In January of 1982, I helped drive a bus from Amman, Jordan to Brussels, Belgium. George Verwer had just completed a tour of the Middle East in his bus and had flown back to England, leaving the bus in Jordan. The driver and I had worked together in India, so the OM leaders asked if I would fly down and help with the driving. The trip was pretty straightforward, except that we were under strict instructions not to travel at night in Damascus. We were to cross the border into Syria in the evening then spend the night there at the border. Then we could travel through Damascus in the morning, when it was more safe.
The people in Syria were more heavily armed than anywhere I’ve ever been. There were soldiers everywhere, but many of the civilians also carried guns. Shortly after we left Damascus, as we started up a long hill I saw a Mercedes parked on the side of the road, and two men with machine guns. They weren’t soldiers, and there was no one else in sight. As we approached them, they stepped into the street to stop us, but then after they had looked us over they stepped aside and let us go.
I don’t quite know what to make of that. Were they looking for someone specific? Were we in any real danger when they stepped into the street? Were they bandits, who intended to rob us, but then the Lord restrained them? I don’t know. I do know that many people drive into a situation like that and don’t come through it. It’s possible that they just weren’t interested in harming us, or it’s possible that the Lord intervened and came to our rescue. Often it’s like that. Often, when God rescues us from danger, it’s not clear to us in the end how serious the danger was. Once it’s past, we legitimately wonder whether things were really as bad as what we’d imagined.
In Psalm 124, the psalmist is looking back on a time when God came to the rescue of His people, but in this case there’s no doubt about the danger. They would have been destroyed if the Lord had not been with them. In Psalm 121, the psalmist is assured of God’s protection. He finds himself in trouble, threatened by the hazards of his pilgrimage, and he looks desperately to the hills, asking where his help is going to come from. And he concludes: “my help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” He knows it’s true, and he’s able to reassure himself because of who God is: “the maker of heaven and earth.” But in Psalm 124, he’s experienced God’s deliverance. In Psalm 121 he knew that God would care for him on his pilgrimage, but now he’s experienced it. He can look back on a time when it seemed that all was lost, that there was no hope of survival, and then God intervened. His experience has confirmed what he already knew about God. What he had believed by faith, he now knows from experience.
The psalmist has had a close call. He had set out on pilgrimage, and at the beginning maybe he hoped his problems would be over. Maybe he hoped that in traveling to Jerusalem he would be protected from problems and difficulties. But very early in his journey he learned that this is not the way God usually works. Right from the beginning, he’s been looking to the Lord to protect him. But things have just gotten worse. It’s one thing to encounter troubles and difficulties, but it’s another to know that without the Lord’s intervention you’ll be destroyed. His experience was like Paul’s time in Asia: “I think you ought to know, dear brothers and sisters, about the trouble we went through in the province of Asia. We were crushed and completely overwhelmed, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we learned not to rely on ourselves, but on God who can raise the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:8-9, New Living Translation). I don’t know whether we were in serious danger in Syria. But the psalmist is not in doubt, nor is the apostle Paul. “If the Lord had not been on our side.... when people rose up against us, they would have swallowed us alive” (vv. 1-3a, NLT).
The psalmist uses two images to illustrate the seriousness of the situation. Eugene Peterson has a good description: “The people were in danger of being swallowed up alive; and they were in danger of being drowned by a flood. The first picture is of an enormous dragon or sea monster. Nobody has ever seen a dragon, but everybody (especially children) knows they exist. Dragons are projections of our fears, horrible constructions of all that might hurt us. A dragon is total evil. A peasant confronted by a magnificent dragon is completely outclassed. There is no escape: the dragon’s thick skin, fiery mouth, lashing serpentine tail, and insatiable greed and lust sign an immediate doom. The second picture, that of the flood, is a picture of sudden disaster. In the Middle East, watercourses which have eroded the countryside are all interconnected by an intricate, gravitational system. A sudden storm fills these little gullies with water, they feed into one another, and in a very few minutes a torrential flash flood is produced. Persons who live in these desert areas are endangered during the rainy season by such unannounced catastrophes. 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 the catastrophe” (A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, pp. 69-70).
We don’t know who these enemies were. Israel was a small country surrounded by larger, more powerful nations, and they were frequently in danger of being overwhelmed. Apart from God’s intervention, they clearly had little chance for long-term survival. During Hezekiah’s reign, the king of Assyria threatened the people of Judah. Assyria was a powerful empire, and, humanly speaking, Judah wouldn’t have a chance against their military strength. They would have been “swallowed up alive.” The Assyrian king’s personal representative sent this message to Hezekiah: “I’ll tell you what! My master, the king of Assyria, will strike a bargain with you. If you can find two thousand horsemen in your entire army, he will give you two thousand horses for them to ride on! With your tiny army, how can you think of challenging even the weakest contingent of my master’s troops, even with the help of Egypt’s chariots and horsemen?” (Isaiah 36:8-9, NLT). Hezekiah and the people of Judah are completely outnumbered and outclassed. Even the thought of fighting such an army is unthinkable. But Hezekiah goes up to the Lord’s temple and prays: “O Lord Almighty, God of Israel, you are enthroned between the mighty cherubim! You alone are God of all the kingdoms of the earth. You alone created the heavens and the earth. Listen to me, O Lord, and hear! Open your eyes, O Lord, and see! Listen to Sennacherib’s words of defiance against the living God” (Isaiah 37:16-17). And God comes to their rescue by putting to death 185,000 Assyrian troops in the middle of the night. So Hezekiah was able to say, with conviction, “if the Lord had not been on our side when men attacked us..., they would have swallowed us alive.” The psalmist may be looking back on a situation like this, where the whole nation is threatened, or it may be that his small band of pilgrims was in danger.
The people of God have had a close call, but God has intervened and come to their rescue. God “has not let us be torn by their teeth.” It was close, and at some point in the process, they probably wondered if it was all over. They could have said, with Paul, “We were crushed and completely overwhelmed, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die.” God didn’t keep things from reaching that point. He didn’t keep them out of trouble. But He did come to their rescue. He kept them from being torn by the dragon’s teeth. And He enabled them to escape the trap. The psalmist is referring here to a trap that was used for birds. It was made of two wooden frames, each covered with a net and joined together on one side, so they could be opened like a book. The snare laid flat on the ground, and when a bird came and took the bait, the two frames would spring shut, like jaws. There’s a reference to this kind of trap in the book of Amos: “Does a bird ever get caught in a trap that has no bait? Does a trap ever spring shut when there’s nothing there to catch?” (Amos 3:5, NLT). These snares were destroyed by breaking the frames. So the picture here is that they have been caught in the snare. God hasn’t kept them from being trapped, but He has enabled them to escape: “We have escaped like a bird out of the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped.” Eugene Peterson says this: “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 ‘the Lord who was on our side’” (p. 70).
He’s had a close call, and the Lord has intervened and come to his rescue. His experience has deepened and reinforced what he already knew. He ends this psalm with the same words that are in Psalm 121. In that psalm, the author had looked around and cried out: “I lift up my eyes to the hills–where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” And at the end of Psalm 124, after God’s rescue from a close call, he concludes: “Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” He’s not saying anything new, but his faith has been deepened and confirmed by experience.
Several years ago, Annie was talking to Leoda Buckwalter, who had been a missionary in India. Leoda was born in India, and she worked there for nearly 50 years. Annie asked her if it becomes easier to trust God when you get older. And Leoda replied that no, it doesn’t become easier. There are always new tests and trials of our faith. But then Leoda went on to say that she did have a lifetime of seeing God at work, of experiencing His help over and over again, and that this experience helped her to continue trusting God in each new situation. Her faith had been confirmed and deepened by experience. She had experienced God’s faithfulness for a lifetime; she knew, in a way that she couldn’t have known in her youth, that God is faithful.
There’s a tendency, in our culture today, to downplay the value of experience. Our culture idealizes youth, and devalues the experience that only comes with age. In the 70's George Burns recorded a song called “I wish I was eighteen again.” It was written from the perspective of an old man looking back and reminiscing about all the things he can’t do anymore. And, of course, if this life is all there is the song makes sense. But from a Christian perspective, the song has it all backwards. This world is not our home. We’re on a pilgrimage to our true home, the New Jerusalem. Where we’re going is better than anywhere we’ve yet been–so much better that it’s beyond our powers of description–so why would we want to go back? Have you ever watched films of climbers on Mt. Everest? Struggling with the lack of oxygen at that high altitude, they just put one step in front of the other and trudge up the mountain. I’ve never heard of a climber near the top of Everest saying to the others, “hey, that last 5000 feet has really been fun. Let’s slide down so we can do it all again before we get to the top!” Wanting to go back to the beginning in our Christian lives is like that; it would only take us further away from our goal.
One of the leaders in the 18th century revival in England said near the end of his life, “I’ve lived long enough to experience the things I’ve been preaching about all my life.” But we only gain that kind of experience by seeing God at work over the course of a lifetime. There are things that we just can’t know at the beginning of our Christian lives. We may hear about them and take hold of them by faith, but as we experience God’s care over a lifetime we find our faith strengthened and confirmed. We knew that God had promised to care for His people, but we’ve seen His faithfulness over and over again, and looking back at all He has done we are encouraged to continue trusting Him.
We need to be careful, though. This doesn’t mean that God will always rescue us in the way we’d like Him to. And it doesn’t mean that He’ll enable us, in the end, to accomplish everything we want. It’s easy to identify God’s purposes with our own hopes and dreams. It’s tempting to assume that when God helps us we’ll be successful at what whatever He leads us to do. But this may not be so. Paul was much more successful, by worldly standards, before he became a Christian. He says in Philippians: "If anyone else thinks he has reasons to put confidence in the flesh, I have more...." He then goes on to describe his former way of life as a Pharisee, and then says: "But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ" (Philippians 3:4, 7). Becoming a Christian did not cause Paul to prosper outwardly. Going on pilgrimage didn’t turn the psalmist into a great success story. God came to his rescue, but things continued to go wrong during his pilgrimage, and no doubt some things were never worked out to his satisfaction.
I am an admirer of the Puritans. They stood for godliness and a heartfelt commitment to the Lord in every area of life, and they did so during very difficult times. J.I. Packer says this about the long‑term success of their ministry: "The Puritans lost, more or less, every public battle that they fought. Those who stayed in England did not change the Church of England as they hoped to do, nor did they revive more than a minority of its adherents, and eventually they were driven out of Anglicanism by calculated pressure on their consciences. Those who crossed the Atlantic failed to establish New Jerusalem in New England; for the first fifty years their little colonies barely survived. They hung on by the skin of their teeth. But the moral and spiritual victories that the Puritans won by keeping sweet, peaceful, patient, obedient, and hopeful under sustained and seemingly intolerable pressures and frustrations give them a place of high honour in the believers' hall of fame, where Hebrews 11 is the first gallery." (A Quest for Godliness, p.23) They were faithful, but they were not successful in accomplishing their outward goals. They remind us, as Hebrews 11 does, that it is dangerous to assume that if we’re faithful, God will enable us to accomplish our goals, that He’ll work things out in a way that pleases us.
Living as pilgrims in this world involves taking a longer-term view of things. It involves getting to know God, giving Him the priority He deserves in our lives. Notice how much God is at the center in this psalm. “If the Lord had not been on our side... if the Lord had not been on our side” (vv. 1-2). “Praise be to the Lord” (v. 6). And “Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth” (v. 8). The sort of experience reflected in this psalm doesn’t just happen automatically. Our faith isn’t established and strengthened just by living a long time. It’s as we walk with God over a lifetime, cultivating an awareness of His priorities, that we find ourselves strengthened and established in the faith.
A major part of developing a longer term view of things is cultivating a growing familiarity with God’s Word. I often appalled at what a small priority God’s Word has in our lives. If you’re not doing any kind of systematic Bible reading right now, make it your goal to read through the New Testament by the end of the year. Or, if you have a bit more time, look up Robert Murray M’Cheyne’s Bible Reading Plan on the Internet. Another possibility is the One Year Bible. It has daily readings arranged to take you through the whole Bible in a year. It’s also a good idea to choose one short portion each day to spend more time with; read it several times, think about what it means and how it applies to your life; then pray over it. Whatever you do, make it your aim to cultivate an increasing awareness of God’s Word. It’s in Scripture that we see God revealing Himself, rescuing His people over and over again, despite their unworthiness.
But notice, also, that all the pronouns in this psalm are plural. “If the Lord had not been on our side.” “We have escaped.... Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” The psalmist isn’t standing on his own; he’s walking in company with God’s people. We need the support of one another. God has not called us to do this alone, but to walk with Him as part of a church. When we encounter difficulties, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and lose our perspective. It’s like we’re in a fog and we can’t see clearly to get ourselves out. At those times especially, we need one another. It’s often through one another that God comes to our rescue. The book of Hebrews is addressed to people who were in difficulties and were on the verge of turning away. The author of that letter urges them to continue supporting one another: “Without wavering, let us hold tightly to the hope we say we have, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. Think of ways to encourage one another to outbursts of love and good deeds. And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage and warn each other, especially now that the day of his coming back again is drawing near” (Hebrews 10:23-25, NLT). Entering into the life of the church is an important part of walking with God over a lifetime. We’re on pilgrimage together.
We’re going to encounter difficulties along the way. Sometimes we won’t be sure whether God came to our rescue or whether the trouble was really insignificant in the first place, as in my opening example. But there will be times when the problems threaten to destroy us; there will be times when life seems too hard to bear. As we continue on, looking to God and crying out to Him for help, we will find ourselves developing a longer-term view of things, recognizing that we are strangers and pilgrims in this world, that we are headed for a place where everything will be made right, where God will dwell in our midst, and where He will wipe away all tears from our eyes. We’re not looking at the bright side of everything, we’re looking toward the bright reality that lies in our future. “We speak our words of praise in a world that is hellish; we sing our songs of victory in a world where things get messy; we live our joy among people who neither understand nor encourage us. But the content of our lives is God, not man. We are not scavenging in the dark alleys of the world, poking in its garbage cans for a bare subsistence. We are traveling in the light, toward God who is rich in mercy and strong to save. It is Christ, not culture, that defines our lives. It is the help we experience, not the hazards we risk, that shape our lives” (Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience, p. 75). As we continue on our pilgrimage, the most significant thing is not our weakness, but the certainty of God’s faithfulness and strength. God has shown Himself to be faithful. We are weak, but “our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
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