Psalm 121 — My Help

Frank: "Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he has gone aside, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he sleeps and must be awakened." That is Elijah, standing on Mount Carmel, mocking the prophets of Baal as they cut themselves for hours trying to wake up a god who would not stir. Why open a psalm about God keeping watch over you with a taunt from a prophet?

Linda: Baal's nap on Mount Carmel has everything to do with my Monday morning. When I'm lying awake at two a.m., I'm still half-believing in a god who needs me to keep him awake, who could nod off if I stop working hard enough.

Frank: More than you'd think, and that's exactly where we're going today. Welcome to Dig Deeper. We're in Psalm 121, one of the best-loved eight verses in the whole book, and by the end I want that Elijah line ringing in your ears, because this psalm is quietly answering it from the other side.

Linda: Alright, sell me on that, because right now it sounds like a stretch. This psalm reads like a greeting card. "I lift my eyes to the hills." It's the kind of thing you'd put on a mug.

Frank: The mug version is exactly the misreading I want to take apart. But let's hear it first, the whole song, and then we'll go back and find the danger hiding in that opening line.

Linda: Read it. I'm curious what I'm missing.

Frank: I will lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from? My help comes from Yahweh, who made heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot to be moved. He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. Yahweh is your keeper. Yahweh is your shade on your right hand. The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. Yahweh will keep you from all evil. He will keep your soul. Yahweh will keep your going out and your coming in, from this time forward, and forever more.

Linda: "I lift my eyes to the hills." Every time I've heard that, it's peaceful. Somebody staring off at a beautiful mountain range feeling their soul settle. That's the mug.

Frank: The hills in this psalm are trying to kill him. Picture the actual road. This is a pilgrim on the way up to Jerusalem for a festival, one of the songs sung on that climb, as we talked about back on day one. And the road to Jerusalem runs through hill country. Now, what lived in those hills? Two things. Robbers, crouched up in the rocks above the mountain passes, waiting to fall on a traveler who's carrying a year's worth of offering up to the temple. And on those same ridgelines, the high places. Pagan shrines. Altars where the nations around Israel begged their gods for help. What does he see when he lifts his eyes to the hills?

Linda: The question in the next line—"where does my help come from"—that's a guy genuinely frightened, looking up at threat and fake refuge at the same time, and actually asking. Why does the answer hit the way it does?

Frank: Watch where he does not look for help. Not up at the shrines on the ridge. His help comes from Yahweh, and the psalm adds this specific credential, "who made heaven and earth." The one who made the very hills the traveler is afraid of. The threat on the horizon and the false gods perched over it, he built the ground they're standing on. That's the answer to the fear. Not "the danger isn't real." The danger is completely real. It's, "the danger's landlord is on your side."

Linda: The danger's landlord. That reframes the whole opening for me. Does the psalm stay with that image?

Frank: It stops describing the fear and starts hammering one word. In the original Hebrew, one verb rings out six times in eight verses. Shamar. To keep. To guard, to watch over, to hedge something in and stand watch over it.

Linda: Six times. In eight verses. That's not a poet running out of words.

Frank: That's architecture. Six repetitions in a poem this short is deliberate. It's the spine everything hangs on. He who keeps you. He who keeps Israel. Yahweh is your keeper. He will keep you from all evil. He will keep your soul. He will keep your going out and your coming in. Shamar, shamar, shamar, driven in like a stake. And notice, it doesn't just repeat, it travels. It starts wide, "he who keeps you," anybody. Then it goes national and eternal, "he who keeps Israel." Then it lands right on the traveler's own body, his shade, his right hand. Then it goes inward, "he will keep your soul," the innermost thing about him. And then it opens back out, "from this time forth and forevermore." The word starts as protection for the road and ends as a promise with no expiration date. How does one verb do all that work?

Linda: Shamar walks the distance. It's a bodyguard on a mountain pass in verse three, standing right next to the pilgrim in the dirt, and it's eternal security for my soul by verse seven. Same verb, from the threat on the ground to forever.

Frank: You just traced the poem. And here's the piece a modern reader walks straight past. Verse four. "He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." We read that as a sweet reassurance. To the people who first sang it, that line had an edge, because it was aimed at somebody.

Linda: This is where the Elijah thing comes back.

Frank: This is exactly where it comes back. Think about the religious world this pilgrim lived in. Everyone around him worshiped gods who were, by nature, unreliable. Baal, the storm god, the fertility god. And the assumption about a god like that was that he could be busy. Distracted. Off traveling somewhere. Asleep. So worship meant working to get his attention. Rousing him. Shouting louder. Cutting yourself, like the prophets on Carmel, for hours, trying to wake a god who would not stir. That was ordinary religion. You are always trying to catch a distracted heaven in a waking hour. Does that sound familiar?

Linda: I cut myself on Mount Carmel every time I lie awake at two a.m. building a contingency plan, thinking if I stop keeping watch, the watch goes unkept.

Frank: "Maybe he's on a journey. Maybe he must be awakened." Now hear the psalm again with that in your ears. "He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." That is not poetry anymore. That's a challenge thrown down at every god on those hills. Your keeper does not doze off while you're exposed on a mountain pass at midnight. He does not need summoning. You are not shouting up at heaven hoping to catch him awake. The gods of the nations had to be woken. Yours never once looks away.

Linda: I want to push on that, though, because that's the ancient version. Nobody I know is slashing themselves to wake up Baal. So what's the modern version of the god you have to wake up?

Frank: It's you. It's the belief that if you fall asleep on the problem, nobody's watching it. So you don't. You lie awake at two in the morning building contingency plans. You refresh the phone for the test result, the callback, the thing that's out of your hands. And underneath all of it is an assumption you'd never say out loud, that if you stop keeping watch, the watch goes unkept. That the vigilance depends on you. Is that what's happening with you?

Linda: Honestly, yes. That's the reason I don't sleep some nights. Some part of me thinks if I close my eyes on it, it stops being guarded.

Frank: Then the psalm is speaking directly at that part of you. "He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." Spurgeon put it plainly, "When dangers are awake around us we are safe, for our Preserver is awake also, and will not permit us to be taken unawares." You don't have to run the night shift. It's already covered. You can actually close your eyes on the thing keeping you up, because Someone is awake over it who has never once needed you to hold the watch.

Linda: There's something else in the reading I want you to explain, because I noticed it and it bugged me. It starts off "my." "My help comes from Yahweh." And then halfway through it flips to "your." "Your keeper. Your shade. Your going out." Who's talking to who?

Frank: You caught the design. Count the pronouns. First two verses, it's all "I" and "my." One voice, alone on the road. "I will lift up my eyes. Where does my help come from. My help comes from Yahweh." Then, verse three, no warning, it flips, and from there to the end it says "you" and "your" eleven times. There are two voices in this song. One asks and confesses. The other one answers, and speaks the promise back over the traveler by name. What do you hear?

Linda: A conversation. Not one guy hyping himself up with his own pep talk. Two voices, one question and one answer.

Frank: Scholars have long heard this as a liturgy of departure. A pilgrim setting out, and a priest, or a friend, a fellow believer, standing there speaking the blessing over him as he goes. And that is not a small detail. Think about what it means. You cannot fully assure your own heart. You know this. You've tried. You lie there at two a.m. reciting the promise to yourself and it just bounces off. This psalm is built so that the promise was meant to be spoken over you by someone else. The keeping God does not leave you alone to preach to yourself. He sends the promise through another voice to reach your ears. Do you feel the difference?

Linda: The "your" is the whole point. Somebody's supposed to say this to me. I'm not supposed to generate it solo.

Frank: That leads somewhere, actually, straight into what this looks like this week. Because the hard confession in this whole psalm is three words. "My help comes from Yahweh." And everything in a capable person wants to edit that line. My help comes from my competence. My savings. My ability to hold it all together. To sing this honestly, you have to admit you are not the one keeping yourself. And for a certain kind of self-reliant person, that admission costs more than any offering plate ever did.

Linda: Because it feels like giving up. Like admitting you're weak.

Frank: Here's what I'd actually ask you to do with it, and it's uncomfortable. The next time something lands that you can't fix by working harder, a diagnosis, a bill, a kid pulling away from you, and you feel yourself start to grip tighter and project calm so nobody sees the fear, stop right there. Say the actual thing to God. Not a polished prayer. "I can't keep this. You can. Help me." Tell one person the truth instead of the managed version. "I'm scared about this, and I don't have it handled." Letting somebody see you unable, that's laying down exactly what the psalm is asking you to lay down. That's the real death of the pride.

Linda: And that ties right back to the "your." I can't say it convincingly to myself. But if I tell one person the true version, I've just put myself in a spot where they can say it back over me.

Frank: You've made yourself the pilgrim on the road who lets someone else speak the blessing. That's the design working exactly as intended.

Linda: There's one thread I don't want us to leave on the table, though. Where does this "keeper" actually end up? Because the pilgrim still had to walk a dangerous road. God being awake didn't mean the robbers vanished.

Frank: No, it didn't. And that's the honest edge of it. The keeping in this psalm doesn't promise you a road with no danger on it. It promises a keeper who never looks away from the road you're actually on. And follow that thread forward. The keeper who holds Israel took on flesh, and stood up and said, "I am the good shepherd. I lay down my life for the sheep." And he said of the people given to him, "I kept them, and not one of them perished." That's the same verb. The keeper became a man. And here's the turn, the thing this psalm couldn't see yet. On the cross, he was not kept from evil. He wasn't spared it. He bore it. He went through it, so that the keeping promised here would actually hold, deep into your soul, forever. Your soul is safe in hands that have nail scars in them, and those hands do not loosen their grip.

Linda: So "he will keep your soul" isn't a wish. Somebody paid for it to be true.

Frank: Somebody paid for it to be true. The keeper kept his charge to the cross and lost none of the ones given to him.

Linda: That's the thing I'm keeping out of all of it. Not that the danger's fake, but that the watch doesn't depend on me.

Frank: Let that be the thing you keep, then. Six times this psalm says "kept" because your soul needs to hear it more than once. So here's your send-off, and I'll give it to you as a question instead of an instruction. Tonight, when your head hits the pillow and the two a.m. list starts up, ask yourself honestly, who do you think is on watch if you fall asleep? And then answer it the way the psalm answers it. He who keeps you will not slumber. You can close your eyes. Someone awake has the night shift, and it was never you.

Linda: And find one person this week who's quietly drowning behind a competent face, and say it over them. Be the second voice.

Frank: This episode is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you don't have it yet, you can find Dig Deeper in the App Store or on Google Play.