Psalm 120 — Cry from Distress

LINDA BROWN: Meshech. That is the word. A man is walking uphill toward the temple in Jerusalem, singing, and the word that comes out of him is a place name most of us could not find on a map. "Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech." Where on earth is Meshech, and why is it the first thing a pilgrim says on the road to God's house?

FRANK EDWARDS: Meshech is on the far edge of the world, up near the Black Sea, about as far north as an Israelite could imagine anyone living. And then, in the same breath, he says he lives among the tents of Kedar, which is a nomadic Arab people down in the desert to the southeast. You cannot camp in both of those at once. Nobody could. So either the psalmist has lost his geography, or he is telling us something about where his soul is standing. Welcome to Dig Deeper. Today we start at the bottom of a very famous staircase, Psalm 120, the first of the Songs of Ascents, and the first step on the road toward God is... a groan. A groan against the liars around him.

LINDA BROWN: Songs of Ascents. I hear that title and I picture something joyful, a choir, a procession. A groan is not what I expect on step one.

FRANK EDWARDS: Ascents is the Hebrew word maʿalōt, and it literally means steps, or goings-up. Jerusalem sits on a ridge, so whichever direction you approached from, you climbed. There are fifteen of these psalms, one hundred twenty through one hundred thirty-four, and the best explanation we have is that pilgrims sang them on the way up to the city for the three great yearly feasts, Passover, Weeks, and Booths. The collection as we have it was most likely gathered after the exile, when Judah had come home from Babylon but was still living small, surrounded by neighbors who mocked the rebuilding and wanted the temple to fail. So the shape of the fifteen is a journey. It moves from distance toward the house of God, from the scattered life toward Zion, and it ends with priests blessing the people at night in the temple courts. That is where it finishes. Where it starts is right here, far from home, among people who hate peace. Would you read it for us?

LINDA BROWN: In my distress I cried to the LORD, and He answered me. Deliver my soul, O LORD, from lying lips and a deceitful tongue. What will He do to you, and what will be added to you, O deceitful tongue? Sharp arrows will come from the warrior, with burning coals of the broom tree! Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar! Too long have I dwelt among those who hate peace. I am in favor of peace; but when I speak, they want war.

FRANK EDWARDS: The first word out of the pilgrim's mouth is "distress." Not Jerusalem, not joy, not the temple. Distress. And I think that is the controlling claim of this psalm, if I can put it plainly: the road home to God begins honestly, in the place you actually are, and the God you are walking toward hears you from there. Before the psalmist tells us what is wrong, he tells us he was answered. "In my distress I cried to the LORD, and He answered me." That is testimony before complaint. Psalm 34 says the same thing as settled doctrine, "the righteous cry out, and the LORD hears; He delivers them from all their troubles." So the pilgrim is not standing on one lucky rescue. He is standing on the whole memory of Israel.

LINDA BROWN: Answered is the word that trips me, though. Verse one says it already happened, past tense, done. Then verse two turns around and begs, "Deliver my soul, O LORD." If he has been answered, why is he still asking? That reads like he does not actually believe verse one.

FRANK EDWARDS: Watch who he is talking to, because it changes three times in four verses. In verse one he speaks about God, third person, "He answered me." In verse two he turns and speaks to God, "Deliver my soul, O LORD." And then in verse three he wheels around and addresses the enemy directly, "What will He do to you, O deceitful tongue?" About God, to God, at the enemy. The man cannot hold still. His voice cannot settle because his situation will not settle, and the poem enacts that. You feel the whiplash of a soul that keeps turning toward heaven and then flinching back toward the threat. So is verse two unbelief? I would say it is the opposite. It is what faith actually sounds like from inside trouble. He remembers being heard, and that memory is precisely what gives him the nerve to ask again. The theology underneath is quiet but enormous: God receives the prayer that cannot keep its footing. He is not repelled by the scattered, back-and-forth cry.

LINDA BROWN: The unsteadiness is the point, then... that is what you are saying? The prayer that stammers and doubles back is still a prayer God takes.

FRANK EDWARDS: Unsteady, and taken exactly as unsteady. Nobody is asked to compose themselves first. And that matters for what he is up against, because the enemy here is not a sword. Read verse two again, "lying lips and a deceitful tongue." Nobody has drawn a blade on this man. Somebody is talking about him. Somebody is twisting what he said, and he knows the story is out there and he cannot catch it. James picks this up centuries later, "the tongue also is a fire... a restless evil, full of deadly poison," and says no one can tame it. James is not inventing a theme. He is standing on Psalm 120.

LINDA BROWN: [short pause] Then I have a real problem with verse four. This man says at the end, "I am in favor of peace." And two verses earlier he is wishing arrows and burning coals on the people who talked about him. That is not peace. That is someone who wants to win. How do those two verses belong to the same person?

FRANK EDWARDS: Start with the strange half of the curse, because I think it answers you. "Burning coals of the broom tree." The Hebrew word is rōtem, and it is a scrubby white-flowered desert shrub that still grows across the Negev and out in Arabia, Kedar's own country. Every caravan trader knew it for one reason. Its wood made the hottest, longest-burning charcoal in the desert. Broom-tree coals could sit under a layer of ash for days and then flare back up when you uncovered them. Herdsmen felt that in their fingertips on a cold night. So when the psalmist says the liar deserves broom-tree coals, he is saying something exact about slander. A lie does not burn out when the conversation ends. It smolders. Weeks later somebody looks at you differently and you feel the heat come back, and the person who lit it is long gone. Hebrew poetry often climbs like this, one line picking up the last and carrying it higher, arrows, then coals, then the particular coals that never quite die. The judgment intensifies because the damage does.

FRANK EDWARDS: Now look at whose hand holds the arrows. "Sharp arrows will come from the warrior." Not from the psalmist. He never picks one up. What he does with the whole matter, the arrows and the coals alike, is lay it in the hands of the warrior who judges rightly. The technical name for this kind of psalm is imprecatory, a psalm that calls down judgment, and people wince at them. But what the imprecation actually accomplishes is that the speaker gives up the right to retaliate. He has words too, remember. He could return fire in the same currency. Instead he hands the fire to God. That shift, from personal vengeance to committed trust, is the quiet miracle of the verse, and it is exactly why he can turn around and say "I am in favor of peace" without lying. Spurgeon put the logic of it in one sentence: "He is the living God, and hence prayer to him is reasonable and profitable." You only hand your case to a judge you believe is actually on the bench.

LINDA BROWN: A judge on the bench. Which means the thing I would have to give up is not the anger, exactly. It is the satisfaction. There is a message on my phone right now that I could answer in a way that would feel very, very good for about ninety seconds, and this psalm is asking me to hand that ninety seconds to God instead and probably never see how it comes out. That is what it costs. Not the feeling. The verdict.

FRANK EDWARDS: The verdict. And the timeline with it, because notice that God's answer to the tongue is promised and not yet visible. Which brings us back to Meshech and Kedar, because that is the man's address while he waits. He is nowhere near either place literally. He is naming a condition. The outer edges of the world, both of them full of fierce, warlike peoples, and he says, I live there, I am surrounded on every side. For Judah after Babylon that was no metaphor. They knew what it was to long for God's dwelling while camped among people who despised it. Hebrews 11 gives the exile's version of this feeling, the pilgrims who "admitted that they were strangers and exiles on the earth" and were looking for a better country. And it is very old grief. Go to the first murder. Abel is a righteous man cut down by a brother who hated peace, and God says, "the voice of your brother's blood cries out to Me from the ground." Innocence surrounded by hostility, and a God who hears the cry. That pattern was carved into the ground east of Eden long before anyone sang up the hill to Jerusalem.

LINDA BROWN: And that raises the part that actually bothers me most, which is the ending. "I am in favor of peace; but when I speak, they want war." Full stop. He does not get his peace. He does not even get to Jerusalem in this psalm. Most songs give you the resolution in the last line, and this one just leaves him standing there in the tents of Kedar. Where is the answer?

FRANK EDWARDS: The psalm refuses to tidy it, and I think that refusal is a gift, because Scripture is giving you words for the ache of belonging nowhere, of speaking peace into rooms that want none, and it is not pretending that ache gets fixed by Friday. But the collection does not end here, and neither does the story. Ask the question this way. Has anyone ever walked this earth entirely in favor of peace, every single word, and been met with nothing but lying lips? One man has. False witnesses stood up at his trial and twisted what he said. When he spoke, they wanted war, and they got it, at a cross. Peter describes his response with this psalm almost audibly behind it, "when they heaped abuse on Him, He did not retaliate; when He suffered, He made no threats, but entrusted Himself to Him who judges justly." That is verse four, lived perfectly. He handed the arrows to the warrior. And then the astonishing thing. The arrows and the coals of judgment came, and they came down on him. Christ was the true pilgrim, ascending toward the Father, and he absorbed the war so that the pilgrim's longing for peace could be answered in his blood. Theologians call this substitution. The man who never deserved the broom-tree coals took them, so that people with deceitful tongues of our own could be welcomed home.

LINDA BROWN: Substitution means he did not just sympathize with the man in Meshech. He stood where the man stood and took what the man asked God to send. Every distress the pilgrim cries out from, Jesus has already entered.

FRANK EDWARDS: Entered, and come out the other side to Zion, so the staircase has a top. Now, what does that do for the person listening whose Kedar is a break room, or a group chat, or a shared table at a holiday meal? Paul is very honest about it in Romans 12, "if it is possible on your part, live at peace with everyone." On your part. Paul knows what the psalmist knows, that peace sometimes depends on the other party, and they may never give it. So the obedience in view is smaller than a speech and harder than one. There is a room you will be in this week with someone who spoke against you. Every instinct pulls you to go stiff, to answer in clipped words, to let them feel the disapproval without ever naming it. And the psalm quietly takes that away from you, because if you are truly for peace, you carry it even toward those who lit the coals. Greeting them by name. Passing the food. Asking a real question about their week. Not because they have apologized. Because Christ was for peace with you while you were still against him, and you have peace to spend now that you did not earn.

LINDA BROWN: Peace to spend. That is the line I want from today, more than the arrows or the geography. The pilgrim ends still standing in Kedar, still out of step with everybody around him, and the first thing he does about it is talk to God before he talks to them. Hold that next to your week. There is a conversation in front of you that you are already rehearsing, and this psalm asks you to bring it to the LORD before you bring it to the person. So the question for the road ahead is not whether they deserve it. Who is the one person you could greet warmly this week, before they deserve it?

FRANK EDWARDS: Go up the hill with that name in your mouth and your case in his hands, and know that the God who heard from Meshech hears from wherever you are standing today. This episode is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you are new here you can find Dig Deeper in your app store.