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)