allow your foot to slip; your Protector will not slumber. 4 Indeed, the Protector of Israel does not slumber or sleep.
The Hebrew word here for “protector” or “protect” is used six times in these six verses (3-8), with only verse 6 not containing the word, but with it used twice in verse 7. This psalm is such a declaration of trust in the protection of the Lord and His actions of protecting His people!
So what kind of support does the writer say the Lord will provide? First, he says that the Lord will not allow the foot of His follower to slip. Remember that the psalmist was likely originally writing with a very real, very physical journey through mountains in mind. Are there any hikers in the room this morning? Hiking is not my favorite thing. I remember when I was in elementary and middle school in Silver City, my dad would sometimes take us out into the Black Range to hike along what I believe looking back had to be the Mimbres River. Sometimes, the trail was not clear, and sometimes the footing was not solid.
So does this psalm mean that because of the Lord’s help, the righteous will never trip while they are on a hike? No. It means that God will support His people as they are on the journey toward Him, and He will not allow anything to keep them from their goal. He will be with them in ALL PLACES on the journey. Look at what Isaiah said about the path of the righteous in Isaiah 26:
7 The path of the righteous is level; you clear a straight path for the righteous.
It is only in Christ that we will be able to walk in righteousness, because left to our own devices, we will stray. By His power through His Spirit as we walk lives submitted to Him, Jude says that He is able to protect us from stumbling and bring us into His presence:
24 Now to him who is able to protect you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, without blemish and with great joy, 25 to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen.
This isn’t to say that we are without the ability to choose whether to rely upon His support, or that God will always support us regardless of what direction we are going. The path that He gives His support to is the path of righteousness. That’s the path that He makes level and straight. That’s the path that those who follow Christ are to walk on. Another psalmist, Asaph, is a good example of this in Psalm 73—
1 God is indeed good to Israel, to the pure in heart. 2 But as for me, my feet almost slipped; my steps nearly went astray. 3 For I envied the arrogant; I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
Notice what he says in this psalm of lament. Asaph confesses God’s faithfulness, but then admits that he almost slipped. Why? Because he took his eyes off of God and started comparing his life with the lives of the wicked around him. He continues to express his frustration about this for another 10 verses, until He realizes that the wealth, the power, the words, the ease, the arrogance of the wicked will not last forever. There will come a day of judgment, and God will make all things right. But in the meantime, Asaph was very nearly overwhelmed and led astray to the sin of jealousy.
This is a trap that we can fall into when we decide that things other than God’s provision and presence are where we find our support. If we trust in our wealth or our education or our technology to keep our footing sure as we travel the path of life, those things will all ultimately let us down if we are not walking in a righteous relationship with God. Don’t get me wrong: those things are not bad things in themselves, and in fact they can be very good things, but they cannot become ultimate things: things we base our lives on. God provides things, resources, and people sometimes as His means of providing support, but walking with the Lord is where sure footing is found.
Asaph ultimately ended his musings about the wicked and their prosperity by saying this:
26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart, my portion forever.
I very briefly want to mention the rest of verse 3 and verse 4. In these, the Lord as Protector of the individual follower of His (verse 3b) and as Protector of the collective of His people (verse 4), is said not to slumber or sleep. This should be a great comfort to us! The Lord, who provides help to His people by His strength, and support and guidance on their journey, never takes a day off. He never needs a break, never takes a nap. He is constantly vigilant.
This reminds me of the confrontation between Elijah and the confrontation with the prophets of Baal and Asherah on Mount Carmel. Most of us know the story. There had been a severe drought because of the Lord’s judgment on Israel, and because of his faithfulness to God, Elijah had become a wanted man. But in order to prove who God really is, Elijah challenged the prophets of these false gods to a duel of sorts. They each got to prepare meat on the altars to their gods: The Baals and the Asherah worshipers for their false god, and Elijah for Yahweh. They were not allowed to set fire to the offering, but were to call upon their gods to answer with fire. The false prophets went first, and spent all morning crying out to their god with no result. In 1 Kings 18:27, Elijah mocks them about it:
27 At noon Elijah mocked them. He said, “Shout loudly, for he’s a god! Maybe he’s thinking it over; maybe he has wandered away; or maybe he’s on the road. Perhaps he’s sleeping and will wake up!”
His mocking are all suggestions of very human characteristics: that Baal must be deep in thought, or in the bathroom (literally what the phrase translated here “wandered away” means), or that he’s on a trip or taking a nap. So they cried out more loudly and even cut themselves to get Baal’s attention so he would give them fire, which of course, he never did, because he’s not real. Elijah prayed, and even after soaking the altar with water, God answered with fire from heaven, and consumed the offering and the wood and the water with His fire. God showed His glory that day.
Our God never sleeps. He is a constant support for His people as they walk with Him, and through His help, He is glorified. As we testify about His presence and His help, He is glorified.
3) God our shelter.
3) God our shelter.
In the next stanza, we see that God is our shelter: something extremely important in a desert climate such as in Israel. We here in New Mexico understand this. Thank the Lord for sunscreen. The sun can be brutally hot and sap you of the desire to even take another step. But then at night, different dangers lurk that we cannot see. This is what the psalmist is saying in verses 5 & 6:
5 The Lord protects you; the Lord is a shelter right by your side. 6 The sun will not strike you by day or the moon by night.
Again, the Lord protects. This time, instead of protecting us from slipping or falling, He protects us as a shelter, providing shade and security from the both what we can see and what we cannot. In ALL SITUATIONS that His people face, God is present and capable of sheltering them. One of the pictures that the Scriptures use for this picture is that God covers us or hides us in the “shadow of His wings.” Consider these other psalms quickly:
8 Protect me as the pupil of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings
7 How priceless your faithful love is, God! People take refuge in the shadow of your wings.
1 Be gracious to me, God, be gracious to me, for I take refuge in you. I will seek refuge in the shadow of your wings until danger passes.
6 When I think of you as I lie on my bed, I meditate on you during the night watches 7 because you are my helper; I will rejoice in the shadow of your wings. 8 I follow close to you; your right hand holds on to me.
This term, the “shadow of your wings,” has always been a blessing to me as I’ve considered how God shelters me, how He comforts me in the troubles that I face. And God provides in our lives resources and people who He uses to provide us comfort and shelter on the journey, and these things are good things. But again, we sometimes look to things other than God to provide us shelter and comfort. The things that immediately come to mind our addictions. We might look for comfort in a drink or a drug. We might seek comfort through looking at pornography or shopping. We might want to find comfort in eating or for some, not eating. An addiction to video games, YouTube, and social media might be where we try to find comfort and shelter from the stresses of life. But each of these is a false hope, because ultimately they all leave us worse off than when we started, because none of them provides any real, lasting shelter, comfort, or security.
Take honest stock for a moment: Is God your shelter and your refuge, your comfort and shield when difficulties rise? The question comes back to the place where we ended last point: who gets the glory? Does God? Or does something else? Look to the Lord to comfort us, as Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 1—
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort. 4 He comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any kind of affliction, through the comfort we ourselves receive from God. 5 For just as the sufferings of Christ overflow to us, so also through Christ our comfort overflows.
See? The comfort that Paul received from God overflowed to comfort the church. So as we experience God’s comforting hand, we can then reach out and comfort one another as well.
4) God our Savior.
4) God our Savior.
So we’ve seen that God’s help is available to us in ALL PLACES as He supports us on our journey, and in ALL SITUATIONS as He provides us shelter and comfort in the shadow of His wings. Finally, we see that God’s help through His strength is available to us at ALL TIMES because He is our Savior not just once, but in an ongoing manner:
7 The Lord will protect you from all harm; he will protect your life. 8 The Lord will protect your coming and going both now and forever.
Notice that the psalmist says that God will protect His people from all harm and will protect their lives. The word here for “harm” is the Hebrew word ‘ra, that which is bad, harmful, or evil. Again, does this mean that no harm will ever befall the one who follows the Lord? No. We live in a world that is broken, and we ourselves are broken, and so broken things are going to happen, all under God’s watchful supervision. But for the one who has faith in God, anything that would try to separate us from God instead becomes an enemy to be subjugated, an opportunity for victory and God’s glory to shine, because we are MORE than conquerors through Him who loved us. Paul wrote about this in Romans 8—
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
This is because Jesus has overcome the world, even though He tells us that in this life we will have trouble (John 16:33). I like how Stephen Yuille explained Psalm 121:7 in his book, Longing for Home:
The greatness of any loss is measured by the value of what’s lost. If God is incomparable, then the loss of him must be incomparable. If he’s infinite, then the loss of him must be infinite. If he’s incomprehensible, then the loss of him must be incomprehensible.
The psalmist’s point is that God keeps him from ultimate evil: the loss of God.
Yuille, J. S. (2015). Longing for Home: a journey through the psalms of ascent.
And then we see that God’s protection extends to ALL TIMES in that He says that He protects our “coming and going both now and forever.” I think that covers all times: whenever we go somewhere or come from somewhere, and now and for all times after now, God is still actively saving us, actively delivering us from that mountain of sin we considered at the beginning. God has saved us, is saving us, and will continue to save us, because He loves us and because He is glorified through the salvation that He has so freely offered in Christ.
Closing
Closing
Theologian Alec Motyer said:
“Nothing, therefore, on the human side of pilgrimage—the exercise of walking and the hazards of picking our way along a difficult path—will be allowed to come between pilgrims and their goal.” p. 35 from Journey: Psalms for Pilgrim People
This psalm doesn’t mean that the way will be without difficulty. It will be. It doesn’t mean that the journey will go perfectly. It likely won’t. But it does mean that for those who look to the Lord for their strength, their support, their shelter, and their salvation, in all places, all situations, and at all times, they will never lack His presence on the journey, even if we don’t always realize He’s there.
Do you want to know that peace today? That God is always with you, even when times are difficult? You can know that peace, because of what Jesus has done on the cross. Trust in Christ’s sacrifice in your place, surrender to Him in faith, and follow Him today.
Invite down Joe, Kerry, Trevor, and the band. We will be here to pray with you and for you, and to answer any questions that you might have about trusting Christ this morning. We want to help you as you start this new journey of faith. If you’re online, you can reach out to me by email at bill@ehbc.org.
If you believe that EHBC is a church family that you can be a part of where you can serve God and grow in your faith as you walk this journey with your brothers and sisters, and you’d like to join in formal membership this morning, come and let us know. We’ll set up an appointment to talk further with you about the church and to get to know you a little more. If you are online and live in the area, please reach out by email to talk about church membership.
Are you facing some mountains on your journey? Your help comes from the Lord. You can come and pray at the steps, or with one of us if you need to this morning.
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Give Wayne the floor.
Retirement party for Wayne on 12/19 in the evening.
Voter registration table in the foyer.
Mary & Karen Gleason graveside service tomorrow at 1 pm at Sunset Memorial. Any who would like at attend may, but there will be a celebration of life at a later date.
Bible reading: Isaiah 46 today.
Instructions: Visitors come and meet me down front following service, I have a gift for you and would like to have a moment to meet you and thank you for being here.
Benediction:
57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! 58 Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.