Psalm 137: "Oh, rats!"

I was in for a not-so-pleasant surprise the morning I went to the home of my vacationing son and family to feed their cat and check on things. As I rounded the corner after fetching mail, my eye caught sight of a critter.  Backing up to look closer, I can truthfully say I’m glad it was dead! We’ve had an occasional mouse at our house, and they’re barely bigger than my thumb. This was no mouse. My city has had increasing complaints about (ugh) rats, and this was one of them. With my hand in one plastic grocery bag as an improvised glove, I pushed it in another grocery bag, tied a knot, and dumped it in their trash.



Psalm 137 expresses a dead-rat sort of disgust. It comes at an interesting point in the book of psalms. Right before, Psalm 136 has risen in a crescendo of ways to give thanks to God for His enduring love. After singing that, the people were on a spiritual high.  But at one point in history—one that happened long after the “Exodus” events of Psalm 136—the Jews weren’t singing much any more. God had judged their disobedience by allowing the Babylonians to conquer them and march them more than a thousand grueling desert miles away to that pagan land.

Talk about being homesick!  Their captors mocked them, saying, “Sing your old songs about your temple in Jerusalem.” No way could the Jews do that. They’d never stand for pagans making fun of the songs dearest to their hearts. So they hung their harps on trees and kept doing their slave work, their distaste for their captors growing by the day.  They may have been transplanted in Babylon, but they weren’t rooted there. Their hearts still yearned for their homeland and Jerusalem, “my highest joy.”

They had as much love for the Babylonians as for the Edomites, a wretched tribe in their homeland that had cheered the Babylonians on as they captured and destroyed Jerusalem. (The minor prophet Obadiah similarly scolds Edom.) The Jews’ disgust got quite ugly, in fact, wishing a horrible thing—murder of Babylon’s infants, its next generation—by the future nation that would conquer Babylon. Where was the Jews’ compassion? On the other hand, the Jews had probably watched the Babylons slaughter Jewish babies as part of their sick military practices.

I don’t like Psalm 137 or any of the other “imprecatory” or condemning psalms. But they present a sobering reality: that those who oppose God will someday pay the price of their sin. Today, ancient Babylon is ruins. Edom’s fortresses are desolate. God judges evil. Romans 2:6 says he will judge every person “according to what he has done.”

But here's the hope: through the death and resurrection of Christ, we can have our lives transformed.
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions--it is by grace you have been saved. (Ephesians 2:5)