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Started reading
May 28, 2020
We Christians are among that privileged company of persons who don’t have accidents, who don’t have arguments with our spouses, who aren’t misunderstood by our peers, whose children do not disobey us. If any of those things should happen—a crushing doubt, a squall of anger, a desperate loneliness, an accident that puts us in the hospital, an argument that puts us in the doghouse, a rebellion that puts us on the defensive, a misunderstanding that puts us in the wrong—it is a sign that something is wrong with our relationship with God.
I do not believe this!!! What about babies born with deformities, or sickness, they did nothing to deserve it. Its due to the brokeness of the world not our acts that some things happen.
Is that what you believe? If it is, I have some incredibly good news for you. You are wrong.
I was glad to find out I was wrong. I was saved from frustration and failure. I would never have gotten the job done, no matter how hard I tried, doing it my way.
Psalm 121 is a quiet voice gently and kindly telling us that we are, perhaps, wrong in the way we are going about the Christian life, and then, very simply, showing us the right way.
Three possibilities for harm to travelers are referred to in the psalm. A person traveling on foot can at any moment step on a loose stone and sprain his ankle. A person traveling on foot under protracted exposure to a hot sun, can become faint with sunstroke. And a person traveling for a long distance on foot, under the pressures of fatigue and anxiety, can become emotionally ill,
In reference to these hazards the psalm says, “He won’t let you stumble, . . . GOD’s your guardian . . . shielding you from sunstroke, sheltering you from moonstroke.”
But a Hebrew would see something else. During the time this psalm was written and sung, Palestine was overrun with popular pagan worship. Much of this religion was practiced on hilltops. Shrines were set up, groves of trees were planted, sacred prostitutes both male and female were provided; persons were lured to the shrines to engage in acts of worship that would enhance the fertility of the land, would make you feel good, would protect you from evil.
Do you fear the sun’s heat? Go to the sun priest and pay for protection against the sun god. Are you fearful of the malign influence of moonlight? Go to the moon priestess and buy an amulet. Are you haunted by the demons that can use any pebble under your foot to trip you? Go to the shrine and learn the magic formula to ward off the mischief. Whence shall my help come? from Baal? from Asherah? from the sun priest? from the moon priestess?2
“Does my strength come from mountains?” No. “My strength comes from GOD, who made heaven, and earth, and
A look to the hills for help ends in disappointment. For all their majesty and beauty, for all their quiet strength and firmness, they are finally just hills. And for all their promises of safety against the perils of the road, for all the allurements of their priests and priestesses, they are all, finally, lies. As Jeremiah put it: “Truly the hills are a delusion, the orgies on the mountains” (Jer 3:23
Psalm 121 says no. It rejects a worship of nature, a religion of stars and flowers, a religion that makes the best of what it finds on the hills; instead it looks to the Lord who made heaven and earth.
The Creator is always awake: he will never doze or sleep.
Baal took lon...
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The Creator is Lord over all natural and supernatural forces: he made them. Sun, moon and rocks have no spiritual power. They are not able to inflict evil upon us: we need not fear any supernatural assault from any of them. “GOD guards you from every evil.”
The promise of the psalm—and both Hebrews and Christians have always read it this way—is not that we shall never stub our toes but that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us.
At no time is there the faintest suggestion that the life of faith exempts us from difficulties.
deliver us from evil.” That prayer is answered every day, sometimes many times a day,
Three times in Psalm 121 God is referred to by the personal name Yahweh, translated as GOD. Eight times he is described as the guardian, or as the one who guards.
None of the things that happen to you, none of the troubles you encounter, have any power to get between you and God, dilute his grace in you, divert his will from you
The Christian life is going to God. In going to God Christians travel the same ground that everyone else walks on, breathe the same air, drink the same water, shop in the same stores, read the same newspapers, are citizens under the same governments, pay the same prices for groceries and gasoline, fear the same dangers, are subject to the same pressures, get the same distresses, are buried in the same ground.
Christian is an unending battle against ominous forces that at any moment may break through and overpower us.
Faith is not a precarious affair of chance escape from satanic assaults. It is the solid, massive, secure experience of God, who keeps all evil from getting inside us, who guards our life, who guards us when we leave and when we return, who guards us now,
To give thanks to the name of GOD— this is what it means to be Israel.
Prosperity to all you Jerusalem-lovers! Friendly insiders, get along! Hostile outsiders, keep your distance!
122 is the song of a person who decides to go to church and worship God.
Psalm 120 is the psalm of repentance—the
God. Psalm 121 is the psalm of trust—a demonstration
Psalm 122 is the psalm of worship—a demonstration of what people of faith everywhere and always do: gather to an assigned place and worship their God.
perjury and falsification would take place. But we do know that much of what we commonly describe as Christian behavior is not volitional at all—it is enforced.
But worship is not forced. Everyone who worships does so because he or she wants
Most Christian worship is voluntary.
An excellent way to test people’s values is to observe what we do when we don’t have to do anything, how we spend our leisure time, how we spend our extra money.
The psalm singles out three items: worship gives us a workable structure
for life; worship nurtures our need to be in relationship with God; worship centers our attention on the decisions of God.
Jerusalem, for a Hebrew, was the place of worship (only incidentally was it the geographical
The great worship festivals to which everyone came at least three times a year were held in Jerusalem. In Jerusalem everything that God said was remembered and celebrated.
Christians go to worship. Week by week we enter the
place compactly built, “to which the tribes ascend,” and get a working definition for life: the way God created us, the ways he leads us. We know where we stand.
When we sin and mess up our lives, we find that God doesn’t go off and leave us—he
But very often we don’t feel like it, and so we say, “It would be dishonest for me to go to a place of worship and praise God when I don’t feel like it. I would be a hypocrite.” The psalm says, I don’t care whether you feel like it or not: as was decreed (RSV), “give thanks to the name of GOD.”
have put great emphasis on the fact that Christians worship because they want to,
not because they are forced to. But I have never said that we worship because we feel like it...
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Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship. When we obey the command to praise God in worship, our
deep, essential need to be in relationship with God is nurtured.
worship is the place where our attention is centered on these personal and decisive words of God.
The first word, pray, is a transition into the everyday world. It is not the word ordinarily used in formal worship, but the everyday Hebrew word for “ask.” It is not improperly translated “pray,” for when we ask from God we pray.
It is the word Hebrews would use to ask for a second helping of bread if still hungry, or for directions if lost.
Worship does not satisfy our hunger for God—it whets our appetite. Our need for God is not taken care of by engaging in worship—it deepens.
service is a willing, working, and doing in which a person acts
not according to his own purposes or plans but with a view to the purpose of another person and according to the need, disposition, and direction of others.
