Moving through the Psalms of Ascent, the songs sung by the Israelites as they went up to Jerusalem, we come to Psalm 124, which Eugene Peterson aptly entitles HELP. Here it is:

• If GOD hadn’t been for us —all together now, Israel, sing out!— If GOD hadn’t been for us when everyone went against us, We would have been swallowed alive by their violent anger, Swept away by the flood of rage, drowned in the torrent; We would have lost our lives in the wild, raging water. (1 – 5)
• Oh, blessed be GOD! He didn’t go off and leave us. He didn’t abandon us defenseless, helpless as a rabbit in a pack of snarling dogs. (6)
• We’ve flown free from their fangs, free of their traps, free as a bird. Their grip is broken; we’re free as a bird in flight. (7)
• GOD’s strong name is our help, the same GOD who made heaven and earth. (8, MSG)

Peterson writes:

Psalm 124 is a song of hazard—and of help. Among the Songs of Ascents, sung by the people of God on the way of faith, this is one that better than any other describes the hazardous work of all discipleship and declares the help that is always experienced at the hand of God.

The first lines of the psalm twice describe God as “for us.” The last line is “GOD’s strong name is our help, the same GOD who made heaven and earth.” God is for us. God is our help.

He goes on to describe the problem of “If God is our help, why did such and such happen?” The answer, essentially, is that God doesn’t promise deliverance FROM adversity but THROUGH adversity.

God’s help is described by means of two illustrations. The people were in danger of being swallowed up alive; and they were in danger of being drowned by a flood. The first picture is of an enormous dragon or sea monster. Nobody has ever seen a dragon, but everybody (especially children) knows they exist. Dragons are projections of our fears, horrible constructions of all that might hurt us. A dragon is total evil. A peasant confronted by a magnificent dragon is completely outclassed. There is no escape: the dragon’s thick skin, fiery mouth, lashing serpentine tail, and insatiable greed and lust sign an immediate doom.

The second picture, the flood, speaks of sudden disaster. In the Middle East, watercourses that have eroded the countryside are all interconnected by an intricate gravitational system. A sudden storm fills these little gullies with water, they feed into one another, and in a very few minutes a torrential flash flood is produced. During the rainy season, such unannounced catastrophes pose great danger for persons who live in these desert areas. There is no escaping. One minute you are well and happy and making plans for the future; the next minute the entire world is disarranged by a catastrophe.

The psalmist is not a person talking about the good life, how God has kept him out of all difficulty. This person has gone through the worst—the dragon’s mouth, the flood’s torrent—and finds himself intact. He was not abandoned but helped. The final strength is not in the dragon or in the flood but in God who “didn’t go off and leave us.”

That’s a good word:

He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. (2 Corinthians 1.10, ESV)

Also at that time, people will say, “Look at what’s happened! This is our God! We waited for him and he showed up and saved us! (Isaiah 25.9, MSG)

Continuing through the Psalms of Ascent, we come to Psalm 123:

I look to you, heaven-dwelling God, look up to you for help. Like servants, alert to their master’s commands, like a maiden attending her lady, We’re watching and waiting, holding our breath, awaiting your word of mercy. Mercy, GOD, mercy! We’ve been kicked around long enough, Kicked in the teeth by complacent rich men, kicked when we’re down by arrogant brutes. (1 – 4, MSG)

There’s a problem: kicked around by “complacent rich men…arrogant brutes.”

It’s a long-standing, continuing problem:

Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, are crying out against you, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous person. He does not resist you. (James 5.1 – 6, ESV)

The solution? Like “servants alert to their master’s commands…We’re watching and waiting, holding our breath, awaiting your word of mercy.”

Eugene Peterson in A Long Obedience in the Same Direction focuses his commentary on our attitude as servants.

As a person grows and matures in the Christian way, it is necessary to acquire certain skills. One is service…

Service, in that we are the servants. God is not our servant, we are his.

But God is not a servant to be called into action when we are too tired to do something ourselves, not an expert to be called on when we find we are ill equipped to handle a specialized problem in living. Paul Scherer writes scathingly of people who lobby around in the courts of the Almighty for special favors, plucking at his sleeve, pestering him with requests. God is not a buddy we occasionally ask to join us at our convenience or for our diversion. God did not become a servant so that we could order him around but so that we could join him in a redemptive life.

Too often we think of religion as a far-off, mysteriously run bureaucracy to which we apply for assistance when we feel the need. We go to a local branch office and direct the clerk (sometimes called a pastor) to fill out our order for God. Then we go home and wait for God to be delivered to us according to the specifications that we have set down. But that is not the way it works. And if we thought about it for two consecutive minutes, we would not want it to work that way. If God is God at all, he must know more about our needs than we do…

With respect to our service to God, Peterson writes:

The Christian is a person who recognizes that our real problem is not in achieving freedom but in learning service under a better master. The Christian realizes that every relationship that excludes God becomes oppressive. Recognizing and realizing that, we urgently want to live under the mastery of God.

For such reasons all Christian service involves urgency. Servitude is not a casual standing around waiting for orders. It is never desultory; it is urgent need: “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth.” And the gospel is the good news that the words of God, commanding new life in us, are already in our ears; “those who have ears to hear, let them hear.”

He continues:

The best New Testament commentary on this psalm is in the final section of Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapters 12—16. The section begins with this sentence: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (12:1). The psalm’s emphasis on actual, physical service (not a spiritual intention, not a desire to be of service) is picked up in the invitation to present our everyday, ordinary life. The motivation for service (not coerced, not demanded) is picked up in the phrase “God helping you.” But most significant is the remarkable last phrase logikēn latreian, “place it before God as an offering,” which another translation renders “reasonable service.” Service, that is, that makes sense. The word latreia means “service,” the work one does on behalf of the community. But it also is the base of our word liturgy, the service of worship that we render to God. And it is precisely that service that is logical, reasonable.

Interestingly, Peterson wrote on Psalm 122 about “worship,” by which he meant attend a worship service at church every Sunday. But then in this commentary on Psalm 123, he refers us to Romans 12.1 which speaks clearly of “worship” in the context of “service” – it’s the same word! Worship doesn’t primarily occur on Sunday in church; it occurs in “your everyday, ordinary life.”

Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship (Romans 12.1, NIV)

We continue through the Psalms of Ascent: today, Psalm 122, and it’s no surprise that Peterson, in his essay on this psalm from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction calls it “Worship.” A long memorized verse:

I was glad when they said unto me, let us go up to the House of the Lord. (Psalm 122.1, KJV)

Here’s all of Psalm 122 in Peterson’s Message paraphrase:

• When they said, “Let’s go to the house of GOD,” my heart leaped for joy. And now we’re here, O Jerusalem, inside Jerusalem’s walls! (1, 2)
• Jerusalem, well-built city, built as a place for worship! The city to which the tribes ascend, all GOD’s tribes go up to worship, To give thanks to the name of GOD— this is what it means to be Israel. Thrones for righteous judgment are set there, famous David-thrones. (3 – 5)
• Pray for Jerusalem’s peace! Prosperity to all you Jerusalem-lovers! Friendly insiders, get along! Hostile outsiders, keep your distance! For the sake of my family and friends, I say it again: live in peace! For the sake of the house of our God, GOD, I’ll do my very best for you. (6 – 9)

Before I get to Peterson, let me share my immediate observation. “Pray for Jerusalem’s peace! … Friendly insiders, get along…live in peace! For the sake of the house of our God.”

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” is a rallying cry for all lovers of Israel. And it’s a good prayer. But a more immediate prayer is for the peace of our congregations!

Back to Peterson who equates, as most pastors do, “Let us go up to the house of the Lord” with attending church, and attending church equals worship. Without challenging that framework, let’s look at a few samples of what Peterson has to say.

Psalm 122 is the song of a person who decides to go to church and worship God. It is a sample of the complex, diverse and worldwide phenomenon of worship that is common to all Christians. It is an excellent instance of what happens when a person worships…Psalm 122 is the psalm of worship—a demonstration of what people of faith everywhere and always do: gather to an assigned place and worship their God.

I remember a Navigator colleague challenging me once on why Navigators should be ministering in churches (as opposed to “out there among the lost”). He said, “There aren’t 10 percent of the people in churches on Sunday morning.” I responded, “There aren’t 10 percent of the people anywhere, including on tennis courts where you like to minister!” Peterson goes farther:

An excellent way to test people’s values is to observe what we do when we don’t have to do anything, how we spend our leisure time, how we spend our extra money. Even in a time when church attendance is not considered to be on the upswing in the United States, the numbers are impressive. There are more people at worship on any given Sunday, for instance, than are at all the football games or on the golf links or fishing or taking walks in the woods. Worship is the single most popular act in this land. So when we hear the psalmist say, “When they said, ‘Let’s go to the house of GOD,’ my heart leaped for joy,” we are not listening to the phony enthusiasm of a propagandist drumming up business for worship; we are witnessing what is typical of most Christians in most places at most times. This is not an exception to which we aspire; it is an instance of the average.

He continues:

Why do we do it? …The psalm singles out three items:

• worship gives us a workable structure for life;
• worship nurtures our need to be in relationship with God;
• worship centers our attention on the decisions of God. (Bulleted for clarity)

Peterson expands on that second point by focusing on attending worship services as an act of obedience:

But very often we don’t feel like it, and so we say, “It would be dishonest for me to go to a place of worship and praise God when I don’t feel like it. I would be a hypocrite.” The psalm says, I don’t care whether you feel like it or not: as was decreed (RSV), “give thanks to the name of GOD.”

I have put great emphasis on the fact that Christians worship because they want to, not because they are forced to. But I have never said that we worship because we feel like it. Feelings are great liars. If Christians worshiped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. Feelings are important in many areas but completely unreliable in matters of faith. Paul Scherer is laconic:

“The Bible wastes very little time on the way we feel.”

My Alcoholics Anonymous friends tell me there’s a saying in AA that goes something like, “I don’t care how you feel, as you long as you stay sober.”

We live in what one writer has called the “age of sensation.” We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. (emphasis mine)

So the message is: participate in public worship. He concludes with:

It is inevitable that we ask regarding worship, is it worth it? Can you justify the time and energy and expense involved in gathering Christians together in worship? Well (and he quotes Charles Spurgeon):

look at the mower in the summer’s day, with so much to cut down ere the sun sets. He pauses in his labour—is he a sluggard? He looks for his stone, and begins to draw it up and down his scythe, with rink-atink, rink-atink, rink-atink. Is that idle music—is he wasting precious moments? How much he might have mowed while he has been ringing out those notes on his scythe! But he is sharpening his tool, and he will do far more when once again he gives his strength to those long sweeps which lay the grass prostrate in rows before him.

Public worship is sharpening the tool.

We must never be too busy to take time to sharpen the saw. – Stephen Covey

Therefore, I would add that one hour on Sunday is good but not enough. We can sharpen the saw and “go up to the house of the Lord daily,” inspired, in part perhaps, by our Sunday experience.

In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly. (Psalm 5.3, NIV)

PS Worshiping God at church on Sunday is good. Worshiping God through everyday service is better – see tomorrow’s blog!

We’re moving through the Psalms of Ascent, guided by Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. I read the psalm, and I thought the message is clear (and it is!). God guards and protects:

• I look up to the mountains; does my strength come from mountains? No, my strength comes from GOD, who made heaven, and earth, and mountains. (1, 2)
• He won’t let you stumble, your Guardian God won’t fall asleep. Not on your life! Israel’s Guardian will never doze or sleep. (3, 4)
• GOD’s your Guardian, right at your side to protect you— Shielding you from sunstroke, sheltering you from moonstroke. (5, 6)
• GOD guards you from every evil, he guards your very life. He guards you when you leave and when you return, he guards you now, he guards you always. (7, 8) (MSG)

But Peterson mines it for deeper meaning, opening with a story about the blessing of being wrong:

A few years ago I was in my backyard with my lawnmower tipped on its side. I was trying to get the blade off so I could sharpen it. I had my biggest wrench attached to the nut but couldn’t budge it. I got a four-foot length of pipe and slipped it over the wrench handle to give me leverage, and I leaned on that—still unsuccessfully. Next I took a large rock and banged on the pipe. By this time I was beginning to get emotionally involved with my lawnmower.

Then my neighbor walked over and said that he had a lawnmower like mine once and that, if he remembered correctly, the threads on the bolt went the other way. I reversed my exertions and, sure enough, the nut turned easily.

I was glad to find out I was wrong. I was saved from frustration and failure. I would never have gotten the job done, no matter how hard I tried, doing it my way.

Psalm 121 is a quiet voice gently and kindly telling us that we are, perhaps, wrong in the way we are going about the Christian life, and then, very simply, showing us the right way.

Yesterday’s Psalm 120 was about saying no to the world and yes to God. But no sooner do we do that when everything starts to go wrong. Been there? I have. It’s at that point we look the wrong way for help. Peterson writes:

We are rudely awakened to something very different, and we look around for help, scanning the horizon for someone who will give us aid: “I look up to the mountains; does my strength come from mountains?”

Psalm 121 is the neighbor coming over and telling us that we are doing it the wrong way, looking in the wrong place for help.

Help from what?

Three possibilities for harm to travelers are referred to in the psalm. A person traveling on foot can at any moment step on a loose stone and sprain his ankle. A person traveling on foot under protracted exposure to a hot sun, can become faint with sunstroke. And a person traveling for a long distance on foot, under the pressures of fatigue and anxiety, can become emotionally ill, which was described by ancient writers as moonstroke (or by us as lunacy).

I wondered what he meant by “moonstroke” in verse 6! The standard translations say something like:

The sun shall not strike you by day, Nor the moon by night. (Psalm 121.6, NKJV)

We can update the list of problems. Peterson suggests things like someone with a gun hijacking an airline, disease, accident. We can’t guarantee that these things won’t happen. So we look for help.

We’re tempted to look to the mountains. What do we see there?

Some magnificent scenery, for one thing. Is there anything more inspiring than a ridge of mountains silhouetted against the sky? Does any part of this earth promise more in terms of majesty and strength, of firmness and solidity, than the mountains? But a Hebrew would see something else. During the time this psalm was written and sung, Palestine was overrun with popular pagan worship. Much of this religion was practiced on hilltops...

…That is the kind of thing a Hebrew, set out on the way of faith twenty-five hundred years ago, would have seen on the hills. It is what disciples still see. A person of faith encounters trial or tribulation and cries out “Help!” We lift our eyes to the mountains, and offers of help, instant and numerous, appear. “Does my strength come from mountains?” No. “My strength comes from GOD, who made heaven, and earth, and mountains.”

A look to the hills for help ends in disappointment. For all their majesty and beauty, for all their quiet strength and firmness, they are finally just hills. And for all their promises of safety against the perils of the road, for all the allurements of their priests and priestesses, they are all, finally, lies. As Jeremiah put it: “Truly the hills are a delusion, the orgies on the mountains” (Jeremiah 3:23 RSV).

So what’s the promise?

The promise of the psalm—and both Hebrews and Christians have always read it this way—is not that we shall never stub our toes but that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will have evil power over us, that is, will be able to separate us from God’s purposes in us.

He concludes:

The Christian life is not a quiet escape to a garden where we can walk and talk uninterruptedly with our Lord, not a fantasy trip to a heavenly city where we can compare our blue ribbons and gold medals with those of others who have made it to the winners’ circle. To suppose that, or to expect that, is to turn the nut the wrong way. The Christian life is going to God. In going to God Christians travel the same ground that everyone else walks on, breathe the same air, drink the same water, shop in the same stores, read the same newspapers, are citizens under the same governments, pay the same prices for groceries and gasoline, fear the same dangers, are subject to the same pressures, get the same distresses, are buried in the same ground.

The difference is that each step we walk, each breath we breathe, we know we are preserved by God, we know we are accompanied by God, we know we are ruled by God; and therefore no matter what doubts we endure or what accidents we experience, the Lord will guard us from every evil, he guards our very life.

That will preach.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8.38, 39, ESV)

I ran across a feel good story on Facebook, posted by J Mendoza, Jr, that’s too good not to share. Here are some snippets:

He was a bankrupt blacksmith with five children to feed. He grabbed a broken piece of steel and built a $100 billion empire that’s still running 187 years later.

In 1837, John Deere was drowning.

Not in water—in debt. He was 33 years old, running a failing blacksmith shop in Rutland, Vermont, with five hungry children at home and creditors pounding on his door.

Vermont’s economy had collapsed. Work had dried up. The future looked bleaker every single day.

…

He abandoned Vermont and headed west to the wild American frontier. His destination: Grand Detour, Illinois—a tiny settlement of barely 100 people where land was cheap, settlers were flooding in, and a skilled blacksmith might actually have a chance...When John Deere arrived in Illinois in 1837, he discovered something strange. The Midwest had a problem nobody could solve.

Beneath the endless prairie grass lay the richest, most fertile soil in North America. Dark, thick, packed with nutrients. It should have been a farmer’s paradise. Instead, it was their nightmare.

The prairie soil was completely different from the sandy earth back East. It was heavy, sticky, dense—like wet concrete. When farmers tried to plow it with traditional cast iron plows, the mud clung to the blade in thick clumps. Every few feet, farmers had to stop and scrape the mud off manually. The iron plows would crack and break under the strain. Hours of backbreaking work barely produced a single furrow.

America’s best farmland was almost impossible to farm.

…

In 1837, [John Deere] found a broken steel sawmill blade. He heated it in his forge until it glowed orange, then hammered it into the curved shape of a plow. He polished it until it gleamed like a mirror. He attached it to a wooden frame.

(Picture from the John Deere website – it looks like their museum.)

Then he handed it to a local farmer and said: “Try this.”

The farmer pushed the plow into the prairie soil.

It sliced through like a hot knife through butter.

The sticky, stubborn earth that had defeated every cast iron plow simply slid off the polished steel surface. No scraping. No stopping. No breaking.

The plow was self-cleaning. Revolutionary. Perfect.

Word spread across the prairie like wildfire.

Farmers traveled for miles just to see this miraculous plow. They came with cash in hand, desperate to buy one. John Deere’s tiny blacksmith shop was suddenly the most important business in Illinois.

He sold 3 plows in 1838. Then 10. Then 40. Then 100 a year. Then 1,000. By 1857, he was producing 10,000 plows annually.

…

The steel plow didn’t just help individual farmers. It unlocked an entire continent.

It made the Great Plains farmable. It enabled westward expansion. It turned subsistence farmers into commercial producers. It helped transform America from a nation that struggled to feed itself into an agricultural superpower that would eventually feed the world.

Historians rank the steel plow alongside the cotton gin and the mechanical reaper as one of the most transformative inventions of the 19th century.

I recommend the article to you in its entirety. It’s a reminder that one person can make a difference. One starving, bankrupt blacksmith in Vermont. Two bicycle mechanics from Ohio.

On a side note, the mayor-elect of New York City declared in his victory speech:

We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about. – Reported by Peggy Noonan, November 6, 2025

Exactly the opposite is true. Government didn’t invent the airplane, the Wright Brothers did. Government didn’t solve the problem of tilling the soil in the Midwest, John Deere did.

God is the great Creator, and he allows us to be his fellow-workers, his fellow-creators.

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Genesis 2.15, NIV)

Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. (Genesis 4.22, NIV)

We’re going through the Psalms of Ascent (120 – 134) letting Eugene Peterson, author of The Message Bible, guide us with his book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. I’ll tell you in advance, I’m the learner here, not the teacher.

Today, before we get into Psalm 120, let’s pull a couple of principles from the introductory chapter. I’m long familiar with “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” but I’d never heard the concept broken down like this:

An old tradition sorts the difficulties we face in the life of faith into the categories of world, flesh and devil. We are, for the most part, well warned of the perils of the flesh and the wiles of the devil. Their temptations have a definable shape and maintain a historical continuity. That doesn’t make them any easier to resist; it does make them easier to recognize.

The world, though, is protean [tending or able to change frequently or easily – I had to look it up!]: each generation has the world to deal with in a new form. World is an atmosphere, a mood. It is nearly as hard for a sinner to recognize the world’s temptations as it is for a fish to discover impurities in the water. There is a sense, a feeling, that things aren’t right, that the environment is not whole, but just what it is eludes analysis. We know that the spiritual atmosphere in which we live erodes faith, dissipates hope and corrupts love, but it is hard to put our finger on what is wrong.

One aspect of world that I have been able to identify as harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once. We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently. Our attention spans have been conditioned by thirty-second commercials…

Thus we start our pilgrimage, leaving “Meshech and Kedar.” Here is Psalm 120:

I’m in trouble. I cry to GOD, desperate for an answer: “Deliver me from the liars, GOD! They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth.”

Do you know what’s next, can you see what’s coming, all you barefaced liars? Pointed arrows and burning coals will be your reward.

I’m doomed to live in Meshech, cursed with a home in Kedar, My whole life lived camping among quarreling neighbors. I’m all for peace, but the minute I tell them so, they go to war! (MSG)

Peterson writes about this psalm which starts with “I’m in trouble” and ends with “war.”

The dissatisfaction, coupled with a longing for peace and truth, can set us on a pilgrim path of wholeness in God. A person has to be thoroughly disgusted with the way things are to find the motivation to set out on the Christian way. As long as we think the next election might eliminate crime and establish justice or another scientific breakthrough might save the environment or another pay raise might push us over the edge of anxiety into a life of tranquility, we are not likely to risk the arduous uncertainties of the life of faith. A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world before he, before she, acquires an appetite for the world of grace.

“A person has to get fed up with the ways of the world…” not trusting in the next election, the next scientific breakthrough, or the next pay raise. He continues:

Christian consciousness begins in the painful realization that what we had assumed was the truth is in fact a lie. Prayer is immediate: “Deliver me from the liars, God! They smile so sweetly but lie through their teeth.” Rescue me…

• from the lies of advertisers who claim to know what I need and what I desire,
• from the lies of entertainers who promise a cheap way to joy,
• from the lies of politicians who pretend to instruct me in power and morality,
• from the lies of psychologists who offer to shape my behavior and my morals so that I will live long, happily and successfully,
• from the lies of religionists who “heal the wounds of this people lightly,”
• from the lies of moralists who pretend to promote me to the office of captain of my fate,
• from the lies of pastors who “get rid of God’s command so you won’t be inconvenienced in following the religious fashions!” (Mark 7:8). (Bulleted for clarity)

“I’m doomed to live in Meschech, cursed with a home in Kedar.” Peterson explains:

Paraphrased, the cry is, “I live in the midst of hoodlums and wild savages; this world is not my home and I want out.” The usual biblical word describing the no we say to the world’s lies and the yes we say to God’s truth is repentance. It is always and everywhere the first word in the Christian life. John the Baptist’s preaching was “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3.2 RSV). Jesus’ first preaching was the same: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4.17 RSV). Peter concluded his first sermon with “Repent, and be baptized” (Acts 2.38 RSV). In the last book of the Bible the message to the seventh church is “be zealous and repent” (Revelation 3.19 RSV).

So the word for Psalm 120 is repent. Peterson clarifies:

Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision.

It’s a decision to say no to the world and yes to God.

“I’m doomed to live in Meshech, cursed with a home in Kedar! My whole life lived camping among quarreling neighbors.” But we don’t have to live there any longer. Repentance, the first word in Christian immigration, sets us on the way to traveling in the light. It is a rejection that is also an acceptance, a leaving that develops into an arriving, a no to the world that is a yes to God.

With respect to repentance, Paul wrote:

…yet now I am happy, not because you were made sorry, but because your sorrow led you to repentance. For you became sorrowful as God intended and so were not harmed in any way by us. Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death. (2 Corinthians 7.9, 10, NIV)

Our reading plan has completed Psalm 119 (a non-trivial 176 verses!), and we move immediately into “The Psalms of Ascent.” These are 15 short psalms sung by Jewish people as they went to Jerusalem three times a year. Since Jerusalem is located on a mountain, one always “goes up to Jerusalem” from any direction.

The article Psalms of Ascent: Footprints Along the Spiritual Path by Eugene Peterson is actually the preface of his book: A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, which is a collection of meditations on Psalms 120 – 134. I commend the article in its entirety and the book. I will be using the book in my own devotions as I go through these psalms, and I’ll share highlights in the Ewellogy.

Here are some snippets from the article/preface:

In the pastoral work of training people in discipleship and accompanying them in pilgrimage, I have found, tucked away in the Hebrew Psalter, an old dog-eared songbook. I have used it to provide continuity in guiding others in the Christian way and directing people of faith in the conscious and continuous effort that develops into maturity in Christ.

The old songbook is called, in Hebrew, shiray hammaloth—Songs of Ascents. The songs are the psalms numbered 120 through 134 in the book of Psalms. These fifteen psalms were likely sung, possibly in sequence, by Hebrew pilgrims as they went up to Jerusalem to the great worship festivals. Topographically Jerusalem was the highest city in Palestine, and so all who traveled there spent much of their time ascending.

But the ascent was not only literal, it was also a metaphor: the trip to Jerusalem acted out a life lived upward toward God, an existence that advanced from one level to another in developing maturity—what Paul described as “the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus” (Philippians 3.12 – 14)

…

Christians will recognize how appropriately these psalms may be sung between the times: between the time we leave the world’s environment and arrive at the Spirit’s assembly; between the time we leave sin and arrive at holiness; between the time we leave home on Sunday morning and arrive in church with the company of God’s people; between the time we leave the works of the law and arrive at justification by faith. They are songs of transition, brief hymns that provide courage, support and inner direction for getting us to where God is leading us in Jesus Christ.

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Everyone who travels the road of faith requires assistance from time to time. We need cheering up when spirits flag; we need direction when the way is unclear…For those who choose to live no longer as tourists but as pilgrims, the Songs of Ascents combine all the cheerfulness of a travel song with the practicality of a guidebook and map.

It’s a pilgrimage. Christian discipleship is a long obedience in the same direction. There are no instant solutions even though we live in a world that’s powered by promises of quick fixes. Microwave ovens are way more popular than crockpots!

Join me on the journey. We’ll start with Psalm 120 tomorrow.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage…They go from strength to strength, till each appears before God in Zion. (Psalm 84.5, 7, NIV)

We come to the end of our journey through Psalm 119. It has 176 verses, 170 of which are explicitly about the word. Here are the other six, and it might be instructive to look at them all in one place:

• 84: How long must your servant endure? When will you judge those who persecute me?
• 90: Your faithfulness endures to all generations; you have established the earth, and it stands fast.
• 121: I have done what is just and right; do not leave me to my oppressors.
• 122: Give your servant a pledge of good; let not the insolent oppress me.
• 132: Turn to me and be gracious to me, as is your way with those who love your name.
• 149: Hear my voice according to your steadfast love; O LORD, according to your justice give me life.

Six verses with no mention of the Word. All are prayers, of course, but…

• Three of the prayers are specifically about deliverance from oppressors: 84, 121, 122.
• Two are more general requests for God’s blessing: 132, 149.
• One is praise for God’s permanence: 90.

And how does this magnificent psalm end? Prayers for God’s help, tied to the psalmist’s response to his word: chosen, delighted in, remembered: TAU, verses 169 – 176.

• Let Your hand become my help, For I have chosen Your precepts.
• I long for Your salvation, O LORD, And Your law is my delight.
• Let my soul live, and it shall praise You; And let Your judgments help me.
• I have gone astray like a lost sheep; Seek Your servant, For I do not forget Your commandments. (173 – 176)

We opened our journey with the suggestion that if you’re having trouble being motivated to spend time with God in the Word and prayer, Psalm 119 might be cure. Was it? I know it has renewed my appreciation for the Word!

Therefore I love Your commandments More than gold, yes, than fine gold! (127)

Back to Psalm 119 – we’re nearly done! Stanza PE, verses 129 – 136. contains a well-known verse:

The entrance of Your words gives light; It gives understanding to the simple. (130)

“The entrance of your words gives light” reminds us of Psalm 119.105 – a light for our path.

“It gives understanding to the simple” sounds remarkably like:

The law of the LORD is perfect, refreshing the soul. The statutes of the LORD are trustworthy, making wise the simple. (Psalm 19.7, NIV)

“Making wise the simple” is from, not Psalm 119, but Psalm 19, which, interestingly, also contains praise for God’s Word. (Psalm 19.7 – 11)

PE also contains our 5th non-word verse. We’ll talk about that and the other five tomorrow.

It’s Veteran’s Day and useful to remember what I first wrote 4 years ago that God values warriors. Consider:

• God is referred to in scripture as a warrior: But the LORD is with me like a mighty warrior… (Jeremiah 20.11, NIV)
• One of the last pictures we have of Jesus is as a warrior.

Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems, and he has a name written that no one knows but himself. He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses. (Revelation 19.11 – 14, ESV)

• Many of God’s key men were warriors:
  • Abraham led his men on an armed mission to rescue Lot. (Genesis 14.11 – 16)
  • Joshua was a general who led a series of campaigns to capture the promised land.
  • Gideon (and most of the judges) led the Israelites to conquer their oppressors.
  • David, of course, was a warrior demonstrated first in his defeat of Goliath. (1 Samuel 17.31 – 49)
  • A significant chunk of scripture is devoted to Davd’s mighty men. (1 Chronicles 11:10 – 12:22)
  • The first recorded Gentile convert was Cornelius, a Roman centurion. (Acts 10)

I’ve been challenged in adult Sunday School classes about being “too military.” But I don’t write this stuff…I just report it! If God didn’t value warriors both for what they do and for the fact that warriors remind us of spiritual warfare, God wouldn’t have devoted so much space to honoring warriors. Here are some snippets from 1 Chronicles 11:

• He wielded his spear against 300 whom he killed at one time.
• He took his stand in the midst of the plot and defended it and killed the Philistines. And the Lord saved them by a great victory.
• He wielded his spear against 300 men and killed them.
• He struck down two heroes of Moab. He also went down and struck down a lion in a pit on a day when snow had fallen. And he struck down an Egyptian, a man of great stature, five cubits tall. The Egyptian had in his hand a spear like a weaver’s beam, but Benaiah went down to him with a staff and snatched the spear out of the Egyptian’s hand and killed him with his own spear.

Those were some tough men!

This is a day to honor all the men and women who have served and are serving in our armed forces. God bless them.

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. (Ephesians 6.10 – 13, ESV)

Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle; he is my steadfast love and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me. (Psalm 144.1, 2, ESV)

PS My oldest son, Mark, sent his daughter Kesley to school on Veteran’s Day three years ago with this picture of her two grandfathers. My picture was made in early 1971. Her other grandfather, Mac, was an Army helicopter pilot in Viet Nam. Mac was a warrior. I was not, or at least not the same kind of warrior as he was. But up until his death, Mac would call me every year to wish me a happy Veteran’s Day. “We were soldiers once…and young.”