Psalm 124 — Our Help

LINDA BROWN: A bird the size of your fist, a sparrow maybe, tangled in a net, and then somehow not tangled anymore. That is one picture. The other one is a road packed with thousands of people, whole families climbing a hill together, all singing the same line at the same moment. Those two things do not belong in the same song. One is tiny and private and half a second long, and the other is an entire nation breathing out at once. Psalm 124 puts them right next to each other.

FRANK EDWARDS: The gap between those two pictures is what today is about, because the psalm thinks the sparrow and the nation are the same story told at two sizes. Welcome to Dig Deeper. We are still on the road with the pilgrims, and today the song is Psalm 124, eight verses, one long exhale. Let me read it straight through and then we will pull it apart.

FRANK EDWARDS: This is a song of ascents, claimed by David. If the LORD had not been on our side... let Israel now declare... if the LORD had not been on our side when men attacked us, when their anger flared against us, then they would have swallowed us alive, then the floods would have engulfed us, then the torrent would have overwhelmed us, then the raging waters would have swept us away. Blessed be the LORD, who has not given us as prey to their teeth. We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowler; the net is torn, and we have slipped away. Our help is in the name of the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.

LINDA BROWN: "Let Israel now declare." That is a strange thing to drop into the middle of a sentence. David starts a thought, "if the LORD had not been on our side," and then stops and turns around and says, everybody, say it. Why interrupt your own opening line?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because it was never one man's line to begin with. Picture the crowd, the one you just described, and picture one voice at the front of it, most likely a Levite whose job was to lead the singing. He calls out the first half, "If the LORD had not been on our side," and then he does not finish it. He throws it to the crowd. "Let Israel now declare." And the crowd finishes the sentence. They sing the condition back at him, "if the LORD had not been on our side when men attacked us," and now the whole road is inside the same unfinished thought together. That is what scholars mean when they talk about call-and-response liturgy in these pilgrim songs. One voice summons, many voices answer, and the answering is not decoration, it is the point. Testimony in Israel was a public act. You did not privately feel grateful. You said, out loud, in front of your neighbors, what God had done, and the leader's job was to make you say it. So the interruption is a summons. It is a man with a strong voice turning to a hillside of families and saying... you tell it. You are the witnesses. Finish the sentence.

LINDA BROWN: That still sounds a little like a stadium chant to me. Thousands of people yelling the same words, everybody swept up in the moment. I can get thousands of people to chant almost anything. What makes this more than a crowd feeling good about itself?

FRANK EDWARDS: The shape of the sentence they are chanting, for a start. A stadium chant is a declaration, we are the greatest, we are going to win. This is a counterfactual. It makes you say aloud a thing that did not happen. "If the LORD had not been on our side," then what? And the psalm makes you answer in detail, four times over, each answer worse than the last. They would have swallowed us alive. The floods would have engulfed us. The torrent would have overwhelmed us. The raging waters would have swept us away. That is step parallelism again, and here what climbs is the water, rising line by line until the singer is up to the neck in it.

FRANK EDWARDS: And the people singing knew exactly which water. The hills around Jerusalem are cut with wadis, dry stream beds, dust and stone for most of the year, a perfectly ordinary place to walk. Then winter rain falls on high ground miles away, and a wall of water comes down a valley that was bone-dry an hour before, no warning, no time to climb out. Shepherds died that way. Travelers died that way. Everybody on that road had heard of someone. So when they sing "the torrent would have overwhelmed us," they are not picturing a gentle river, they are picturing the killing flood, the one that gives no one a second chance. And underneath that image sits the oldest memory the nation had, which is the sea at the exodus, where the same drowning water that should have closed over Israel closed over Pharaoh's chariots instead. A crowd that will say all of that aloud, together, about itself... that is not a crowd feeling good about itself. That is a crowd admitting, in unison, how close it came.

LINDA BROWN: The flood is the thing that did not happen, and they are singing about it anyway, in more detail than they sing about the rescue. They spend four lines drowning and about one line escaping.

FRANK EDWARDS: Which means the rescue only weighs as much as the danger did. If you let the flood be small, the mercy is small. If you feel the water at your ankles, then the fact that the ground is still under you becomes astonishing. The psalm knows that gratitude is measured by the size of the thing you were spared from, so it refuses to let you skip the drowning. It makes you stand in the wadi first.

LINDA BROWN: That changes the next question, then, because after four lines of water the picture suddenly switches to a bird. Not a swimmer pulled from a flood, not a soldier who won the fight. A bird in a net. Why that image, right there?

FRANK EDWARDS: A bird cannot tear its own net. That is the reason. A swimmer might have kicked hard enough. A soldier might have fought well. But picture a fowler's snare, a fine net staked over the ground with grain scattered under it, and a bird that has flown into it. The more it beats its wings, the tighter it is held. It has no hands. It has no strength that helps. It is, at that moment, the most helpless thing in creation, and it is alive only if something outside itself does the tearing. David takes that picture straight from Psalm 91, "he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler," and notice what the psalm says happened. Not "we broke free." "The net is torn, and we have slipped away." The tearing is in the passive voice. Someone else did it. Deliverance, the very thing the pilgrim begged for in the first of these songs, deliver my soul, O LORD, means exactly that here: the escape belongs entirely to whatever tore the net, and the bird gets to do nothing except be gone.

LINDA BROWN: Which is where this gets sharp, because that bird is then handed the biggest title in the Bible. "Our help is in the name of the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth." A sparrow with a torn net, and then the Creator of the universe, in the same breath. That is a wild jump in scale. Is that just David being grand at the end of a song, or is the size of that title doing something?

FRANK EDWARDS: The size is the argument. "Maker of heaven and earth" is the biggest title the psalm could reach for, the God of Genesis 1, who speaks and it is so. Light that did not exist. Sea that did not exist. So David takes the largest possible description of God, naming Him as bringing things into being from nothing, and he spends it on the smallest possible rescue, one trembling bird alive by the width of a torn thread. He does that on purpose. He wants you to hear that the hand that hung the stars is not too large for the sparrow.

FRANK EDWARDS: And there is a piece of design here that most people walk right past. Look where the name of the LORD sits in this psalm. It is the first thing you hear, "if the LORD had not been on our side," and it is the last thing you hear, "our help is in the name of the LORD." Poets call that an inclusio, a frame. Everything in between, the teeth, the flood, the torrent, the snare, is bracketed on both sides by that one name. The danger has a front edge and a back edge. The name does not. That is quietly the theology of the entire poem. The covenant name is not a word you shout in the crisis hoping it works. It is the frame around the crisis. Centuries later a boat full of fishermen watched the same thing happen in miniature, raging water, Jesus standing up and saying "Silence! Be still!" and the water obeys, and they ask, who then is this? Psalm 124 already had the answer. Whatever owns the flood is whatever tears the net.

LINDA BROWN: Something about this psalm costs more than it looks like, and I think it is the first line, not the bird. "If the LORD had not been on our side." To sing that honestly you have to admit you are not the reason you are still standing. And I know exactly where that gets tested. Somebody asks you how you got through the hard stretch, the diagnosis, the year the money was thin, the season with the kid who would not talk to you, and they mean it kindly, they are half-praising you, and the answer is already forming in your mouth. "I just kept pushing." That sentence is sitting right there, and it is the story I like about myself, and this psalm takes it away.

FRANK EDWARDS: The credit is the thing. That is exactly the fork, and you have named it in the present tense, which is where it lives. This psalm asks you to put the name of the LORD in the sentence where your own name would normally go. Not because you did nothing, you beat your wings, you kept getting out of bed, but because none of that tore the net. And here is why that is good news rather than humiliation. Paul picks up David's exact logic in Romans 8. "If God is for us, who can be against us?" He is standing in the same spot as the Levite on the road, calling a congregation to finish the sentence, except now the deliverance he is pointing at is not one national escape but the finished work of Christ, the deepest water there is, death itself, and a tomb that could not hold him. The net is torn for good in him. So when you say "I did not do that on my own, God carried me," you are not being modest. You are being accurate. Spurgeon put it the way only Spurgeon could: "Jehovah be praised for checking the fury of the foe, and saving his own."

LINDA BROWN: The help has a name, and the name is on both ends. That is what I want to keep from this. The trouble I am inside right now has a front edge, and it is going to have a back edge, and the same name is standing at both of them.

FRANK EDWARDS: [short pause] Take it with you, then, the one line the whole road sang. You are not going to be swept away. Not because your grip is strong. Because the one holding the net is the Maker of heaven and earth, and nothing he made is too small for him to save.

LINDA BROWN: So finish the sentence today, out loud, the way the crowd did. Somebody is going to ask how you are still standing. When they do, let David answer for you: our help is in the name of the LORD.

FRANK EDWARDS: Next time, the road climbs on to Psalm 125, where the people who trust the LORD are like Mount Zion, a mountain that cannot be moved, and the hills stand around Jerusalem the way the LORD surrounds his people.

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

FRANK EDWARDS: Thanks for walking this stretch of the road with us. Go well, and we'll see you next time.