Psalm 121 — My Help

FRANK EDWARDS: "Don't lift your eyes to the hills. That is where the trouble is." You can imagine an older traveler saying that to a younger one at the trailhead. And he would not be wrong. The hills between a village in Galilee and the temple in Jerusalem were the most dangerous ground of the entire trip, and Psalm 121 opens by staring straight into them and asking for help.

LINDA BROWN: The hills are the danger, and the psalm looks right at them. That is a strange place to start a song about safety, and I want to know if it holds up by the end of today. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everyone. We are still climbing with the Songs of Ascent, and today is Psalm 121, which is probably the most quoted psalm in this collection.

FRANK EDWARDS: Quoted on greeting cards, printed over hospital beds, read at gravesides, and I think mostly misheard as a gentle little poem about scenery. It is a poem about a road that could kill you. Let me read it, and then let's talk about what the traveler was actually seeing when he looked up.

FRANK EDWARDS: Psalm 121. I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot to slip; your Protector will not slumber. Behold, the Protector of Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is the shade on your right hand. The sun will not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD will guard you from all evil; He will preserve your soul. The LORD will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.

LINDA BROWN: "From where does my help come." I have always read that as a rhetorical question, like he already knows the answer and is just setting up the next line. But the way you framed the hills, it sounds like it might be a real question. Like he genuinely does not know yet.

FRANK EDWARDS: A real question, asked by a person standing at the bottom of a climb and looking at what is ahead of him. So let me lay out what was actually up there, because this is the road every one of these pilgrim songs is sung on, and we will keep coming back to it for the rest of the collection. Three dangers, and the psalm answers all three in order.

The first is people. The road up to Jerusalem climbed through rough, broken country, the ground rising steeply, the paths narrowing between rocks, and that terrain hid bandits who watched for exactly this kind of traveler, small family groups on foot, weighed down with provisions for the feast. You know this road already. It is the road in the parable, where a man goes down from Jerusalem to Jericho and falls among robbers and is left half dead. Jesus did not invent that setting. Everyone listening to him had walked it and had been afraid on it.

The second danger is religious. The high places, the tops of those very hills, were dotted with shrines to Baal and the regional gods, altars raised where the Canaanites believed heaven came closest to earth. A pilgrim scanning the ridgeline would see those sites catching the sun. And the question in his mouth, "where does my help come from," had an obvious wrong answer glinting right in front of him.

The third danger is the sun itself. A traveler on foot through the Judean summer, on an exposed ridge with no shade for miles, could be dropped by heatstroke. When the psalm says "the sun will not strike you," that is not a metaphor for hard times. That is a fear the man carried in his own body.

LINDA BROWN: The three things he is afraid of are the exact three things the psalm goes on to name. Robbers, so your foot will not slip and evil will not reach you. Shrines on the hilltops, so help comes from the Maker of the hills, not the gods on them. Sun, so there is shade on your right hand. Which is neat. But I have to say, I can hear a listener thinking, "so the message is God is bigger than the hills." That is a pep talk. Why is this psalm any deeper than a bumper sticker?

FRANK EDWARDS: The bumper sticker version stops at "bigger." The psalm does not stop there, and the reason is one Hebrew word that most of our English Bibles quietly spread across five or six different English words so that we never hear it.

The word is shamar. To keep, to guard, to watch over. Six times in eight verses the poet reaches for it, or a form of it. Your Protector will not slumber, that is shamar. The Protector of Israel, shamar. The LORD is your keeper, shamar. He will guard you from all evil, shamar. He will preserve your soul, shamar. He will watch over your coming and going, shamar. In Hebrew this poem beats like a heart, the same verb returning again and again. This is not a psalm that mentions God's protection. It is built out of it. The repetition is the sermon.

And what does the word actually mean? Not "protect" in a vague sense. Shamar is the posture of a watchman posted on a wall through the long dark, eyes fixed on the road, refusing to move. It is the verb God gives Adam in the garden, told to keep what God had made. It is the verb of Aaron's blessing over Israel, "the LORD bless you and keep you." So when this traveler says the LORD is my keeper, he is pulling the oldest blessing in the nation and pressing it onto one anxious man with dust on his sandals.

FRANK EDWARDS: Watch how the poem grips tighter as it goes, too. The form is what scholars call step parallelism, where one line hands a word up to the next line, and the next line lifts it higher. "Your Protector will not slumber." Then the next line seizes slumber and stacks on top of it: "Behold, the Protector of Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." Not a drowsy moment, not a lapse, then not even a night when the guard lies down. The poem climbs the same way the pilgrim climbs.

LINDA BROWN: "Slumber nor sleep." Honestly, that is the line I trip over. Isn't that just saying the same thing twice? It reads like the poet needed to fill out the meter. Why does it matter whether God dozes or sleeps, when the point is he is paying attention either way?

FRANK EDWARDS: It matters because of who else lived on those hills. Remember the shrines. The pagan religions surrounding Israel ran on a settled assumption that we find bizarre: the gods slept. They wandered off, got distracted, went quiet, and had to be roused before they would do anything for you. Worship, for a Canaanite, was partly the labor of getting the deity's attention. Priests shouted for hours, danced, cut themselves, kept up the noise until the god noticed.

Scripture keeps one unforgettable scene of this. Mount Carmel. The prophets of Baal have been crying out from morning till noon and nothing has happened, and Elijah starts heckling them. "Perhaps he is sleeping and must be awakened." Elijah is not inventing an insult. He is naming the actual logic of Baal worship, where the storm god might be napping and you have to wake him before he sends rain.

Now hear our traveler with that in your ears. He is walking past those altars, altars to gods who have to be woken up, and he is singing, "the Protector of Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." The doubling is not filler. It is a direct answer to every hilltop he passes. Your keeping does not depend on your waking him. He was already watching before you looked up.

LINDA BROWN: [quietly] I do the shouting, though. Not with cymbals, but I know what it is to pray longer because the first prayer did not seem to get through, or to bargain, if you fix this I will do that, like I am trying to make enough noise to get noticed. That is Baal worship with better manners.

FRANK EDWARDS: Bargaining is exactly the labor this psalm takes off your shoulders, and you have named the thing precisely: a god who has to be flagged down. Spurgeon put it this way, in the Treasury of David, "When dangers are awake around us we are safe, for our Preserver is awake also, and will not permit us to be taken unawares." The dangers are awake. So is he. You do not have to stay up.

That leads somewhere, actually. Because there is a shift in the middle of this psalm that almost nobody catches when they read it silently, and it changes who is doing the talking.

LINDA BROWN: A shift in who is talking. I noticed something when you read it aloud, actually, and I could not put my finger on it. The first two verses are "I" and "my." Then from verse three it is "your foot," "your Protector," "your keeper," all the way down. Where did the "I" go?

FRANK EDWARDS: The "I" vanished on purpose. Read verses one and two and you have a man speaking of himself: I lift up my eyes, my help comes from the LORD. Then verse three arrives and a second voice answers him, and it speaks to "you" six times over, to the end. Mechanically, the poet has staged a dialogue. One person voices the searching question and the confession. Another person speaks the blessing back over him.

Think about how these songs were used. They were sung on the road, in company, families and neighbors walking together. So one voice says, my help comes from the LORD, and the voice beside him says, he will not let your foot slip, your keeper does not sleep. The pilgrim's private trust becomes a benediction pronounced over him by somebody else. You begin the psalm confessing your own faith, and by the end you are being preached to.

LINDA BROWN: That's a stretch, honestly. Poets change pronouns all the time. You are building a doctrine of, what, other people preaching to me, on the back of an "I" turning into a "you." Why should I read that as design and not just a translation wobble?

FRANK EDWARDS: Sell you on it with the blessing I already mentioned. Aaron's blessing, "the LORD bless you and keep you," is never something an Israelite says to himself in the mirror. It is spoken over him by the priest, in the second person, with the same verb shamar sitting in the middle of it. Psalm 121 is doing exactly what that blessing does, and it borrows the same word to do it. That is not a wobble. That is a pattern the original audience would have felt in their bones.

And it matters for a reason that is not academic at all. Our grip on God is unsteady. You know this. There are mornings you cannot generate a single confident sentence about God's care from inside your own head. The psalm knows that too, which is why it does not leave the assurance inside your head. It arrives from outside, as a word spoken over you by another voice. The traveler cannot keep himself awake all night worrying and singing. So someone else says to him, you do not have to. He is awake.

FRANK EDWARDS: And then, centuries later, the psalm gets the strangest echo imaginable. Mark chapter four. A storm on the lake, the boat filling, the disciples frantic, and where is Jesus? In the stern, sleeping on the cushion. They shake him awake and shout, "don't You care?" Which is, word for word, the Baal problem. The god is asleep and we have to wake him.

LINDA BROWN: He is asleep in the boat. So either the psalm is wrong about God never sleeping, or Jesus is not who the disciples thought. That is a real problem, not a cute paradox. How do you hold "neither slumber nor sleep" together with a man snoring through a storm?

FRANK EDWARDS: You hold them together by letting the scene finish. He wakes, and he stills the sea with a word. He neither slumbers nor sleeps, yet he has taken a body that grows tired and lies down, and his rest did not mean absence for one second. The wind was under his authority while his eyes were closed. So the God who cannot sleep entered a life that had to, and his weariness never once weakened his watch.

Run the thread further and it ends on a hillside outside Jerusalem, and this is the part I want you to hear carefully. The Keeper of Israel became the kept one. On the cross the Son cried out, and God did not guard him from evil. His foot did slip, into the grave. His soul was not preserved from death. He walked the road of Psalm 121 with every promise in it withheld from him, so that "he will preserve your soul" could belong to you with no condition attached. This is what theologians call the perseverance of the saints, or better, the preservation of the saints, and the emphasis is on the passive. You are preserved. Jesus said of his own, no one will snatch them out of my hand. The grip is his. Not yours.

LINDA BROWN: [short pause] Preserved, and the grip is his. Then I have to say out loud what that costs, because I think the psalm means it. If the LORD is my keeper, then the things I have built to keep myself are... redundant, at best. The account I watch like a fortress. The evenings I give to a second stream of income so nothing can surprise me. Somebody in front of me needs help this week, and the number I'm holding is larger than comfortable, and my instinct is to work out what I can give without feeling it.

FRANK EDWARDS: The number you can give without feeling it is the number that says you are still your own keeper. That is the situation the psalm walks you into, and it does not soften it. Someone crosses your path, a friend behind on rent, an appeal at church, and generosity feels precisely like taking your foot off solid ground. Like leaving yourself open to slip.

And into that exact fear the second voice says, he will not allow your foot to slip. Not because the ground is safer than you think. Because the hands under you are stronger than your grip. Christ gave up the riches of heaven so you would be rich in him, which means you never give from scarcity. You give from a fullness already secured by someone who does not sleep. What you do with that is between you and him.

LINDA BROWN: So back to the traveler at the trailhead, and the man telling him not to look at the hills. I think I finally have the answer. The old traveler is right that the hills are where the danger lives. He is wrong that you should look away. The psalm looks straight at the robbers, the shrines, the sun, and then it looks past them to their Maker. You do not get help by pretending the road is safe. You get it by knowing who is awake on it.

FRANK EDWARDS: The hills have a Maker, and he is also the one who keeps you on them, and that is the single thing I want you to walk out of this room with. Six times, shamar. The LORD is your keeper. Not a keeper you have to wake, not a keeper you have to pay, not a keeper who lies down at midnight and leaves you to the dark. Let that be the thing you keep today, spoken over you by another voice, the way it was always meant to be heard.

LINDA BROWN: Then let me be that voice for whoever is listening, and I will use the psalm's own words, because they are better than mine. He will not allow your foot to slip. Your Protector will not slumber. The LORD will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore. Go into your day held.

FRANK EDWARDS: Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for climbing a little higher with us. Go well, and we will see you next time.