If you have your Bibles, I’d invite you to turn with me to Psalm 129 as we continue our way through these songs of ascents which are part of the fifth book of the Psalms. We began with the first of the songs in the fifth book of the Psalter, Psalm 107, and God willing we will continue all the way through to the one hundred fiftieth and when we do that will mean that we have preached all the way through the whole of the Psalter in the course of the years that God has granted to me to be with you and that has been a great blessing to me.
John Calvin says of this psalm:
“This psalm teaches, in the first place, that God subjects His Church to various troubles and afflictions to the end that He may better prove Himself Her Defender and Deliverer. The psalmist, therefore, recalls to the memory of the faithful how sadly God’s people have been persecuted in all ages and how wonderfully they have been preserved in order, by such examples, to fortify their hope in reference to the future. In the second part, under the form of an imprecation” — the calling down of curses — “in the form of an imprecation he shows that the divine vengeance is ready to fall upon all the ungodly who, without cause, distress the people of God.”
That’s a very good, succinct description of what this psalm does. And Derek Kidner says about it, and this is so striking; I’ll come back and make a comment about this in just a few moments:
“Whereas most nations tend to look back on what they have achieved, Israel reflects here on what she has survived. It could be a disheartening exercise, for Zion still has its ill-wishers, but the singers take courage from the past, facing God with gratitude and enemies with defiance.”
Let’s pray before we read this psalm together.
Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your Word. It is, our souls can say with full confidence, just what we need. We find You ready to feed us precisely the meal that we require, that we want. And so we ask, O God, that by Your Spirit You would enable us to open our mouths to receive from You the food of life, Your promises, Your Word, and to enable us to embrace even our sufferings as the occasion of Your deliverance and defense, and so sing to You even when all lights have gone out. Grant us eyes to see and ears to hear the truth of Your Word as we read Your Word. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Hear the Word of God beginning in Psalm 129 verse 1:
“’Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth’ — let Israel now say — ‘Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me. The plowers plowed upon my back; they made long their furrows.’ The LORD is righteous; He has cut the cords of the wicked. May all who hate Zion be put to shame and turned backward! Let them be like the grass on the housetops, which withers before it grows up, with which the reaper does not fill his hand nor the binder of sheaves his arms, nor do those who pass by say, ‘The blessing of the LORD be upon you! We bless you in the name of the LORD!’”
Amen, and thus ends this reading of God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant Word. May He write its eternal truth upon all our hearts.
What God tells us to sing matters. It is very important that we pay attention to the subject matter, to the content, to the material for singing that God gives us in the hymnbook of the Bible, the Psalter, the Psalms, because that content expresses the whole range of spiritual experience for Christians and it is very tempting for us to limit ourselves in the material that we sing back to God when we gather for praise. One friend has observed that so much of the content of the songs that have been written in the last two or three or four decades for gathered praise for the people of God has been happy and celebratory and hasn’t dealt with the darker side of spiritual experience. Very thankfully, just in the last decade, I’ve begun to see a correction to that in the songs that are being written today but I think that’s probably an accurate indictment for the three previous decades. And I want us to look and see what we learn about and some other things from this psalm together tonight.
GOD TELLS HIS PEOPLE TO SING ABOUT THEIR PERSECUTION AND SUFFERING
So the first thing that I want you to see as we look at this psalm is that God tells His people, and that means you and me, God tells His people to sing about their persecution and suffering. Is that a strange thing to you, that God would tell His people to sing about their persecution and suffering? That’s exactly what we find here in Psalm 129. Does it remind you of anything? It starts, “Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth,” and then the choir director says, “Now everybody sing! Let all Israel say, ‘Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth!’” It reminds you of Psalm 124 doesn’t it? Go back to Psalm 124 and see what we meet there. “’If it had not been the LORD who was on our side,’ – now let Israel say — ‘If if had not been the LORD who was on our side.’” So the psalmist begins, “’If it had not been the LORD who was on our side,’ — now everybody sing; join in, everyone!’” That psalm, however, focuses on God’s deliverance in the midst of the people of Israel’s troubles. This psalm, Psalm 129, gives us a command to sing about the troubles, to sing about the sufferings, to sing about the physical abuse, to sing about the persecution. What God tells us to sing about matters and He tells Israel to sing about their suffering and He tells us to sing about our suffering and our persecution.
You see, Israel was literally born in suffering. This psalm deliberately takes Israel back to what experience? It takes Israel back to the experience of Egypt. Where was it where Israel had felt the cruel stripes of the oppressor on her back? It was the lashes of slave masters in Egypt. And the psalmist says, “Go back and remember the persecution, remember the oppression, remember the abuse, remember the persecution, and sing about it.” Israel was born in suffering. That is very, very important for us to understand. Theologically it’s very, very important to understand and of course it’s also true of the Christian church. I’ve quoted on several occasions as we’ve talked a little bit about Islam, Bernard Lewis’ marvelous works recounting the cultural history and development of the whole Islamic world. Bernard Lewis is now an emeritus professor at Princeton University and is an expert in Islam. And one of the things he says, I think in his book, What Went Wrong? which is a history of the relationship between Islam and the western world, I think it’s in that book where he says that Christianity finds one of its fundamental differences with Islam in that the primary experience of Islam in its first seven centuries was unmitigated success and triumph. Islam went from strength to strength, triumphing in military battle after military conquest for seven centuries before it ever met its first defeat, whereas Christianity was born in four unremitting centuries of persecution. And that those two dramatically different experiences cast the mold for the way that those world religions would understand themselves. I have no idea whether Bernard Lewis is a Christian or not, I rather think not, but I don’t know. I have no idea, but I found that a very, very interesting and acute and accurate observation on his part. Christianity, like Israel, was born in suffering and persecution. And here, God tells His people to sing about it. Why? So that we will not forget it and so that we will not despair in it because all of God’s people, all of God’s people will know this reality in their lives and God says for us to sing about it.
This psalm also, I want to point out, provides us a key to understanding Matthew’s quotation of Hosea 11:1. Look at Psalm 129:1. “Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth,” and then that line is repeated in verse 2 – “Greatly have they afflicted me from my youth.” And so the beginnings of Israel are depicted here as Israel’s youth or childhood. It’s a reference back to the exodus and to the trials of Egypt. If you will look with me in the minor prophets at the book of Hosea, look at Hosea chapter 11 verse 1. “When Israel was a child I love him and out of Egypt I called My son.” There you see the prophet Hosea doing the same thing that the psalmist is doing here, looking back to the experience of Egypt and then seeing that as the birthplace, as the childhood of the nation of Israel.
Turn with me to the Gospel of Matthew to chapter 1. When Jesus and His parents leave Bethlehem because of the persecution of Herod and go down into Egypt, Matthew chapter 2 verse 14, and remain there until Herod dies, Matthew chapter 2 verse 15, Matthew pauses and says, “By the way, the reason that after the angel told Joseph to get out of Bethlehem, the reason that Joseph and Mary and Jesus had gone down into Egypt to be the place where they would stay as a place of refuge until the danger of Herod had passed, was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, ‘Out of Egypt I called My son.’” Now many critical scholars, and even some scholars who would call themselves evangelical students of the New Testament, will say that, “Matthew is misapplying Hosea 11:1 in applying it to Jesus. Clearly Matthew’s just rifling through Bible texts and he’s finding references to a son wherever he can find them and then sticking it on Jesus. Jesus happened to be in Egypt, He was a Son, Israel was in Egypt, was called a son, and so Matthew is just sort of attaching that significance to a passage in which that has absolutely nothing to do.”
Wrong. What Matthew is doing is deep and profound. As Israel, God’s son, was born in Egypt in suffering, so God’s one true Son went into Egypt in suffering and would leave Egypt and return to His people and live in suffering and die in suffering because He is the fulfillment of all the suffering servant songs of the Old Testament. What Matthew is doing here is profoundly correct and profoundly theological and ties together a whole theme in the Old Testament. And you see it here in this psalm because this psalm reminds us that Israel’s childhood, Israel’s youth, is associated with Egypt. It is in the crucible of persecution and suffering in Egypt that God’s people is made. It is in the crucible of the suffering of the one, true, and unique, the only begotten Son of God that the new Israel is created as we are united to Him. And so this psalm provides us a key to understanding Matthew’s quotation of Hosea 11:1. You see, God had but one Son without sin, but none without suffering. And Jesus, not only identified with His people in their suffering, He experienced their suffering. But the point here that I want you to see is, the psalmist is looking at the suffering of the children of Israel in their youth and in their childhood in Egypt and he is reflecting on the Lord’s purposes in this.
It’s very interesting, isn’t it, that when the Presbyterians of the Church of Scotland chose a symbol for the church, they chose the symbol of the burning bush. Now that’s odd because the burning bush is a theophany. In the Bible, it’s a manifestation of God. It’s God speaking to Moses from the burning bush. Why did Presbyterians in Scotland choose the burning bush? They chose the burning bush because of the truth of this psalm and many others and because the phrase that is attached to the story of the burning bush in the book of Exodus. You remember, when Moses looks at this bush it’s on fire but what does he notice about it? Even though it’s burning, it’s not burning up. Even though it’s burning, it’s not being consumed by the fire. And how did Presbyterianism begin in Scotland? With 130 years of persecution. Between 1660 and 1689 alone, 18,000 Presbyterians died for religious freedom in Scotland. Presbyterians looked back on it and they called it “The Killing Times” and it was in those times that the Presbyterians of Scotland chose the burning bush as the picture of God’s Church and they attached the little Latin phrase, “Nec Tamin Consumabato” — Not however, is it being consumed; yet it is not consumed. In other words, the picture of the bush on fire but not being consumed, they saw in that a picture of the Lord’s preservation of those Presbyterians under persecution and suffering in the early days of Presbyterianism in Scotland.
And of course Israel and the church’s experience of persecution and suffering is designed to make us tender to those who suffer. This is again one of the things that Bernard Lewis points out in his book, What Went Wrong? It’s one of the things that creates a very different attitude on the part of Christians towards non-Christians and on the part of Muslims and non-Muslims. In the heyday of Islam, your option as a non-Muslim was to convert or die. In the heyday of Christianity, Christians went around the world and they didn’t kill the people they met, they were willing to be killed by the people that they met in order that those people might be with God forever because the experience of suffering is designed to make us tender towards all who are under suffering and persecution and oppression.
And I want to pause for just a few moments and say this. It matters that we sing about this, it matters that we remember this, it matters because right now around this world Christians are suffering and dying under persecution for their simply believing in Jesus as well as sharing the Gospel. Within the last twenty-four hours, a Christian has died in Yemen because he was sharing the Gospel. It’s very interesting, at the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization I had the privilege of preaching at a Presbyterian church. There are only a few Presbyterian churches in South Africa. Most of the reformed churches in South Africa are Dutch Reformed in their roots and there are very few Presbyterian churches in South Africa. Interestingly, some of those churches have connections with Reformed Theological Seminary and with Southern Presbyterianism. But I got to preach in one of them. And while I was there, there was a young man who was a missionary to Yemen. Now I did something that probably was bad. I just said to him, “Wow, you’re in Yemen! Tell me about that.” Now I had a sneaking suspicion that when I did that he was going to get offended and he did. But let me tell you why I asked him the question that way. Yemen is where most of the hijackers that performed the assault on America on September 11, 2001 were from. It’s one of the most radicalized, anti-western, spite filled, hate filled parts of the Muslim world. And I was amazed that I was talking to a Christian missionary who was in Yemen and I wanted to know what that was like. And he was immediately defensive. “Oh, they’re not like the newspaper depicts them; they’re wonderful.” Okay. “Um, so how do you go about sharing the Gospel with them given that conversion would mean death for them and your sharing the Gospel with a Muslim would be a violation of Sharia and you would be liable to the death penalty?” “Oh, we would never ever share the Gospel with them!” “Oh.” Just about that time Grace Bateman walked up and I was so glad she was there. And she began to engage this missionary about how you went about doing Christ-centered, Gospel-based mercy ministry in a missionary setting. And he was utterly oblivious to everything that she was talking about. And I just sat there like a fly on the wall and watched.
Now why am I telling you that? I’m telling you that because there are many people who think that we must, at all costs, not offend anyone by sharing the Gospel and we must, at all costs, preserve our own hides. Now in contrast, that same week within twenty-four hours, I heard Michael Ramsden stand up at Cape Town and say these words: “There are no closed countries to the Gospel as long as you’re willing to die to share the Gospel.” And he went on to tell about he was going into these closed countries and sharing the Gospel — not just doing good, not just doing mercy ministry, but sharing the Gospel. There are Christians dying around the world right now because they’re sharing the Gospel. We ought to sing about that every once in a while and Psalm 129 gives us those words.
JESUS’ IDENTIFICATION WITH OUR SUFFERING
Second, not only does God tell us to sing about suffering and what God tells us to sing about matters, we see in this passage Jesus’ identification with us in suffering. And I’ve already laid the groundwork for understanding that by our discussion of Hosea 11:1 and Matthew chapter 2 verses 14 and 15. This passage pictures the suffering of the children of Israel but only Jesus ultimately fulfills the picture that is painted here. “Greatly have they afflicted me in my youth,” verse 1. “The plowers plowed upon my back; they made long furrows.” What does that remind you of? Not only Isaiah’s words, “By His stripes we are healed,” but the actual scourging of Jesus recounted to us in the Gospels. Again, Derek Kidner says this:
“The suffering songs, the servant songs of Isaiah, visualize this witness lifted to a higher plain all together, that of willing suffering. First as the cause of speaking out for God, which is the context of the words, ‘I gave my back to the smiters,’ Isaiah 50 verse 6, and finally as vicarious sacrifice, a task beyond the capacity of Israel itself because we learn in Isaiah 53:5, ‘With His stripes we are healed.’ The New Testament, while showing its fulfillment in Christ and in Him alone as to His atoning suffering, calls the Church to follow in His steps and shows the apostles rejoicing as they do.”
Do you remember when the apostles come out of prison having been beaten, rejoicing that it had been their privilege to suffer for the sake of the name of Christ? Well, this is because Jesus has taken our place in His suffering, He has fulfilled the sufferings that are just pictured here in Psalm 129, and then He has given us the privilege. How does Paul say it? “For it has been granted to you, Philippians, it has been granted to you not only to believe but also to suffer for His sake.” This is what Paul meant by filling up that which is lacking in Christ’s suffering. Jesus identifies with us, He takes our place in suffering, and then He allows us the privilege of joining in and experiencing like suffering as His. Is that our attitude when we encounter suffering for the sake of Christ?
A PICTURE OF THE ONE PEOPLE OF GOD IN ALL AGES
Third, not only does it matter to God what we sing about, and He wants us to sing about suffering, not only do we see Jesus identifying with us as the fulfillment of what is spoken of in Psalm 129, Zion, here as in the psalm that we studied last week, Psalm 128, is a picture of the one people of God in all ages. Last week I just flew right over this point and didn’t explain it at all. And one of my dear sisters in Christ asked me to flesh that out so I’m going to do that right now, tonight. In this passage, we’re reminded again that Zion is a picture of the one people of God in all ages. Zion is not simply the capital of Israel. Jerusalem is the place where the throne of David and the Ark of the Covenant reside together. It symbolizes the Kingship of God and the Priesthood of God and it is the place where God’s people gather to worship Him and to experience His unique presence, nearness, and favor. As such, it is a picture of the place where God’s people in all ages meet to worship Him. And where does Jesus say that is in Matthew 18? It is wherever there are two or more gathered in His name — “There I am.” Jesus is the place where God’s people in all ages gather to come before the heavenly Father. And who is it that gathers around Jesus? The Church; the people of God. Zion is a part of that reality but Old Testament Zion is but a foreshadowing and a picture of that reality. And so when we meet Zion in this psalm we’re not just talking about the capital city of Israel; we’re talking about a picture of the people of God.
Again, let me point you to Derek Kidner who says this: “If Zion were no more than a capital city, the imprecation,” of verses 5, 6, and 7, and 8, “the imprecations on its enemies would be mere petulance and bluster. But in the Psalter, Zion is the city of our God.” And what does Jesus say to His disciples? “You are a city on a hill.” It is the mountain for our abode. And that’s Psalm 68 and what does the book of Hebrews say? “We come to Mt. Zion.” And it is the destined mother city of the world. All the nations will stream into her and even the Gentile converts say of her, “All my springs are in you.” And where have all the people of the world come? Men and women and boys and girls from every tribe, tongue, people and nation? To Zion? To Jesus. And who is gathered around Jesus? A multitude that no man can number from every tribe, tongue, people, and nation. And who are they? Zion is a picture of the Church and that means that what we have in this psalm is a picture of the Church’s confidence in God in the midst of suffering and persecution in the resistance of unbelievers against the Church.
CELEBRATING GOD’S PROMISES TO ABRAHAM
And that leads me to the last thing that I want you to see in this psalm because this psalm celebrates God’s promise to Abraham. In Genesis 12 verses 1 to 3 what does God say to Abraham? “Those who bless you I will bless, but those who curse you I will curse.” And what does this psalm say? “May all who hate Zion be put to shame and turned backwards.” Those who curse you I will curse. “Let them be like the grass on the housetops which withers before it grows up.” That’s an interesting picture, isn’t it? In Israel in this time people would put the beams of their house together and then they would sod it to make it water tight, which sometimes, because there was seed still left in the sod, grass would pop up on their roof but it wouldn’t last long because it didn’t have enough for roots and so the sun would burn it up like that. It would pop up, little shoots of grass, and then it would be gone. And that’s a picture here for those who oppose God’s people. In contrast, Isaiah will say, “The grass withers, the flowers fall, but the Word of our God stands forever.” The enemies of God’s people are but like this (snap) but God’s Word stands forever. Those who bless you I will bless, those who cure you I will curse.
“With which the reaper does not fill his hand, nor the binder of sheaves his arms, nor do those who pass by say, ‘The blessing of the LORD be upon you! We bless you in the name of the LORD!’” Now that’s an interesting reference. I think the psalmist is thinking about a scene that we meet in Ruth chapter 2 verse 4. Do you remember it? Boaz is approaching the field where people are reaping and gleaning and he calls out, “The Lord be with you!” And they call back, “The Lord bless you!” Why? Because the Lord’s been kind to give them a good harvest. It’s a picture of His blessing. But here, we’re told that those who oppose the Lord will hear no such blessings. Those who bless you I will bless, those who curse you I will curse.
For the believer, one thing that means is when we face persecution and suffering from those who oppose the Gospel, from those who oppose Christ, from those who oppose His message, from those who oppose His people, rather than being caught in the gall of bitterness about what we’re experiencing, we may just want to fear for them because this psalm says, look at verse 4 – “The LORD is righteous and He has cut the cords of the wicked.”
William Plumer says, “It is fatal the cause of cruelty and persecution that God’s righteousness endures forever.” How did the poet put it? “The wheels of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.” The enemies of the people of God will not last, but by God’s grace, He has appointed that His people will last forever. And so we can bear up under our sufferings and even sing about it every once in a while. Let’s pray.
Our Lord and our God, You give us just what we need just when we need it. We’re like the little birds opening their mouths to be fed by their mother. Grant that we would eat Your Word in trust. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Would you stand for God’s blessing?
Peace be to the brethren and love with faith from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, until the daybreak and the shadows flee away. Amen.