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Discipleship
If you’re worn out in this footrace with men, what makes you think you can race against horses? – Jeremiah 12:5
It is nearly as hard for a sinner to recognize the world’s temptations as it is for a fish to discover impurities in the water. We know that the spiritual atmosphere in which we live erodes faith, dissipates hope and corrupts love, but it is hard to put our finger on what is wrong.
It is not difficult in such a world to get a person interested in the message of the gospel; it is terrifically difficult to sustain the interest.
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw this area of spiritual truth at least with great clarity, wrote, “The essential thing ‘in heaven and earth’ is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.” It is this “long obedience in the same direction” which the mood of the world does so much to discourage.
A disciple is a learner, but not in the academic setting of a school-room, rather at the work site of a craftsman. We do not acquire information about God but skills in faith. Pilgrim (parepidēmos) tells us we are people who spend our lives going someplace, going to God, and whose path for getting there is the way, Jesus Christ.
Repentance
I’m in trouble. I cry to GOD, desperate for an answer: “Deliver me from the liars, GOD! They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth.” Do you know what’s next, can you see what’s coming, all you barefaced liars? Pointed arrows and burning coals will be your reward. I’m doomed to live in Meshech, cursed with a home in Kedar. My whole life lived camping among quarreling neighbors. I’m all for peace, but the minute I tell them so, they go to war! – Psalm 120
A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquillity, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.
John Baillie wrote, “I am sure that the bit of the road that most requires to be illuminated is the point where it forks.” The psalmist’s God is a lightning flash illuminating just such a crossroads. Psalm 120 is the decision to take one way over against the other.
The usual biblical word describing the “no” we say to the world’s lies and the “yes” we say to God’s truth is repentance. It is always and everywhere the first word in the Christian life. John the Baptist’s preaching was “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2).
Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace. Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.
Providence
I look up to the mountains; does my strength come from mountains? No, my strength comes from GOD, who made heaven, and earth, and mountains. He won’t let you stumble, your Guardian God won’t fall asleep. Not on your life! Israel’s Guardian will never doze or sleep. GOD’s your Guardian, right at your side to protect you— Shielding you from sunstroke, sheltering you from moonstroke. GOD guards you from every evil, he guards your very life. He guards you when you leave and when you return, he guards you now, he guards you always. – Psalm 121
But to deviate from the truth for the sake of some prospect of hope of our own can never be wise, however slight that deviation may be. It is not our judgement of the situation which can show us what is wise, but only the truth of the Word of God. Here alone lies the promise of God’s faithfulness and help. It will always be true that the wisest course for the disciple is always to abide solely by the Word of God in all simplicity. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Psalm 121 is a quiet voice gently and kindly telling us that we are, perhaps, wrong in the way we are going about the Christian life, and then, very simply, showing us the right way.
Three possibilities for harm to travelers are referred to in the psalm:
- A person traveling on foot can at any moment step on a loose stone and sprain his ankle.
- A person traveling on foot under protracted exposure to a hot sun, can become faint with sunstroke.
- A person traveling for a long distance on foot, under the pressures of fatigue and anxiety, can become emotionally ill, which was described by ancient writers as moonstroke (or by us as lunacy).
In reference to these hazards the psalm says, “He won’t let you stumble, GOD’s your guardian…shielding you from sunstroke, sheltering you from moonstroke.”
Let’s return to the psalm: The person set on the way of faith gets into trouble, looks around for help (“I look up to the mountains”) and asks a question: “Does my strength come from moutains?” As this person of faith looks around at the hills for help, what is he, what is she, going to see?
Help comes from the Creator, not from the creation. The Creator is always awake: He will never doze or sleep.
The promise of the psalm—and both Hebrews and Christians have always read it this way—is not that we shall never stub our toes but that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us.
Three times in Psalm 121 God is referred to by the personal name Yahweh, translated as GOD. Eight times He is described as the guardian, or as the one who guards. He is not an impersonal executive giving orders from on high; He is present help every step of the way we travel.
The great danger of Christian discipleship is that we should have two religions: a glorious, biblical Sunday gospel that sets us free from the world, that in the cross and resurrection of Christ makes eternity alive in us, a magnificent gospel of Genesis and Romans and Revelation; and, then, an everyday religion that we make do with during the week between the time of leaving the world and arriving in heaven.
Worship
When they said, “Let’s go to the house of GOD,” my heart leaped for joy. And now we’re here, oh Jerusalem, inside Jerusalem’s walls! Jerusalem, well-built city, built as a place for worship! The city to which the tribes ascend, all GOD’s tribes go up to worship, To give thanks to the name of GOD— this is what it means to be Israel. Thrones for righteous judgment are set there, famous David-thrones. Pray for Jerusalem’s peace! Prosperity to all you Jerusalem-lovers! Friendly insiders, get along! Hostile outsiders, keep your distance! For the sake of my family and friends, I say it again: live in peace! For the sake of the house of our God, GOD, I’ll do my very best for you. – Psalm 122
There is something morally repulsive about modern activistic theories which deny contemplation and recognize nothing but struggle. For them not a single moment has value in itself, but is only a means for what follows. – Nicolas Berdyaev
There are many reasons (excuses) people give for not worshiping. Psalm 122 is the song of a person who decides to go to church and worship God.
Psalm 122 is third in the sequence of the Songs of Ascents. Psalm 120 is the psalm of repentance—the one that gets us out of an environment of deceit and hostility and sets us on our way to God. Psalm 121 is the psalm of trust—a demonstration of how faith resists patent-medicine remedies to trials and tribulations and determinedly trusts God to work out his will and “guard you from every evil” in the midst of difficulty. Psalm 122 is the psalm of worship—a demonstration of what people of faith everywhere and always do: gather to an assigned place and worship their God.
An excellent way to test people’s values is to observe what we do when we don’t have to do anything, how we spend our leisure time, how we spend our extra money.
There are more people at worship on any given Sunday, for instance, than are at all the football games or on the golf links or fishing or taking walks in the woods. Worship is the single most popular act in this land.
Worship is the place where we obey the command to praise God: “To give thanks to the name of GOD—this is what it means to be Israel.” This command, to give thanks, runs right down the center of all Christian worship.
Christians worship because they want to, not because they are forced to. But Peterson has never said that we worship because we feel like it. Feelings are great liars. If Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith. Paul Scherer is laconic: “The Bible wastes very little time on the way we feel.”
We live in what one writer has called the “age of sensation.” We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.
Service
I look to you, heaven-dwelling God, look up to you for help. Like servants, alert to their master’s commands, like a maiden attending her lady, We’re watching and waiting, holding our breath, awaiting your word of mercy. Mercy, GOD, mercy! We’ve been kicked around long enough, Kicked in the teeth by complacent rich men, kicked when we’re down by arrogant brutes. – Psalm 123
In general terms, service is a willing, working, and doing in which a person acts not according to his own purposes or plans but with a view to the purpose of another person and according to the need, disposition, and direction of others. It is an act whose freedom is limited and determined by the other’s freedom, an act whose glory becomes increasingly greater to the extent that the doer is not concerned about his own glory but about the glory of the other… It is ministerium Verbi divini, which means, literally, “a servant’s attendance on the divine Word.” The expression “attendance” may call to mind the fact that the New Testament concept of Diakonos originally meant “a waiter.” [We] must wait upon the high majesty of the divine Word, which is God himself as he speaks in his action. – Karl Barth
If God Is God at All
Consider this thought, “I look to you, heaven-dwelling God, look up to you for help.” Service begins with an upward look to God.
Too often we think of religion as a far-off, mysteriously run bureaucracy to which we apply for assistance when we feel the need. We go to a local branch office and direct the clerk (sometimes called a pastor) to fill out our order for God. Then we go home and wait for God to be delivered to us according to the specifications that we have set down. But that is not the way it works.
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: “I look to you, heaven-dwelling God.” The moment we look up to God (and not over at him, or down on him) we are in the posture of servitude.
The prayer “Mercy, GOD, mercy!” is not an attempt to get God to do what He is unwilling otherwise to do, but a reaching out to what we know that He does do, an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ. In obedience we pray “Mercy!” instead of “Give us what we want.”
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. The consequences are all positive.
Help
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, We 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! He didn’t go off and leave us. He didn’t abandon us defenseless, helpless as a rabbit in a pack of snarling dogs. We’ve flown free from their fangs, free of their traps, free as a bird. Their grip is broken; we’re free as a bird in flight. GOD’s strong name is our help, the same GOD who made heaven and earth. – Psalm 124
God is almost intolerably careless about crosses and swords, arenas and scaffolds, about all the “evils” and all the “plagues.” His caring doesn’t mean that he goes in for upholstering! – Paul Scherer
Psalm 124 is a song of hazard—and of help. 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. Christian discipleship is hazardous work.
There are no easy tasks in the Christian way; there are only tasks that can be done faithfully or erratically, with joy or with resentment.
In a world where nearly everything can be weighed, explained, quantified, subjected to psychological analysis and scientific control, Peterson persists in making the center of his life a God whom no eye hath seen, nor ear heard, whose will no one can probe. That’s a risk.
The final sentence, “GOD’s strong name is our help, the same GOD who made heaven and earth,” links the God who created heaven and earth to the God who helps us personally. It takes the majesty of the One who pulled a universe into order and beauty, and finds this same God involved in the local troubles of a quite ordinary person.
Security
Those who trust in GOD are like Zion Mountain: Nothing can move it, a rock-solid mountain you can always depend on. Mountains encircle Jerusalem, and GOD encircles his people— always has and always will. The fist of the wicked will never violate What is due the righteous, provoking wrongful violence. Be good to your good people, GOD, to those whose hearts are right! GOD will round up the backsliders, corral them with the incorrigibles. Peace over Israel! – Psalm 125
Judea was designed to produce in her inhabitants the sense of seclusion and security, though not to such a degree as to relieve them from the attractions of the great world, which throbbed closely past, or to relax in them those habits of discipline, vigilance, and valour, which are the necessary elements of a nation’s character. In the position of Judea there was not enough to tempt her people to put their confidence in herself, but there was enough to encourage them to defend their freedom and a strenuous life. And while the isolation of their land was sufficient to confirm their calling to a discipline and destiny separate from other peoples, it was not so complete as to keep them in ignorance of the world or to release them from those temptations to mix with the world, in combating which their discipline and destiny could alone be realised. – George Adam Smith
Peterson notes, “Backslider was a basic word in the religious vocabulary I learned as I grew up. Exempla were active in our little church but had lost their footing on the ascent to Christ and backslid.”
The emphasis of Psalm 125 is not on the precariousness of the Christian life but on its solidity. Living as a Christian is not walking a tightrope without a safety net high above a breathless crowd, many of whom would like nothing better than the morbid thrill of seeing you fall; it is sitting secure in a fortress.
A friend introduced Peterson to the phrase “the saw-toothed history of Israel.” Israel was up one day and down the next. One day they were marching in triumph through the Red Sea, singing songs of victory, the next they were grumbling in the desert because they missed having Egyptian steak and potatoes for supper. One day they were marching around Jericho blowing trumpets and raising hearty hymns, and the next they were plunged into an orgy at some Canaanite fertility shrine.
But all the time, as we read that saw-toothed history, we realize something solid and steady: they are always God’s people. God is steadfastly with them, in mercy and judgment, insistently gracious.
The general truth under which the Christian lives in this regard is “once saved always saved.”
The way of discipleship gets difficult; they see an opening through the trees that promises a softer, easier path. Distracted and diverted, they slip off and never return.
Three times in his great Sermon, Jesus, knowing how easily we imagine the worst, repeats the reassuring command “Do not be anxious” (Matthew 6:25, 31, 34). Our life with God is a sure thing. When mountain climbers are in dangerous terrain, on the face of a cliff or the slopes of a glacier, they rope themselves together. Sometimes one of them slips and falls—backslides. But not everyone falls at once, and so those who are still on their feet are able to keep the backslider from falling away completely.
Joy
It seemed like a dream, too good to be true, when GOD returned Zion’s exiles. We laughed, we sang, we couldn’t believe our good fortune. We were the talk of the nations— “GOD was wonderful to them!” GOD was wonderful to us; we are one happy people. And now, GOD, do it again— bring rains to our drought-stricken lives So those who planted their crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest, So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing. – Psalm 126
We can decide to center ourselves in the God who generously gives and not in our own egos which greedily grab. One of the certain consequences of such a life is joy, the kind expressed in Psalm 126.
The center sentence in the psalm is “We are one happy people” (Psalm 126:3).
One of the most interesting and remarkable things Christians learn is that laughter does not exclude weeping. Christian joy is not an escape from sorrow. Pain and hardship still come, but they are unable to drive out the happiness of the redeemed. A common but futile strategy for achieving joy is trying to eliminate things that hurt: get rid of pain by numbing the nerve ends, get rid of insecurity by eliminating risks, get rid of disappointment by depersonalizing your relationships. And then try to lighten the boredom of such a life by buying joy in the form of vacations and entertainment. There isn’t a hint of that in Psalm 126.
Work
If GOD doesn’t build the house, the builders only build shacks. If GOD doesn’t guard the city, the night watchman might as well nap. It’s useless to rise early and go to bed late, and work your worried fingers to the bone. Don’t you know he enjoys giving rest to those he loves? Don’t you see that children are GOD’s best gift? the fruit of the womb his generous legacy? Like a warrior’s fistful of arrows are the children of a vigorous youth. Oh, how blessed are you parents, with your quivers full of children! Your enemies don’t stand a chance against you; you’ll sweep them right off your doorstep. – Psalm 127
The first great fact which emerges from our civilization is that today everything has become “means.” There is no longer an “end”; we do not know whither we are going. We have forgotten our collective ends, and we possess great means: we set huge machines in motion in order to arrive nowhere. – Jacque Sellul
Structures become more important than the people who live in them. Machines become more important than the people who use them. We care more for our possessions with which we hope to make our way in the world than with our thoughts and dreams which tell us who we are in the world.
Hilary of Poitiers taught that every Christian must be constantly vigilant against what he called “irreligiosa solicitudo pro Deo”—a blasphemous anxiety to do God’s work for him.
As Christians do the jobs and tasks assigned to them in what the world calls work, we learn to pay attention to and practice what God is doing in love and justice, in helping and healing, in liberating and cheering.
Happiness
All you who fear GOD, how blessed you are! how happily you walk on his smooth straight road! You worked hard and deserve all you’ve got coming. Enjoy the blessing! Revel in the goodness! Your wife will bear children as a vine bears grapes, your household lush as a vineyard, The children around your table as fresh and promising as young olive shoots. Stand in awe of God’s Yes. Oh, how he blesses the one who fears GOD! Enjoy the good life in Jerusalem every day of your life. And enjoy your grandchildren. Peace to Israel! – Psalm 128
Being a Christian is what we were created for. The life of faith has the support of an entire creation and the resources of a magnificent redemption. The structure of this world was created by God so we can live in it easily and happily as his children.
Blessing is the word that describes this happy state of affairs. Psalm 128 features the word. The psalm begins with three descriptive promises: “All you who fear GOD, how blessed you are!” “You…deserve all you’ve got coming.” “Enjoy the blessing! Revel in the goodness!” It concludes with three vigorous pronouncements: “Oh, how he blesses the one who fears GOD!” “Enjoy the good life in Jerusalem.” “Enjoy your grand-children.”
Jesus, in the introduction to His Sermon on the Mount, identifies the eight key qualities in the life of a person of faith and announces each one with the word blessed.
Not a day goes by but what we have to deal with that ancient triple threat that Christians in the Middle Ages summarized under the headings of the world, the flesh and the devil:
- The World—the society of proud and arrogant humankind that defies and tries to eliminate God’s rule and presence in history;
- The Flesh—the corruption that sin has introduced into our very appetites and instincts;
- The Devil—the malignant will that tempts and seduces us away from the will of God.
In the plain words of the psalm: “All you who fear GOD, how blessed you are! how happily you walk on his smooth straight road!”
“Fear GOD.” Reverence might be a better word. Awe. The Bible isn’t interested in whether we believe in God or not. It assumes that everyone more or less does. What it is interested in is the response we have to him.
Perseverance
“They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young” —this is how Israel tells it— “They’ve kicked me around ever since I was young, but they never could keep me down. Their plowmen plowed long furrows up and down my back; But GOD wouldn’t put up with it, he sticks with us; Then GOD ripped the harnesses of the evil plowmen to shreds.” Oh, let all those who hate Zion grovel in humiliation; Let them be like grass in shallow ground that withers before the harvest, Before the farmhands can gather it in, the harvesters get in the crop, Before the neighbors have a chance to call out, “Congratulations on your wonderful crop! We bless you in GOD’s name!” – Psalm 129
Patience is drawing on underlying forces; it is powerfully positive, though to a natural view it looks like just sitting it out. How would I persist against positive eroding forces if I were not drawing on invisible forces? And patience has a positive tonic effect on others; because of the presence of the patient person, they revive and go on, as if he were the gyroscope of the ship providing a stable ground. But the patient person himself does not enjoy it. – Paul Goodman
Eugene Peterson was once told, “You have no stick-to-itiveness. You never finish anything.” Years later, he learned that the church had a fancier word for the same thing: perseverance.
Stick-to-itiveness. Perseverance. Patience. The way of faith is not a fad that is taken up in one century only to be discarded in the next. It lasts. It is a way that works. It has been tested thoroughly.
Perseverance does not mean “perfection.” It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us.
The cornerstone sentence of Psalm 129 is “GOD wouldn’t put up with it, he sticks with us.” When the Bible says that God sticks with us, the emphasis is on His dependable personal relationship, that He is always there for us.
God sticks to His relationship. He establishes a personal relationship with us and stays with it. The central reality for Christians is the personal, unalterable, persevering commitment God makes to us. Perseverance is not the result of our determination, it is the result of God’s faithfulness.
Christian discipleship is a process of paying more and more attention to God’s righteousness and less and less attention to our own; finding the meaning of our lives not by probing our moods and motives and morals but by believing in God’s will and purposes; making a map of the faithfulness of God, not charting the rise and fall of our enthusiasms. It is out of such a reality that we acquire perseverance.
Christian discipleship is a decision to walk in His ways, steadily and firmly, and then finding that the way integrates all our interests, passions and gifts, our human needs and our eternal aspirations. It is the way of life we were created for. There are endless challenges in it to keep us on the growing edge of faith; there is always the God who sticks with us to make it possible for us to persevere.
Hope
Help, GOD—the bottom has fallen out of my life! Master, hear my cry for help! Listen hard! Open your ears! Listen to my cries for mercy. If you, GOD, kept records on wrongdoings, who would stand a chance? As it turns out, forgiveness is your habit, and that’s why you’re worshiped. I pray to GOD—my life a prayer— and wait for what he’ll say and do. My life’s on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning. Oh Israel, wait and watch for GOD— with GOD’s arrival comes love, with GOD’s arrival comes generous redemption. No doubt about it—he’ll redeem Israel, buy back Israel from captivity to sin. – Psalm 130
Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair. Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them… In response to hope the imagination is aroused to picture every possible issue, to try every door, to fit together even the most heterogeneous pieces in the puzzle. After the solution has been found it is difficult to recall the steps taken—so many of them are just below the level of consciousness. – Thornton Wilder
A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering.
Psalm 130 grapples mightily with suffering, sings its way through it, and provides usable experience for those who are committed to traveling the way of faith to God through Jesus Christ.
George MacDonald put it with epigrammatic force: “The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.”
Such are the two great realities of Psalm 130: suffering is real; God is real. Suffering is a mark of our existential authenticity; God is proof of our essential and eternal humanity.
These words are at the center of the psalm. “I pray to GOD—my life a prayer—and wait for what He’ll say and do. My life’s on the line before God, my Lord, waiting and watching till morning, waiting and watching till morning.” Wait and watch add up to hope.
Humility
GOD, I’m not trying to rule the roost, I don’t want to be king of the mountain. I haven’t meddled where I have no business or fantasized grandiose plans. I’ve kept my feet on the ground, I’ve cultivated a quiet heart. Like a baby content in its mother’s arms, my soul is a baby content. Wait, Israel, for GOD. Wait with hope. Hope now; hope always! – Psalm 131
Humility is the obverse side of confidence in God, whereas pride is the obverse side of confidence in self. – John Baillie
Psalm 131 is a maintenance psalm. It is functional to the person of faith as pruning is functional to the gardener: it gets rid of that which looks good to those who don’t know any better, and reduces the distance between our hearts and their roots in God. The two things that Psalm 131 prunes away are unruly ambition and infantile dependency, what we might call getting too big for our britches and refusing to cut the apron strings.
We need pruning. Jesus said, “[God] cuts off every branch of me that doesn’t bear grapes. And every branch that is grapebearing He prunes back so it will bear even more” (John 15:2).
Robert Browning’s fine line on aspiration, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” has been distorted to “Reach for the skies and grab everything that isn’t nailed down.” Ambition is aspiration gone crazy. Aspiration is the channeled, creative energy that moves us to growth in Christ, shaping goals in the Spirit. Ambition takes these same energies for growth and development and uses them to make something tawdry and cheap, sweatily knocking together a Babel when we could be vacationing in Eden. Calvin comments, “Those who yield themselves up to the influence of ambition will soon lose themselves in a labyrinth of perplexity.”
The last line of the psalm addresses this quality of newly acquired freedom: “Wait, Israel, for GOD. Wait with hope. Hope now; hope always!” Choose to be with Him; elect His presence; aspire to His ways; respond to His love.
When Charles Spurgeon preached this psalm, he said it “is one of the shortest Psalms to read, but one of the longest to learn.”
Obedience
O GOD, remember David, remember all his troubles! And remember how he promised GOD, made a vow to the Strong God of Jacob, “I’m not going home, and I’m not going to bed, I’m not going to sleep, not even take time to rest, Until I find a home for GOD, a house for the Strong God of Jacob.” Remember how we got the news in Ephrathah, learned all about it at Jaar Meadows? We shouted, “Let’s go to the shrine dedication! Let’s worship at God’s own footstool!” Up, GOD, enjoy your new place of quiet repose, you and your mighty covenant ark; Get your priests all dressed up in justice; prompt your worshipers to sing this prayer: “Honor your servant David; don’t disdain your anointed one.” GOD gave David his word, he won’t back out on this promise: “One of your sons I will set on your throne; If your sons stay true to my Covenant and learn to live the way I teach them, Their sons will continue the line— always a son to sit on your throne. Yes—I, GOD, chose Zion, the place I wanted for my shrine; This will always be my home; this is what I want, and I’m here for good. I’ll shower blessings on the pilgrims who come here, and give supper to those who arrive hungry; I’ll dress my priests in salvation clothes; the holy people will sing their hearts out! Oh, I’ll make the place radiant for David! I’ll fill it with light for my anointed! I’ll dress his enemies in dirty rags, but I’ll make his crown sparkle with splendor.” – Psalm 132
True knowledge of God is born out of obedience. – John Calvin
Psalm 132 is one of the oldest psalms in the Bible. It is a psalm of David’s obedience, of “how he promised GOD, made a vow to the Strong God of Jacob.” The psalm shows obedience as a lively, adventurous response of faith that is rooted in historical fact and reaches into a promised hope.
Psalm 132 activates faith’s memory so that obedience will be sane. “Each act of obedience by the Christian is a modest proof, unequivocal for all its imperfection, of the reality of what he attests.”
Christians who master Psalm 132 will be protected from one danger, at least, that is ever a threat to obedience: the danger that we should reduce Christian existence to ritually obeying a few commandments that are congenial to our temperament and convenient to our standard of living.
Christian living demands that we keep our feet on the ground; it also asks us to make a leap of faith. A Christian who stays put is no better than a statue.
Community
How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along! It’s like costly anointing oil flowing down head and beard, Flowing down Aaron’s beard, flowing down the collar of his priestly robes. It’s like the dew on Mount Hermon flowing down the slopes of Zion. Yes, that’s where GOD commands the blessing, ordains eternal life. – Psalm 133
We can no more be a Christian and have nothing to do with the church than we can be a person and not be in a family. Membership in the church is a basic spiritual fact for those who confess Christ as Lord.
Psalm 133 presents what we are after: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!” The psalm puts into song what is said and demonstrated throughout Scripture and church: community is essential.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.”
One of the best, maybe the best, book written in the twentieth century on the meaning of living together as a family of faith is Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The book begins with the words of the psalm: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to live together in unity!”
Blessing
Come, bless GOD, all you servants of GOD! You priests of GOD, posted to the nightwatch in GOD’s shrine, Lift your praising hands to the Holy Place, and bless GOD. In turn, may GOD of Zion bless you— GOD who made heaven and earth! – Psalm 134
Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune’s favorites sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out. – Herman Melville
In Psalm 120, the first of the Songs of Ascents, we saw the theme of repentance developed. The word in Hebrew is tĕshubah, a turning away from the world and a turning toward God—the initial move in a life-goal set on God. It was addressed to the person at the crossroads, inviting each of us to make the decision to set out on the way of faith.
Psalm 134, the final Song of Ascents, provides the evidence. The way of discipleship that begins in an act of repentance (tĕshubah) concludes in a life of praise (bĕrakah). It doesn’t take long to find the key word and controlling thought in the psalm: bless God, bless God, God bless you.
Psalm 128 is what we experience when God blesses us. The word in Hebrew “is used only of men, never of God, [and] in the NT there are only two instances in which it is used of God (makarios in 1 Timothy 1:11; 6:15).”
God gets down on His knees among us, gets on our level and shares Himself with us. He does not reside afar off and send us diplomatic messages; He kneels among us.
A book on God has for its title The God Who Stands, Stoops and Stays. That summarizes the posture of blessing:
- God stands—He is foundational and dependable;
- God stoops—He kneels to our level and meets us where we are;
- God stays—He sticks with us through hard times and good, sharing His life with us in grace and peace.
Humphrey Bogart once defined a professional as a person who “did a better job when he didn’t feel like it.” That goes for a Christian too. Feelings don’t run the show. There is a reality deeper than our feelings. Live by that. Eric Routley thinks that, colloquially, to bless means to “speak well of.” The Lord has spoken well of you; now you speak well of him.
The first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism is “What is the chief end of man?” What is the final purpose? What is the main thing about us? Where are we going, and what will we do when we get there? The answer is “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Glorify. Enjoy. There are other things involved in Christian discipleship. The Songs of Ascents have shown some of them.
“The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” Or, in the vocabulary of Psalm 134, “Bless GOD.”
A Long Obedience
Peterson reflects, “The phrase (from Nietzsche) ‘a long obedience in the same direction’ embedded itself in my imagination and eventually became this book. My pastoral work was to fuse them into a single act: scriptureprayer, or prayerscripture. It is this fusion of God speaking to us (Scripture) and our speaking to him (prayer) that the Holy Spirit uses to form the life of Christ in us. And it is this fusion that I was trying to get onto the pages of A Long Obedience.”
The fusion of Scripture and prayer is not a terribly difficult way of reading and writing, but it does require diligent attentiveness. The fusion is accomplished by reading these Scriptures slowly, imaginatively, prayerfully and obediently. This is the way the Bible has been read by most Christians for most of the Christian centuries, but it is not commonly read that way today. The reading style employed more often than not by contemporary Christians is fast, reductive, information-gathering and, above all, practical. We read for what we can get out of it, what we can put to use, what we think we can use—and right now. “We… we… we…” all the way home.
We need to familiarize ourselves with the world in which Jesus and His gift of life are revealed to us. We do it by reading our Scriptures slowly, imaginatively, prayerfully and obediently. Each adverb is important.
Richard J. Foster, author of Celebration of Discipline and Streams of Living Water writes, “I thank God for A Long Obedience. It is a pioneer message, first coming to us at a time when no one was talking about either ‘long’ or ‘obedience.’ And while, thankfully, others have added their voices in the intervening years, A Long Obedience retains its prophetic edge for us who live on the cusp of the twenty-first century. Rooted in the ancient psalmist’s Songs of Ascents, it invites us to journey with Jesus into the rich spiritual landscape of ‘righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.’”