Psalm 126 — Restore Our Fortunes

LINDA BROWN: Why would people who got exactly what they prayed for say it felt like a dream? That is the line I cannot get past in this psalm... "we were like dreamers." If someone hands you the thing you have wanted for years, you would think it feels more real than anything, not less. So what happened to these people that good news felt like sleep?

FRANK EDWARDS: What happened to them is a seventy-year story, and I think once you hear it the dreaming makes perfect sense... and it also turns out to be the key to how this song prays. Welcome to Dig Deeper. We are in the pilgrim collection again, one of the songs of ascent we talked about on day one, and today it is Psalm 126.

LINDA BROWN: The one with the tears and the seed at the end. I know that half better than the first half, honestly, so read the whole psalm for us, start to finish, and then I want my question answered.

FRANK EDWARDS: Psalm 126. When the LORD restored the captives of Zion, we were like dreamers. Then our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with shouts of joy. Then it was said among the nations, "The LORD has done great things for them." The LORD has done great things for us; we are filled with joy. Restore our captives, O LORD, like streams in the Negev. Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy. He who goes out weeping, bearing a trail of seed, will surely return with shouts of joy, carrying sheaves of grain.

LINDA BROWN: "Restored the captives of Zion." That is the sentence doing the work, isn't it... who are the captives, and what are they captive to?

FRANK EDWARDS: Captives to Babylon, and this is a piece of history the rest of this series is going to lean on, so let me actually lay it out. In 587 BC the Babylonian army broke through the walls of Jerusalem. They burned the temple, the place where God had said his name would dwell, they pulled the walls down stone from stone, and they marched the survivors east, hundreds of miles, into a foreign country. Another psalm remembers those people sitting by the rivers of Babylon, hanging their harps in the willow trees because they could not sing the songs of Zion in a place like that. And then... nothing happened. For nearly fifty years after Jerusalem fell, nothing happened. A child carried out of Jerusalem grew old in Babylon. A generation was born who had never seen the land at all. You do not keep hoping at full strength for seventy years. Hope wears down. You start arranging your life around the assumption that this is simply where you live now.

FRANK EDWARDS: Then Cyrus. In 539 BC a Persian king nobody in Judah had any reason to expect conquered Babylon, and one of the first things he did was issue a decree, you can read it in the opening verses of Ezra, letting the exiles go home and rebuild the house of the LORD. Ezra says the LORD stirred his heart to do it. So here is your answer, Linda. Why did it feel like a dream? Because they had stopped asking. Not stopped believing, exactly... stopped daring to ask. And when a thing you have quietly given up on walks in the door, the first response is not gratitude. It is disbelief. That is why the psalm says their mouths were "filled with laughter." Not a polite thank-you. The helpless, spilling-over laughter of people watching God do the thing they no longer had the nerve to pray for.

LINDA BROWN: The laughter is the disbelief, then. It is what disbelief sounds like when the news turns out to be true. And the neighbours noticed... that line about the nations, what is that doing there? Why do we care what Babylon thought?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because of what happens to that sentence next, and this is a lovely piece of Hebrew poetry. The nations say, in Spurgeon's old King James wording, "Then said they among the heathen, the Lord hath done great things for them." Outsiders reporting on a rescue. And then Israel takes the exact sentence and turns it around: "The LORD has done great things for us." Step parallelism again, and the climb this time is the sentence changing hands. Testimony from outside becomes worship from inside. And watch what neither line says. Nobody credits Cyrus. Nobody credits their own patience. The pagans and the pilgrims agree on one thing... the LORD did this. That is the controlling claim of the psalm in one sentence. Restoration is God's work from the first move to the last. He scattered them for their sin, and he alone gathered them back.

LINDA BROWN: The credit goes past the king who signed the paperwork to the God who moved the king. So the psalm is a thank-you song. That is what I would have said walking in. Grateful people, looking back at the day they got home.

FRANK EDWARDS: That is what verse three sounds like, and if the psalm ended there you would be right. Here is where it turns. Verse four: "Restore our captives, O LORD." Same word. In Hebrew the verb is shuv, and it means to turn, to come back, to bring back around. Verse one says when the LORD did the shuv for Zion. Verse four says LORD, do the shuv again. The memory and the plea are built on the identical verb, so the song is not a thank-you card at all... it is a prayer that uses the thank-you as its argument.

LINDA BROWN: That does not sound grateful to me, it sounds greedy. God just did the great thing, they just said so out loud, and in the very next breath it is "do it again"? If I got the miracle and immediately asked for the next one I would feel a little ashamed.

FRANK EDWARDS: You would, if the miracle were finished. It wasn't. The decree let them go home, but read Ezra and Nehemiah and you find out what home looked like. Rubble. A temple foundation and no temple. Enemies in the neighbouring towns, poor harvests, families half-returned because plenty of people stayed in Babylon where life was easier. The great thing had begun and the great thing was not done. Theologians have a phrase for that condition... "already and not yet." God has genuinely acted, the rescue is real, and you are still standing in a field that has not been harvested. That is not greed. That is the only honest place a believer has ever stood. Every homecoming God works is a down payment on the last one, and a down payment is meant to make you ask for the rest.

FRANK EDWARDS: And look at the picture they reach for when they ask. "Like streams in the Negev." The Negev is the desert in the far south of the land, and it is threaded with wadis, dry riverbeds that lie cracked and empty most of the year. Then the rains come in the hills, and with no warning at all a channel that was dust an hour ago is roaring with water. A returned exile knew that in his body. So the prayer is not "God, gradually improve things." It is "God, do it the way you did it the first time... sudden, overflowing, life where there was nothing." Remembered grace is the shape of the request.

LINDA BROWN: Somebody listening right now is standing in one of those riverbeds. Not the exile, the dry part after. The marriage that got saved and is still hard. The job that came through and does not pay enough. The prayer God clearly answered, and the answer left you with a lot of rubble to move. That is where this psalm is actually praying from, and I think that is a relief, because I would not have known you were allowed to pray from there.

FRANK EDWARDS: The rubble is exactly the field the last two verses walk into. "Those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy." Now, why is the sower crying? Not because farming is sad. Because of what seed was. Grain was food. A family living close to hunger, and every returned exile was, faced a decision each planting season: eat the seed, or bury it. To scatter your grain into dry ground when your children are hungry felt like throwing bread away. Every handful cast down was a handful not eaten. That is why it is done weeping. Planting was an act of faith paid for in present hunger. He is not merely grieving. He is grieving and planting at the same time, in the same hand.

LINDA BROWN: "Sow in tears, reap in joy" is on a coffee mug somewhere, Frank. I know people who have sown for years and are still weeping. So tell me why this is not a greeting card... why the psalm gets to promise a harvest to someone still walking out to the field.

FRANK EDWARDS: The greeting card version says your sadness will pay off if you stay positive. The psalm says something much stranger and much older. Go back to Genesis three. "Cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it." Sweat, thorns, grief mixed into the work of feeding yourself. That curse is the field this man is walking across. His tears are Adam's tears. And into that cursed ground the psalm plants a promise, and it does it with a single repeated word. The Hebrew for "shouts of joy" is rinnah, and it rings three times. Verse two, "our tongues with rinnah," the joy of the return, in the past. Verse five, "will reap with rinnah." Verse six, "will surely return with rinnah." Same word, once in memory and twice in the future. The poet is arguing without arguing. The joy you already heard is the joy you are going to hear. Your own ear learns to expect it.

LINDA BROWN: The shout is the same shout. The one they remember from the road home is the one being promised at the harvest, so the past is being used as evidence for the future, not just as a nice story. God gives the proof before he gives the outcome.

FRANK EDWARDS: Evidence before outcome, and then the New Testament tells us who the sower is. Jesus, the week he died: "Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed. But if it dies, it bears much fruit." He was speaking about himself. He went out weeping, through Gethsemane, to a hill outside the city, and he is also the seed... buried, and for three days looking for all the world like grain the ground had simply swallowed. Then the harvest. Paul calls the risen Christ the firstfruits, which is the farmer's word for the first sheaf brought in from the field, the proof that the rest of the crop is coming. [short pause] So the promise in verse six is not wishful. The King has already walked the psalm. He went out with tears and came back carrying sheaves, and you are in the armload.

LINDA BROWN: Then the seed is the costly line for me, not the tears. Because what it asks is that I give away the thing I am afraid to run out of, while I am still sad, before I see anything come back. The text I do not want to send because it will cost me an evening I do not have. The money I earmarked. The "I'm sorry" I have been rationing. Everything in me says protect the store, you are already stretched, you have already cried this month. And the psalm says go out anyway. That is what sowing means.

FRANK EDWARDS: Rationing. That is the right word, because it gets at the fear underneath, that there is only so much of you and it has to be guarded. The psalm's answer to that fear is not "be braver." It is the memory. The man who can walk out to the field weeping is the man who remembers the day the LORD brought the captives home. Which is why the psalm opens the way it does. You said at the top that the dreaming line bothered you... and I think the dreaming is the whole point. They keep that memory, the day it felt unreal, precisely so that on the day the riverbed is dry they have something to pray from. Remembered grace is not nostalgia. It is fuel.

LINDA BROWN: [quietly] Let that be the thing you keep, then. One thing God has already done that felt, at the time, a little like a dream. Say it out loud tonight, the psalm's own way... "the LORD has done great things for us." Then name the one dry riverbed you are waiting on, and ask him for water in that exact channel. Then go plant the seed you have been holding back.

FRANK EDWARDS: Tears now, sheaves later, and the God who kept the promise once has not run out of streams. Dig Deeper is free, and you can find it at dig deeper dot A I.

LINDA BROWN: Thanks for listening. Go gently, and we will see you next time.