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Psalm 125:
Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the LORD surrounds his people, from this time forth and forevermore. For the scepter of wickedness shall not rest on the land allotted to the righteous, lest the righteous stretch out their hands to do wrong. Do good, O LORD, to those who are good, and to those who are upright in their hearts! But those who turn aside to their crooked ways the LORD will lead away evildoers! Peace be upon Israel!
David, Solomon and Hezekiah’s Jerusalem was a lily cupped gently in the palm of the surrounding hillsides. While its panorama is stunning, the city’s susceptibility to enemy invasion is staggering. Smart urban planners build national capitals on top of mountains, not beneath them.
Jerusalem’s surrounding hills: Scopus, Olives and Zion should have served as metaphors for the city’s weakness as enemy archers and charioteers would have been able to press in on the city with relative ease. The writer of Psalm 125, however, flips the panorama upside-down, reinterpreting the landscape through the eyes of faith:
Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. As the mountains surround Jerusualem, so the LORD surrounds Jerusalem, from this time forth and forevermore.
Two things appear wrong with the picture the psalmist paints. First, his words were likely penned within the context of a post-exilic Jerusalem. The Temple had already been destroyed, the majestic hills surrounding Jerusalem had served as highways for the strong, blood-thirsty arm of Babylon:
The LORD, the God of their fathers, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place. But they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words and scoffing at his prophets , until the wrath of the LORD rose against his people, until there was no remedy. Therefore he brought up against them the king of the [Babylonians] (2 Chr. 36:15-17a).
The constant that was the Temple Mount, the place where all of Israel would gather to testify to the realized promises of their faithful God, was a distant memory preserved by the aged few who were able to make the journey back from Babylon following seventy years of exile.
Even after the foundations of the second temple were set into place, the remnant who were able to remember first temple began to weep amid the second temple’s inferiority.
And yet, the psalmist seems so certain of God’s faithfulness.
How do we turn to God after our hearts have been broken and bodies (or souls) have bore the utter humiliation of exile? How can we be sure that after moral failure, God will provide the grace necessary to draw near to Him once again?
In spite of his people’s past, the psalmist boldly proclaims:
As the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the LORD surrounds his people, from this time forth and forevermore.
But what if another empire invades Jerusalem? What if “his people” find themselves in Babylon, Rome, Dakau or Auschwitz? Does God maintain his topographical grip when his people endure financial ruin or the loss of the one they loved most?
Yes. “As the mountains surround Jerusalem…”
My professor describes Israel as possessing the topographical and climatic variety of California in a space half the size of New Jersey. Everything is squished together. Foothills, mountains, valleys, and mountains fly by in rapid succession as one travels more than five or ten miles in any direction, imparting to foreign hearts a sort of scenic clausterphoia (if one stands still too long). The mountains surrounding Jerusalem do not merely tower above the City of David, but they press in on it. There’s both imminence and transcendence to the landscape, providing perfect imagery for the God who breathed forth creation and clothed himself in the vulnerability of human flesh.
We are all exiles, in one way or another. We are exiles who have been brought back home through the blood of Christ.
The pslamist closes his verse by safeguarding against those who might sing back his words flippantly:
Do good, O LORD, to those who are good, and to those who are upright in their hearts! But those who turn aside to their crooked ways the LORD will lead away with evildoers!…
Our rescue from exile is an act presupposing an eternal trajectory–like a sailboat cast out from harbor by an unchanging breeze. James says it this way:
For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead (2:26).
Faith–the gift that reaches into the exile’s cage and tears his still-beating heart from the jaws of damnation–is a force that necessarily elicits a response. Faith without force (works) isn’t really faith.
The imagery the pslamist uses in, “But those who turn aside to their crooked ways the LORD will lead away with evildoers.” would have conjured up images of exile, when the citizens of Israel were led way to Babylon. Exile is a very real possibility for those who do not stand upright before God; however, the spiritual truth is that we are all born into exile and that without the LORD’s rescuing work, calling us out of Egypt or Babylon or stubbornness or the illusion of self-sufficiency, we’ll never know the pleasure of a God who surrounds us as mountains surround Jerusalem.
Powerful, Bryan!