Psalm 121

 :1 I lift up my eyes to the hills--

    where does my help come from?

 :2 My help comes from the LORD,

    the Maker of heaven and earth.

 

The psalms of Ascent, of which Psalm 121 is the second, were sung by the pilgrims heading to Jerusalem to worship the Lord God of heaven and earth.  But on their way to the city of Jerusalem, they had to pass through a variety of places where one would lift up ones eyes to the tops of the hills and see a temple or holy place or high place or sacred grove or such on the hill.  As we learned in Greece, these high places were considered to be places that were near unto the God that was worshipped in that place.  One went to these high places to receive insight into the working of that particular God and how to influence that God to bless me as a person.  Wherever one goes in Athens, the Acropolis, with its temple to Athena, is visible in one way or another.  We’re told that no building can be designed and built which would interfere with the view of the high place and the Parthenon that others now have. 

 

So we need to ask ourselves, what do we make of that?  The ancients often built their holy places so that they would be seen by others from a great distance.  What do we build that others can see today?  Our high places today are commercial buildings, high rise apartment buildings with high price tags, banks, insurance companies, big firms with lots of money.  Government buildings housing offices of the people who run our communities rise above the skylines of the towns and cities in which they are found.  Today, these are the places we turn to for help in times of trouble.  Hospitals build towers that house various treatment facilities.

 

Is your company in financial trouble?  Well, maybe you can get a government grant that will change things.  Is your health failing?  A modern tower of healing might be just the place for you to go to find help in this time of need.  These places now tower over the skyline and form the places to which we look for help.

 

But the psalmist says, I lift up my eyes to the hills and I’m reminded that my help is not in any of these places that dominate the skyline.  My help is in the name of the Lord, who made the heavens and the earth.  Not long ago, I heard someone say that poets are the ones whose voices and verse shape our experience of reality.  I think that is correct.  For the poets help us to get a handle on our understanding of how things work.  In our own day, just think of the power of songs—poetry set to music—to shape our understanding of our world.  So here the psalmist, a poet, teaches us that the reality we all need is that the God who made the heavens and the earth is our only source of help.  

Последнее изменение: понедельник, 13 августа 2018, 11:41