Psalm 129 — Afflicted Many Times

LINDA BROWN: Somebody hears this psalm read out and says it plainly: "You call that protection? Look at his back. It looks like a field somebody drove an ox across. If your God cut the cords, why is the man still covered in furrows?" I think that objection is fair. I think a lot of people listening right now have some version of it sitting in their chest, and they have never said it out loud in church.

FRANK EDWARDS: Fair is the right word for it, and I want to leave it standing for a while rather than swat it down. Welcome to Dig Deeper. Frank Edwards, Linda Brown, and we are in Psalm 129 today, still climbing with the pilgrims in the Songs of Ascent we started back on day one. This one is short, it is scarred, and it does something I find astonishing, which is that it puts the furrows and the cutting of the cords into the same breath and does not flinch at either. So the question you just quoted is, in a sense, the question the psalm itself is answering. Shall I read it?

LINDA BROWN: Read it, and read it slow, because the images are going to do most of the work.

FRANK EDWARDS: A song of ascents. Many a time they have persecuted me from my youth, let Israel now declare, many a time they have persecuted me from my youth, but they have not prevailed against me. The plowmen plowed over my back; they made their furrows long. The LORD is righteous; He has cut me from the cords of the wicked. May all who hate Zion be turned back in shame. May they be like grass on the rooftops, which withers before it can grow, unable to fill the hands of the reaper, or the arms of the binder of sheaves. May none who pass by say to them, "The blessing of the LORD be on you; we bless you in the name of the LORD."

LINDA BROWN: The plowmen. That is the line I cannot get past, and I notice it comes before the good news, not after. He does not say God rescued me and then, by the way, it hurt a bit. He says my back is a field first. So my objection is still standing, Frank. The furrows are in the text.

FRANK EDWARDS: The furrows are in the text, and so is the word "youth," and I want to start there because it tells you who is speaking. This is a nation talking about itself as one body, one battered person, looking back over its whole life. "From my youth" means from Egypt. The cradle of this people was a brickyard under Pharaoh's whip. Then the wilderness, then Midian, then the Philistines, then Assyria, then Babylon, one after another, and the psalm gathers every one of them into a single sentence and sings it on the road up to Jerusalem. Centuries of enemies. One voice. And listen to how it is built: the line comes once, "many a time they have persecuted me from my youth," and then it comes again, word for word, with Israel now told to say it aloud. Step parallelism again, and the step this time is who is saying it. A private ache becomes a congregation's confession. Spurgeon put it this way in the Treasury of David: "The fact was uppermost in her thoughts, and she could not help soliloquizing upon it again and again." Grief said twice is grief that refuses to be hushed.

FRANK EDWARDS: Then the picture itself. Every pilgrim on that road had walked behind a plow or watched one. You know what a furrow is: iron dragged through heavy soil, a straight open cut, then another beside it, the full length of the field. Lay that across a human back and there is no ambiguity about what you are looking at. It is the striped flesh of a slave under the lash, the long weals of the whip, described as though someone had run a plow down a man's spine. Oppression in this psalm is not an idea. It has a texture, and it bleeds.

LINDA BROWN: The furrows are the whip, then, and the field is a nation that has been flogged for a thousand years. I can hear that. What I cannot yet hear is why that is anything more than a very poetic way of saying life is hard and we made it. People say that at funerals. "They didn't break us." Isn't the psalm just saying that with better imagery?

FRANK EDWARDS: If it were saying that, it would credit Israel, and it does not. Read the refrain again: "but they have not prevailed against me." Now ask who gets the credit for that. Not Israel's toughness. Not her armies, not her cleverness. "The LORD is righteous; He has cut me from the cords of the wicked." The psalm points at a Person. And this is the controlling claim of the whole song, the thing everything else hangs on: the survival of God's people is God's doing, and not their own. This is that same preservation we have been tracking since day two, except here a whole nation sings it out loud on a hillside. Think about it historically for a second. Israel had every earthly reason to vanish like a hundred forgotten peoples, the Hittites, the Amalekites, the Philistines themselves. Egypt is gone. Babylon is gone. Assyria is a pile of tablets in a museum. And the people they were plowing over is still standing on the road, singing. The funeral line, "they didn't break us," is a boast about the survivor. This line is a confession about the Keeper.

LINDA BROWN: "Righteous." That is the word that surprises me there. If I were writing that verse I would have said the LORD is strong, or the LORD is merciful. Why does cutting somebody free from ropes make God righteous? That's a courtroom word being used for a rescue.

FRANK EDWARDS: Righteous, in the Hebrew Scriptures, is not primarily a scale being balanced. It is a God being faithful to what He swore. When the psalm says the LORD is righteous, it means He has done right by His covenant, He has kept the promise He made to Abraham, and the proof is that the ropes are on the ground. That is why the courtroom word is exactly right for a rescue. The rescue is God keeping His word. And the promise goes back further than Abraham. At the gate of Eden God tells the serpent, "He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." The heel is struck. The back is plowed. But the enemy never gets the killing blow, because heaven decided the outcome before the first furrow was ever cut. So when your objector says "why is the man still scarred," part of the answer is that the scars were promised too. God never said His people would not be wounded. He said the wound would not be fatal.

LINDA BROWN: Which is where this gets sharp, because the second half of the psalm stops talking about his own back and starts wishing things on other people. "May all who hate Zion be turned back in shame." Grass that withers. Nobody blesses them. I want to be honest, Frank, that reads to me like someone who has been beaten and is now enjoying the thought of payback. Convince me why I should sing that on the way to worship.

FRANK EDWARDS: Look up before you decide. Every house those pilgrims lived in had a flat roof, and the roof was packed mud and clay spread over beams. People slept up there in the heat, dried figs and flax up there, sat up there in the evening. And every spring the same thing happened over every doorway in the village: the rains came, stray seeds that the wind had dropped on that thin skin of dirt sprouted, and for a few days it looked like a little green field on top of the house. Then the sun climbed. No depth for roots, no groundwater underneath, nothing but a hand's breadth of baked earth, so the blades shot up fast and died faster, scorched brown before they ever headed out into grain. Nobody ever climbed a ladder to harvest a roof. That is the picture. And the poet walks you through the harvest that never happens with a farmer's precision: the reaper reaches down and closes his hand on nothing, and whoever ties the sheaves has no armful to bind, and the customary blessing that harvesters and passersby called across a real field, "the blessing of the LORD be on you," is simply never said, because there is nothing there to bless. Does that sound like a man savouring revenge? It sounds to me like a man describing what opposition to God's people actually is. Green in the morning. Gone by noon. The curse is not a wish. It is a diagnosis.

FRANK EDWARDS: And set the two pictures side by side, because the poet clearly wants you to. The persecuted have been planted in real soil, ground that has been broken open, torn, worked over. The wicked are sprouting in a handful of dust on a roof. Jesus tells the same story in Matthew 13, seed on rocky ground that springs up at once because the soil is shallow, and withers when the sun rises because it has no root. Psalm 1 has the tree by the water and the chaff blown off by the wind. Scripture keeps drawing these same two lives. Deep and wounded, or high and rootless. And notice what the plowing does to a field: it prepares it. The very violence that scars the ground is what makes it ready for a crop.

LINDA BROWN: If the enemies really are rooftop grass, then the singer can afford to leave them alone, because there is nothing there worth fighting. [short pause] I want to say out loud what that would cost, though, because I have a name I keep rehearsing. Somebody who has done real damage. And I have a sentence ready for them, a good one, the kind you polish in the shower. This psalm hands that sentence to God and asks me to not say it. That is not a small thing to ask.

FRANK EDWARDS: The singer does not draw the sword himself. That is worth noticing. He names the wrong, without softening it, and then he asks God to deal with it, and then he goes on walking up the hill to worship. "May they be turned back in shame" is a prayer, not a plan. So the reckoning you are holding, the debt you intend to collect, goes into God's hands, and what you say in your own head when the rehearsal starts is something like this: "God, You are righteous. You handle this. I will not." Then you pass the salt. You ask about their week. The person is still three feet from you at the table, and the score is no longer yours to settle.

LINDA BROWN: That changes the next question, because you cannot do that by clenching your jaw. I have tried the clenched-jaw version and it is just the same sentence with the volume turned down. What actually lets a person put it down?

FRANK EDWARDS: Run the thread forward and watch where it goes. Isaiah saw a Servant, and he saw His back. "Pierced for our transgressions," and by His stripes we are healed. The plowmen struck the servant nation across the centuries, and then, under a Roman lash, they struck the true Servant, and they made their furrows long across Him. He did not curse them. He prayed for them. And they did not prevail. The tomb could not hold Him. So the resurrection settles over everyone joined to Christ what this psalm sings over Israel: the enemy plows, the wounds are real, the soil is turned, and the crop the wicked hoped to gather never comes up. That is what lets you lay it down. He already carried what you are tempted to carry. And there is one more turn of the screw here. On the Damascus road the risen Christ asks Saul, "Why do you persecute Me?" Not "why do you persecute them." Every furrow cut into His people, He feels on His own back. Which means, Linda, that your objector at the top of the show was closer to the truth than he knew. Yes, the man is still scarred, and God cut the cords anyway. Both are true, and the scarred one turns out to be God Himself.

LINDA BROWN: The furrows do not go away, then. That is the answer to the question we opened with. The psalm never promises a smooth back. It promises that whoever is doing the plowing does not get the harvest. And it lets you say both sentences in the same breath, "they made their furrows long," and "the LORD is righteous," without pretending either one away.

FRANK EDWARDS: Both sentences, in the same breath. That is the psalm. If you want to do something with it tonight, write them down, one under the other, the loss named honestly and then "He has cut me from the cords," and read them aloud before bed. Grief that is honest and a God who is true, side by side. Turn that over today.

LINDA BROWN: And the psalm gives us the words for the send-off, so I am going to borrow them rather than improve on them. Somewhere in your life there is a person quietly having furrows plowed across their back right now. Before you sleep tonight, send them the line those harvesters used to call across the field. "The blessing of the LORD be on you." Do not explain it. Just bless them.

FRANK EDWARDS: This conversation is part of the Dig Deeper app, and if you do not have it yet, you can find Dig Deeper in your app store or on the Play Store.