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May 28, 2020
person grows and matures in the Christian way, it is necessary to acquire certain skills. One is service.
Psalm 123 is an instance of service. In
In Psalm 123 we observe that aspect of the life of discipleship that takes place under the form of servanthood.
of Jesus Christ as a servant: with that before us it is easy to assume the role of master and begin
ordering
But God is not a servant to be called into action when we are too tired to do something ourselves, not an expert to be called on when we find we are ill equippe...
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God is not a buddy we occasionally ask to join us at our convenience or for our diversion.
God is God at all, he must know more about our needs than we do; if God is God at all, he must be more in touch with the reality of our thoughts, our emotions, our bodies than we are; if God is God at all, he must have
“Heaven-dwelling God.” When the Bible uses that phrase, and it does use it frequently, it is not saying anything about geography or space.
They describe
between God and persons like you and me, a relationship between the Cre...
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No, if God is worth our attention at all, he must be a God we can look up to—a God we must look up to:
The moment we look up to God (and not over at him, or down on him) we are in the posture of servitude.
with our expectation. What happens when we look up to God in faith?
expect is mercy.
watching and waiting, holding our breath,
The basic conviction of a Christian is that God intends good for us and that he will get his way in us.
We live under the mercy. God does not treat us as alien others, lining us up so that he can evaluate our competence or our usefulness or our worth. He rules, guides, commands, loves us as children whose destinies he carries in his heart.
The word mercy means that the upward look to God in the heavens does not expect God to stay in the heavens but to come down, to enter our condition, to accomplish the vast enterprise of redemption, to fashion in us his eternal salvation. “The root meaning ‘to stoop,’ ‘to be inclined,’ has been conjectured.”
Servitude is specific in its expectation, and what it expects is mercy.
The psalmist lived in a culture in which the slave and the servant were institutionalized, as they have been at different times in world history.
Freedom is on everyone’s lips. Freedom is announced and celebrated.
The Christian is a person who recognizes that our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master. The Christian realizes that every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive. Recognizing and realizing that, we urgently want to live under the mastery of God.
“So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (12:1).
The psalm’s emphasis on actual, physical service
The psalm has nothing in it about serving others. It concentrates on being a servant to God. Its position is that if the attitude of servanthood is learned, by attending to God as Lord, then serving others will develop as a very natural way of life.
The glorious theme has extensive documentation in the lives of the people of God. But there are also, sadly, numerous instances in our society of persons who, having been given their freedom, have at once squandered it, using it as “an excuse to do whatever you want” (Gal 5:13), ending in a worse slavery.
As Psalm 123 prays the transition from oppression (“kicked in the teeth by complacent rich men”) to freedom (“awaiting your word of mercy”) to a new servitude (“like servants, alert to their master’s commands”), it puts us in the way of learning how to use our freedom most appropriately, under the lordship of a merciful God.
servant Christian is the freest person on earth.
If GOD hadn’t been for us —all together now, Israel, sing out!— If GOD hadn’t been for us when everyone went against us,
would have been swallowed alive by their violent anger, Swept away by the flood of rage, drowned in the torrent; We would have lost our lives in the wild, raging water. Oh, blessed be GOD!
Psalm 124 is a song of hazard—and
Among the Songs of Ascents, sung by the people of God on the way of faith, this is one that better than any other describes the hazardous work of all discipleship and declares the help that is always experienced at the hand of God.
The first lines of the psalm twice describe God as “for us.”
I am put on the spot of being God’s defender. I am expected to explain God to his disappointed clients.
for God doesn’t need me to defend him. He doesn’t need me for a press secretary, explaining to the world that he didn’t really say what everyone thought they heard
The proper work for the Christian is witness, not apology, and Psalm 124 is an excellent model. It does not
argue God’s help; it does not explain God’s help; it is a testimony
GOD hadn’t been for us
God’s help is not a private experience; it is a corporate reality—not an exception that occurs among isolated strangers, but the norm among the people of God.
The people were in danger of being swallowed up alive; and they were in danger of being drowned by a flood.
During the rainy season, such unannounced catastrophes pose great danger for persons who live in these desert areas. There is no escaping. One minute you are well and happy and making plans for the future; the next minute the entire world is disarranged by a catastrophe.
The psalmist is not a person talking about the good life, how God has kept him out of all difficulty. This person has gone through the worst—the dragon’s mouth, the flood’s torrent—and finds himself intact. He was not abandoned but helped.
The final strength is not in the dragon or in the flood but in God who “didn’...
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The reason many of us do not ardently believe in the gospel is that we have never given it a rigorous testing, thrown our hard questions at it, faced it with our most prickly doubts.
Psalm 124 is not a selected witness, inserted like a commercial into our lives to testify that life goes better with God; it is not part of a media blitz to convince us that God is superior to all the other gods on the market. It is not a press release. It is honest prayer.
Every day I put faith on the line. I have never seen God. In a world
where nearly everything can be weighed, explained, quantified,
subjected to psychological analysis and scientific control, I persist in making the center of my life a God whom no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, wh...
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Still, despite my ignorance and surrounded by tinny optimists and cowardly pessimists, I say that God will accomplish his will, and I cheerfully persist in living in the hope that nothing will separate me from Christ’s love.
