Psalm 123 — Eyes on God

FRANK: Picture a man standing along the wall of a room, saying nothing, doing nothing, and watching one thing. A hand. Not the face of the person he serves, not the door, not the window. The hand. Psalm 123 is a whole psalm built on that one gesture, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it... every line either lifts the eyes or explains why they had to be lifted.

LINDA: A whole psalm on one motion of the head. That is a small thing to build a song on, and I love that this is where we are today. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody. We are in Psalm 123, four songs into that pilgrim collection we set up on day one, and this one is short enough that Frank can read every word of it without anybody getting restless. Go ahead.

FRANK: "A song of ascents. I lift up my eyes to You, the One enthroned in heaven. As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maidservant look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes are on the LORD our God until He shows us mercy. Have mercy on us, O LORD, have mercy, for we have endured much contempt. We have endured much scorn from the arrogant, much contempt from the proud."

LINDA: Servants. That is the word I bump on right away, and I think a lot of listeners bump on it with me. I am being told to stand against a wall with my hands at my sides and stare at somebody else's hand until they decide to do something about my problem. That sounds like resignation with a religious name on it. Explain to me why it isn't.

FRANK: A servant in that world learned to read a hand the way you read a face. A slight motion of the fingers meant fetch water. A downward flick meant leave the room. An open palm meant food was coming, and a raised one might mean correction was near. Nothing was written down, nothing was shouted across the house, so the servant's entire livelihood... bread, safety, standing in the household, all of it ran through a gesture, and that meant his attention could never drift. Not once. Always. And that is the opposite of resignation, Linda. Resignation lets the eyes drop. This servant cannot afford to. His whole self is gathered into a single point of watching, because he knows exactly where his life comes from and he refuses to look anywhere else. So ask it this way. What does a person do when they have no leverage at all? No money, no army, no argument that will land with the people mocking them?

LINDA: They find somewhere to look. Attention becomes their strength, because attention is all they still have when everything else is gone. That is a different picture than the one in my head. I had a doormat. You are describing something closer to a sentry.

FRANK: Sentry is good, and the poem itself is built like one, climbing. That is the step parallelism we met on day two, each line reaching one rung higher on the same ladder. "As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master." One rung. "As the eyes of a maidservant look to the hand of her mistress." Same rung, a little higher, the picture widened to include the women of the house. And then the third line goes where the first two were pointing the whole time. "So our eyes are on the LORD our God." Servant, maidservant, and then the whole gathered people on the road, every one of them with their chin up. Psalm 121 opened with the same motion two songs ago, eyes lifted to the hills, and Spurgeon put the distinction in one sentence I keep coming back to. "Not to the hills, but to the God of the hills he looked." Psalm 123 skips the hills entirely. It goes straight to the throne.

LINDA: "Enthroned in heaven." That opens up the part I actually find hard, because if I am being sneered at, if somebody has decided I am a joke and says so in front of other people, I do not want a God on a throne somewhere above the clouds. I want Him standing next to me. Why is the height supposed to comfort me? It sounds like distance.

FRANK: The height is the point of the comfort, not the price of it. Think about who is doing the mocking in this psalm. The proud. The arrogant. People who look down, which is the only direction contempt ever travels. And the psalmist answers their downward look with an upward one, to a seat that is set above anything they can reach... their scorn rises no higher than the ground they are standing on. The next two songs on this road say the same thing in different words, "if the LORD had not been on our side," "as the mountains surround Jerusalem, so the LORD surrounds His people." Higher God, safer people. Isaiah saw the Lord "high and exalted" on a throne, and it did not push him away. It undid him, and then it cleansed him. Transcendence in Scripture is not a wall between you and God. It is the one refuge the proud cannot climb.

FRANK: And I want to hold the rest of that thought for a few minutes, because the same God who is enthroned above the reach of the arrogant is going to come down without leaving that throne, and when He does, this psalm turns into something the pilgrims could not have seen yet. Let it stand for now. The eyes go up, and up is the safe direction.

LINDA: And underneath that sits the complaint, which is the part that surprised me on the read-through, because for a poem about lifting your eyes, it spends its last third face down in the mud. Contempt. Scorn. Contempt again. Is that just a poet piling up synonyms, or is there really a difference between being despised and being, I don't know, robbed or struck?

FRANK: The Hebrew word is buz, and it means to be looked at as worthless, treated as a thing beneath notice. The poet never says they were hit. He says they were despised, and he will not let the word go. Watch where it sits. "Contempt" opens the complaint and "contempt" closes it, with "scorn" set between them, so the entire grief is boxed in on every side by the same bruise, and the poet keeps pressing on it. The verb underneath "we have endured" pictures a vessel that has been filled past the brim. They have taken all they can hold and more keeps pouring in. And there is a real moment behind it. Read this next to Nehemiah, a small, poor, unwalled remnant trying to lay stones on the rubble of Jerusalem while the prosperous officials around them stand and laugh. "What are these feeble Jews doing?" A fox climbing that wall would knock it down. The phrase some translations use, "those at ease," is not neutral in that world. It names a class. The comfortable, the landed, the secure. Contempt from people with power, aimed at people with almost none.

LINDA: Worthless. That is the word I would underline, because being hit at least means somebody thinks you are worth hitting. Contempt says you are not worth the effort of an argument. And you know that look, if you are listening. The half-smile in the meeting. The way a certain relative repeats your sentence back to you a little slower. Nobody laid a hand on you, and you still drive home with less than you left with.

FRANK: "Have mercy on us, O LORD, have mercy." Said twice, the way the contempt is said twice, as if the plea has to be at least as heavy as the wound. The word is chanan, and it matters what it does not mean. It does not mean God is obligated. It is the bending down of a superior toward someone who has no claim on him at all, the free favor of the one with everything toward the one with empty hands. You cannot demand chanan. You cannot earn it or bill for it. You can only wait for it, and that is why the poem says "until." "Our eyes are on the LORD our God until He shows us mercy." No deadline in that sentence. So what does the servant actually do during the until?

LINDA: He keeps his eyes where they were. I understand that as a picture, Frank, but I want to push once more, because there is a real person listening right now who is being belittled by someone they cannot get away from, and I am worried this psalm is telling them to just absorb it. Eyes up, mouth shut, take it. Where is the difference between that and surrender?

FRANK: The difference is what the hand turned out to be. This is the part I set aside a few minutes ago. The God enthroned in heaven did not stay up there and gesture. The hand the servant watches became a human hand, a Jewish carpenter's hand, and it was nailed through and lifted up outside the same city those rebuilders were mocked for restoring. And Jesus knew buz from the inside. Isaiah saw Him "despised and rejected by men." Hebrews says He "endured the cross, scorning its shame." Peter, who watched it happen, writes that "When they heaped abuse on Him, He did not retaliate... but entrusted Himself to Him who judges justly." That is Psalm 123 lived to the letter. Eyes on the Father under a flood of mockery, entrusting Himself upward instead of swinging. The scorn the pilgrims merely endured, He drank to the bottom. So when you lift your eyes now, you are not looking at a master who has never been laughed at. You are looking at hands that carry the marks of the exact treatment you are getting, and those hands are the ones that hold your mercy.

FRANK: Which means surrender is the wrong word for what the psalm asks. Surrender is giving up on being answered. This is the refusal to give up on being answered, aimed at the one person who has already answered it in His own body. [short pause] The waiting gaze has a face now.

LINDA: [quietly] The thing this costs is my right to hit back. That is what it comes down to. The shift has three hours left, the remark has just been made over my head as though I were not standing there, and I have the answer for it, and the psalm is asking me to keep my eyes up instead of firing it. Or the sentence is already loaded, sitting right behind my teeth at the dinner table, and instead I say "you may be right, let me think about it." I am not sure I can do that on willpower.

FRANK: Willpower is not what the psalm offers, and Peter would be the first to say so. The restraint in this poem is not gritted teeth. It is a servant who knows the hand will move, and so does not need his own hand to move first. Because Christ did not retaliate against you, and He had every right to, you are free not to retaliate today, and His Spirit lives in you to make that freedom more than a nice sentence. Paul writes to Titus that we "await the blessed hope and glorious appearance of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ." Same posture. The eyes are still lifted. The object has a name, and He is coming back.

LINDA: There is a name sitting with me, and I do not want to pray for that person. That is the honest version. The source for this passage says to pray for the very one whose scorn stings most, and everything in me would rather pray about them than for them.

FRANK: The psalm knows that, which is why it lets you say the true thing first. "We have endured much contempt." No polish on it, no pretending the wound is smaller than it is. Lament is not unbelief. It is bringing the entire bruise to the only hand that can do anything about it, and once it is there, in His hand instead of yours, praying for the person becomes possible in a way it never is while you are still holding the answer.

FRANK: One idea to leave with, out of everything today. The One on the throne is the One whose hand was pierced for you, and nothing anyone says about you can climb that high. Scorned by the world, seen and valued by the God enthroned in heaven. Let it work on you.

LINDA: And the psalm hands you its own first line to do it with. Before the day gets loud, somewhere quiet, actually lift your head, physically, and say it out loud. "I lift up my eyes to You." Then keep them there. That is the challenge. Not fixing it. Watching the hand.

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

LINDA: Thanks for lifting your eyes with us. Until next time.