Psalm 133 — Unity of Brothers

FRANK EDWARDS: The Bible's best picture of a healthy church is a man with oil running through his beard and soaking into his shirt collar. Not a handshake. Not a potluck. A priest who has had so much poured on his head that it is dripping off his chin onto his clothes, and the poet looks at that mess and says... good. Pleasant. Behold.

LINDA BROWN: A stained collar. That is what I am supposed to want for my church. [laughs] I love it and I do not believe you yet, which is a good way to start. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody. We are still on the road up to Jerusalem with the pilgrims, and today the road gets very short... Psalm 133, three verses, and one of them is about a beard.

FRANK EDWARDS: Three verses, and Spurgeon set it against the first song in this collection, the one we opened the series with, and wrote, "That is full of war and lamentation, but this sings of peace and pleasantness." The pilgrim started this climb surrounded by liars and swords. Thirteen songs later he is standing in a crowd and singing about oil. Read it for us, would you, straight through?

LINDA BROWN: A song of ascents. Of David. Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in harmony! It is like fine oil on the head, running down on the beard, running down Aaron's beard over the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon falling on the mountains of Zion. For there the LORD has bestowed the blessing of life forevermore.

FRANK EDWARDS: Behold. That is the first real word, and it tells you what kind of poem this is going to be. David does not argue for unity here, he does not give reasons, he does not list benefits. He points. He holds up one scene and says, look at that. And when you look, when you actually follow the words with your eye, one direction takes over the entire song. The oil is on the head, then it is running down the beard, then it is running down Aaron's beard onto the collar of his robes. Head, beard, hem. Then the picture changes completely, a mountain instead of a man, and the dew comes down on the hills of Zion. Nothing in this psalm goes up. Not one verb climbs. The whole poem tilts the same way, three times, like a floor sloped toward a drain... everything in it is falling. And you came in expecting a song about brothers standing side by side, unity spreading sideways across a room, and instead the grammar keeps turning your head upward to find the source and then down again to watch the gift arrive. So where does that leave you, if you are looking for unity in the room?

LINDA BROWN: That's a lot to hang on which way a liquid runs. Oil runs down because that is what oil does. Gravity is not a doctrine. Why should I read theology out of the fact that David knew how a beard works?

FRANK EDWARDS: Because he did not pick any oil. He picked Aaron's, and every Israelite singing this knew exactly what day he meant. Exodus 29, Leviticus 8. Moses takes an oil that God himself gave the recipe for, myrrh and cinnamon and cane blended into olive oil, and it is reserved by law for one use only, you could not perfume yourself with it, you could not sell it. And Moses does not dab it on. He pours it. It runs over Aaron's hair, into his beard, down onto the vestments, and think about what those vestments were. On the shoulders and on the breastpiece were engraved stones, and cut into those stones were the names of the twelve tribes. So the oil that consecrates the priest keeps going until it reaches the names of the people. The man from Dan and the man from Judah, who will spend most of their lives never seeing each other, are lying side by side on that collar getting wet with the same grace. The stain on the collar is the nation being covered.

FRANK EDWARDS: And hold the direction a moment longer, because it matters for the objection you raised. Aaron did not anoint himself. He stood there with his hands at his sides and Moses poured. That is what consecration is, from the very first time it happens in Israel, something done to you from above. So when David reaches for that scene to describe brothers living together, he is quietly rooting the harmony of God's people in priesthood. They are one because of what came down on the head, and what came down on the head ran all the way to the hem.

LINDA BROWN: Stones. I want to underline the stones, because that changes what I thought the picture was. The tribes are one because the same oil is soaking all twelve names at once, and that follows from who got anointed, not from how well the twelve of them were getting along that afternoon. Unity is a side effect of the priest.

FRANK EDWARDS: Mediation, is the older name for what you just described. A mediator is someone set apart to stand between a holy God and a people who cannot stand there themselves, and the anointing is how God marks that person out. And Aaron was only the shadow of it. The Hebrew word for a person like that is mashiach, which simply means smeared with oil, having had oil poured over him and therefore no longer available for ordinary use. Jesus is the true and greater Aaron. He is not anointed with a blend of olive oil and spices, he is anointed with the Spirit, John says without measure, consecrated to reconcile people to God and then to each other by his own blood. And the night before he died, what did he pray for? Not for our success. "that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You." The harmony David is singing about has its source in the oneness of God himself, and its guarantee in the prayer of the Priest. We are one because we share one Head. You, and the person three pews back you have never spoken to, are both names on the same collar.

LINDA BROWN: And underneath that sits the second picture, which I confess I have always just read past. Hermon. Why does a snow-capped mountain need to be in a song about brothers, and how does dew from a mountain in the north end up on hills a hundred miles south? That is not how weather works.

FRANK EDWARDS: It is not how weather works, and the singer knew that better than we do, which is why the line is so strange and so good. Hermon rises in the far north, the highest thing in the land, and its slopes catch the heaviest dew anywhere in Israel, so much that it became a byword for abundance. Meanwhile Zion, the modest hills of Jerusalem in the south, bakes dry all summer with no rain from spring to autumn. That northern moisture never physically reaches Jerusalem. Never. But the pilgrim's song carries it there anyway, and remember who is singing. These are the people we talked about back on day three, families who normally see only their own village, converging from a hundred miles of rough country onto one small ridge for the feast. A man from the shadow of Hermon is standing in the temple court next to a man from the Negev, strangers by geography, brothers by covenant. So the psalm is not describing a wish. It is describing the road he just walked. The wettest place in the north poured out on the driest hills in the south is exactly what the festival had just done to the tribes.

FRANK EDWARDS: And dew, in Scripture, is always a particular kind of gift. Moses blessed Israel with "a land of grain and new wine, where even the heavens drip with dew." Dew arrives overnight, unearned, while you are asleep, from above. You do not irrigate with dew. You wake up and it is there. Now set that against the first time in the Bible two brothers stand together over one piece of land. Genesis 13. Abram says to Lot, let there be no quarrel between us, we are brothers... and then they separate. The first brothers in Scripture keep the peace by dividing the land between them. Psalm 133 is looking at a better country than that one, where brothers dwell together and it is good, and Ezekiel names what David only glimpsed, God saying I will make them one nation on the mountains of Israel, one king over all of them. Unity gathers what sin scattered, and it comes down on the scattered like dew.

LINDA BROWN: That's an alibi, honestly. If unity descends, if it is oil and dew and I am just standing under it, then the man who never repairs anything with anybody gets to shrug and say he is waiting on the weather. Explain why this is not the most comfortable doctrine in the book.

FRANK EDWARDS: Paul would not let him shrug, and neither will the psalm. Paul tells the Ephesians to be diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. Preserve, not produce. You do not manufacture the gift, but you are ordered to guard it with effort, and guarding something you did not make is harder than building something you did, because you cannot take credit for it and you still get blamed when it breaks. But the real answer to your alibi is one small word at the end of the psalm. [short pause] There. "For there the LORD has bestowed the blessing of life forevermore." Not everywhere. Not anywhere. There. The blessing has an address, and the address is where brothers dwell together. And the verb underneath "bestowed" is tsavah, the word for a command, the word used when God speaks the ten words at Sinai, when he gives Moses the pattern for the tabernacle, when a king issues a decree nobody can revoke. David is not saying blessing tends to show up where people get along. He is saying God has issued a standing order that life rest at that address. So the man waiting on the weather is not waiting. He is standing in the wrong place, and the oil is falling somewhere he refuses to go. What does it cost, do you think, to stand at the address?

LINDA BROWN: It costs the wall. You know the one I mean. Coffee hour, and there is a person across the room, and the second your eyes meet you decide, in less than a breath, to steer toward a different conversation. That careful distance feels like peace. It is quiet, nobody is fighting, nobody is even talking. And the psalm is saying that quiet is not the address. It is a wall painted to look like peace, and I have been calling the paint a blessing.

FRANK EDWARDS: Painted. That is the honest word for it, and the psalm will not let you keep the paint. Because look where the oil actually runs in the picture. It does not stop at the beard. It keeps going, over the collar, onto the names, and it covers everything it touches without asking any of the twelve stones whether they were ready. That is what makes walking across the room possible, and it is why this is not one more thing you owe. Christ tore down the wall between you and God, and that same peace is now yours to hand across a coffee hour. Walking over is receiving. You say, can we talk sometime this week, I do not want things to stay the way they have been between us, and then you name your part without a "but" attached, and you listen to theirs without defending. That conversation is you standing where he commanded the oil to land.

LINDA BROWN: Then the blessing being commanded is actually the comfort, and it follows from the fact that I must not be the architect of its appearance. If God has decreed life at that address, the only thing I am gambling when I cross the room is my pride, and he has already decided what waits on the other side.

FRANK EDWARDS: Life forevermore is what waits, the psalm says, and I want to leave that one word on the table for you. There. Not a mood, not a feeling you work up on a Sunday, an address God has appointed, and the oil is already poured on the Head. Your part is to stand underneath it. Let it work on you today...

LINDA BROWN: Then here is the ask. Before this day is over, walk over to the person you have been keeping a careful distance from, or send them a message, and say, "Can we talk sometime this week?" That is where the oil starts to fall.

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

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