PSALM 137
Read Psalm 137:1-9
In reading the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel and 1 & 2 Kings we have seen the history of the Old Testament people of God from going into the Promised Land to the Exile. We have seen highs and lows; the joy of God leading them out of slavery, the faithfulness of God throughout this time, but also the unfaithfulness, the sin of God’s people. This ultimately led to judgement which involved losing that Promised Land when the Babylonians conquered Israel and took the people living there into captivity in Babylon. That was bad enough, but the Babylonians destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. The Temple was the symbol of God’s presence with his people. Did this mean that God no longer cared for his people? Had he withdrawn his presence because of their sin? What would be the Israelites response to this new situation?
The Book of Daniel gives us an insight into what life was like for the exiles, but before we look at that, Psalm 137 gives us a sense of the loss that the Israelites felt. When their captors asked them to sing, the reply was, “how can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?” (v4). And then there is the yearning for home, the commitment to remembering what things were like back in Jerusalem. The sense of despair coming through these verses is almost tangible. We might wonder why they had been unfaithful; after all, the Lord had often spoken through his prophets of the consequences of persistent disobedience. But it is human nature to go our own way and as the song says, “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?”
The people of God had lost Paradise, they had lost that close connection with God and felt separated from him. That is the effect of sin – and it always was. Isn’t this just like the Garden of Eden where Adam and Eve disobeyed God and were expelled from the Garden and the close presence of God? We will see in due course that God had not abandoned his people. He is faithful and true and there is always a way back. Judgement is not the end, and that is good news for us all.
The last couple of verses are often a worry for Christians. They express a wish by the Israelites that the children of the Babylonians are killed by being dashed against rocks. In the 1970s the pop group Boney M had a hit with this psalm set to a rather inappropriately jaunty tune. But they left out the bit about babies’ heads being dashed against the rocks. How should we deal with this – it is, after all, scripture, God’s word. I think the best way to handle this is to acknowledge that we all have bad thoughts from time to time and what is happening is that the psalmist is handing his very strong and emotive thoughts over to the Lord to deal with. “I feel very strongly and I wish this would happen, but I acknowledge that my thoughts are wrong and, Lord, I ask you to deal with the situation, I put it all in your hands”. Good advice for us; don’t deal with it yourself, hand it over to the Lord.