Help From Above

Text: Psalms 121

Focus: Courage

Function: to help people focus on God in worship.

Form: exposition

Intro: There is a history to this Psalm that I want to look at this morning. And coincidently, I have an history with this Psalm that sort of ties the story together.

Obviously, the first verse of scripture that most people ever memorized is John 3:16.

At times as a child, I played the smart Alec preacher’s kid. My favorite was responding with “Jesus Wept” as my favorite memory verse.

It is ironic that it is now one of my favorite all time Bible verses. It does such a great job of capturing our reason to have courage: Jesus Christ. Jesus is the incarnation of God, He is the Word of God made flesh, and as incarnate God, He wept with us, He had friends, He groaned and I believe still groans, with humanity. Every time we cry, our great High Priest can sympathize with our pain.

So, in the 5^th grade when the Sunday School teacher in the voluntary “Christian education take out” session that happened in the Baptist church across the street from my elementary school, right before lunch time every other Wednesday, challenged me to be serious and memorize more, I choose Psalms 121 because I loved the way the poetry sounded to my ears.

And because I choose it, it became a big thing for me, I was going to make it personal.

I am grateful for the challenge to memorize scripture because those experiences started to make the scriptures mean something to me.

Now I have to tell you that the entire premise of the Psalm sort of rattled my theological cage until I took a bible course in the Poetical books of the Old Testament.

I finally learned that the first line: “I will lift up my eyes unto the hills...” was not a form of idolatry.

The verse really bothered my young mind because I was told and still believe that God is Omnipresent -God is everywhere.

So, if the Psalmist claims that God is in the hills, then he must be claiming that his god is some sort of idol carved into some mountain somewhere.

I saw all kinds of problems with that, the biggest being that if the bogey man was not up in the hills, but down here on the prairie with us, and God was up in the hills, then how was God going to get there in time to help me?

I needed my God, my protector, right there where God could help me. Nope, Hill God was not good enough, Omnipresent God is much better.

I honestly wanted to go up to the preacher and whisper to him that there was an obvious error in one of our primary texts. I mean, I wouldn’t have used that language because I was a kid and I didn’t have the verbiage for it, but it would have been what I meant.

And then I reasoned that the Psalm made complete sense if you turn the first line into a sort of rhetorical question that assumes a negative response.

I thought it might have been easier to understand if it said, “Do we have to wait for God to come from the hills to rescue us? No! Our God is here because God is everywhere.”

But then, I realized that the poet used poetic license and I read that Psalm for many years. Often times when I read it publicly, I would supply the interrogative by reading it “Do I look to the hills for my Help?” and then a pause in order for the reader to understand that “no” was implied.

And then I learned that:

• “Their God is a god of the hills” passage.
  • Apparently, In 1 Kings chapter 20, an enemy spy took the words of this Psalm and convinced the Syrian King to lead his troops to be captured by the Israelite king.
  • And although God did not approve the the Israelite king, God also takes offense at the idea that we relegate God to the hills.
  • Or maybe, it is because someone took it so literally that they started preaching it and an enemy agent who didn’t know the history of the text fooled himself by taking it to literally.
• Then I learned:
• “The God of the hills” was an idiomatic expression used by the Hebrews that was meant to express -fast forward to young Phillip 2800 years later- God’s Omnipresence. “Even the mountains were made by God.”

All of that both reinforces my wonder at the gift of the scriptures that God has given us and at the same time, I can see from those scriptures themselves what can happen if we try to stretch the meaning beyond its intent.

The intent? Courage and trust in God.

Even when they had it wrong, God was still faithful toward them.

Verse 4 is particularly encouraging to me, The Lord never slumbers nor sleeps.

I had a professor in Seminary who wrote his Doctoral Thesis on the evolution of the worship of God.

Through a collection of ancient scriptures of many different religions, he was able to trace how humanity started out believing in Creator God, and then deliberately chose what he called “lesser gods.” What he meant was that humanity basically knew about Creator God, but choose to worship idols instead.

And he graphed a sort of chart that showed a divergence away from monotheism toward polytheism and then back toward monotheism, at least, in the Western cultures.

The principle religions of the West and middle East, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are all monotheistic religions.

Remember, by the time 1 Kings happened, what we know as Psalm 121 was already an ancient text, hundreds of years old.

It has become a sort of confession of faith, a sort of creed for those faithful to Jehovah and it calls people to separate from idolatry toward faith in God.

The Psalm is a declaration that God, our God, is real, alive and has a purpose for us as a people.

This was a big thing with huge implications. It was a question, are you going to follow the king with his new gods, or are you going to go back to the ancient faith, the one that we have our national identity tied to?

When we read about the idolatry that was prevalent in Canaan before the Israelites displaced them, we read their justification for it was because these idolatrous religions ritualized abusive sex and legalized forms of oppression against women and aliens.

The OT law system was very clear about human rights, especially for the resident alien and the poor.

Whenever the OT prophets, who confronted this idolatry throughout the history of Israel and Judah preached, they spoke very clearly about why God hated the idolatry. And although the idea of God being jealous is mentioned a few times, it is taken out of context. God hated idolatry because it allows for oppression of the poor.

When I think about our culture and the moral outrage leveled by the Church and I hear groups of people marginalized as evil because of their faith, their race or their sexual identity, I want to shout because when Daniel stood before Belshazzar when the writing on the wall appeared, during the middle of a party that was for all intents and purposes an orgy, Daniel said nothing about the orgy going on, but tells the king to make sure the poor get justice and God will repent of God’s destruction.

And that keeps bringing me back to this Psalm. Psalms 23, 25, 27, 39, 40, 51, 67, 73, 100, 103, 121, 127, 139 and 150 all serve to keep me, to keep us focused on our worship of God. Literally, the best part of my day is that part of the day when the Psalm comes up in my morning devotions.

Even though by this time they had it wrong, the use of the Psalm, the use of it in their worship, delivered them from destruction.

First, it focuses them, us, back on God, our Saviour. It -they- remind us of simple, basic and yet profound truths. They help to keep us from idolatry.

And many may chuckle and say that it is working as well as elephant repellent in anywhere but Africa and India or a zoo. Idolatry is dead, we don’t need it.

But here is the thing, where does our help come from? Does it come from our bank account, our IRA or the Lord? That is not meant to shame anyone. But remember, money is still the biggest idol.

(Pray) Lord, help us.