IF (Psalm 124)

The trash bin at a local thrift store had this warning--maybe to keep

people from getting entrapped in it!

(Part of an ongoing series on the 48 psalms commended to study during times of "feeling down," from pastor-counselor David Seamands' book, Healing for Damaged Emotions.)

Flash flood!  I’ve never lived where flash flooding rated national front-page news, but our arid valley has endured a few minor-league floods. Decades ago, one sedate stream turned into a death machine, killing people in a hotel on its banks. A few years ago, a severe storm turned the street a few blocks away, into an angry brown river. Israel, similarly an arid land, is also known for flash floods that its usually dry wadis cannot handle. That’s the picture King David provides in Psalm 124 as he seeks ways to illustrate how God is our Help when we feel inundated by life’s problems and threats. The opening word, “if,” emphasizes how they depended on God for victory:

If the LORD had not been on our side—let Israel say—if the Lord had not been on our side when men attacked us….they would have swallowed us alive. (vv. 1-3)

Context matters in Bible study, and this one is believed to have been inspired by one of King David’s more challenging battles against the Philistines. Recorded in 2 Samuel 5:17-25, it tells how David’s army prevailed in what threatened to be a “flash flood” of intense fighting (Psalm 124:4-5).

TRAPS

Though probably written in different historical settings, Psalms 123 and 124 are linked in subject matter. Psalm 123 speaks of verbal oppression (ridicule and contempt form the oppressor). Psalm 124 goes to all-out attacks—maybe not sword to shield, but demeaning choices meant to overwhelm us, like a flood. Then, as if to be sure he covers all the bases of spiritual attack, David throws in the image of a bird trap:

We have escaped like a bird out of the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped. (v. 7).

The psalm doesn’t give a clue as to how “meaty” those snared birds were, but the entrapped birds didn’t have a chance. The apostle Peter picked up on that image when he said Satan prowls around like a lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). David’s saying that God cares so much for us that He reaches down and releases those dangerous traps. How does that translate to real life, and real days when the negatives get you down?  These truths, I believe:

*No overwhelming flood of problems is too overwhelming for God.

*No entrapment by someone’s negative words or actions is outside God’s power. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ broke the power of the trap!

The psalm ends on a note of praise, as well it should—and as well we should do as an antidote to prolonged complaints about negative circumstances:

Our help is in the name of the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.(v. 8)

Do you hear an echo from Psalm 121:2?

My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.

It’s said that French Protestants in the late 18^th century opened every public worship service with this verse. If you have a spot to post inspirational verses, consider displaying this one. If (there’s that important word again!) you feel attacked or entrapped, it’s a reminder that our omniscient, omnipresent, all-powerful God is adequate for any discouraging challenge out there.

Pouring chocolate

A series inspired by sights in Kauai.
Heavy rainfall had turned the usually white-frothed Wailua Falls, near the east coast of Kauai, into thrashing muddy flood.  Still, it was beautiful and worthy of its “must visit” rating as we chose what to see in Kauai.  Most sources say it falls 140 feet; some claim it’s 173 high, others, less than 100 feet.  Despite warnings of safety, some dare to swim in its pool.  In ancient days, Hawaiian men would jump from the top of the falls to prove their manhood.  Today’s that illegal because of the danger.

In contrast to the roar and volume of the Wailua Falls, I recalled my study a few years ago of the water-pouring ceremony associated with “Feast of Tabernacles” in ancient Jerusalem.  Priests would process to the city’s “Pool of Siloam,” a reservoir created in King Hezekiah’s time, holding water brought 1,780 feet through a conduit hewn from rock from a small spring outside the city.  One day Jesus watched the priests go through their ritual, then shocked everybody by saying with a loud voice, “If a man is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.  Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.”  The “living water” to which He referred, would be the Holy Spirit, to be poured out in magnificence at Pentecost to help Christ-followers (who include us today) to live out their faith with refreshing power. An old hymn by Horatius Bonar (1808-1889), Scottish preacher and hymn-writer, has one stanza that speaks of this:

I heard the voice of Jesus say, ‘Behold, I freely give
The living water-- thirsty one, Stoop down and drink, and live.”
I came to Jesus, and I drank of that life-giving stream;
My thirst was quenched, my soul revived, And now I live in Him.

This “living water” is what keeps us going when life sends us reeling with its muddy flows of destruction and disappointment.  In recent weeks, as I’ve prayed for troubled loved ones, another hymn has flowed through my heart like a life-giving, cleansing stream.  At times, just a few words of the chorus helped to settle my heart and trust God again:

Jesus, Jesus, how I trust Him, How I’ve proved Him o’er and o’er!
Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus! O for grace to trust Him more.

Hymn books name the lyric’s authors as Louisa Stead, who penned the entire verse in 1882. Born in England, she became a Christian at age nine and as a teenager felt the call to mission work. A revival meeting at Urbana, Ohio, confirmed that on her heart. But when she applied to go to China, the mission board felt her health was too fragile.  She married and had a little girl. But when her daughter was about four, her husband drowned trying to save someone.  Muddy waters!  But shortly after, she and her little girl sailed to mission work in South Africa! Widowed, alone, in a foreign culture—that’s when she wrote these lyrics. During her fifteen years there, she married again, but poor health meant a return to America where her second husband pastored a Methodist Church.  By 1900, her health restored, they returned to Africa, this time to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) as missionaries!  She retired in 1911 (about age 61) and died six years later. 

Of her last work in Rhodesia, she wrote in her journal, “In connection with this whole mission there are glorious possibilities. One cannot in the face of peculiar difficulties help saying, ‘Who is sufficient for these things?’ But with simple confidence and trust we may and do say, ‘Our sufficiency is of God.’”

Louisa Stead could have allowed her faith to be drowned in the floods of disappointment and a spouse’s death. But she trusted in Jesus, and “proved Him o’er and o’er,” living in the power of His living water.

Floods and fickle trickles

It goes by the prosaic name “Dry Falls,” and when you look across the sedate coulee in central Washington State, you can only imagine its former thunderous, foaming glory. Scientists say about 16,000 years ago, an ice dam created an enormous lake that stretched into today’s western Montana. Then it burst. The resulting cataclysmic flooding scoured layers of basalt and dug out deep coulees, resulting in monstrous falls. This one was probably three and a half miles wide and 400 feet high, ten times larger than the present Niagara Falls. Yes, Niagara Falls—the foaming behemoth that a tight-rope walker successfully crossed just a few weeks ago as the world wondered, would he fall?


When a cross-state journey recently took us by Dry Falls, I thought of how easily as Christians we’re content with a “fickle trickle of God.” We want the label of “Christian,” the assurance of Heaven when we die, but we're like the lakes at the bottom of Dry Falls: just sitting there. Or, deep within us, we’re yearning for more spiritual power, as David expressed: “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1).

Those who feel stuck as spiritual “dry falls” can learn from Psalm 63 how to move out of there.

Get a glimpse of God. David wrote, “I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory” (v. 2). Of course, we don’t “see” God, but in worship we’re reminded of His power, authority and holiness. When Isaiah had a vision of the throne room of God, his first reaction was “Woe to me!” (Isaiah 6:1). He realized how unworthy He was in God’s absolutely pure presence. The same lesson comes to us. Getting closer to God requires confessing the sin that looms as a barrier between us. David lived for months with spiritual dryness from trying to cover up his adultery and murder. When these were exposed, David cried out, “Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity!” (Psalm 51:2). This was no stain-stick fix. This was thorough, harsh soul-scrubbing. Remember that “sin” includes wrong things we do (“sins of commission”) and things we’re wrong in not doing before God (“sins of omission”). Confession that breaks down sin barriers is the first step toward God’s purifying, holy flood.

Worship in community. When David encountered God in the worship center, he wasn’t alone. It was always filled with worshippers. Even as king, he needed the connections of other God-fearing people—the “all who swear by God’s name [and] praise Him” (v. 11). We, too, need the community of believers to pull us out of spiritual apathy. “Bedside Baptist”/”Pillow Presbyterian”/”Mattress Methodist” (or whatever tongue-in-cheek term you have for staying away from public worship) doesn’t do it. Yes, it takes effort to get to church and it’s risky to establish relationships, but there’s no other way to build a spiritual support network. “Let us not give up meeting together,” warns Hebrews 10:35, “as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another.”

Choose to praise. David could draw on the praise songs he composed during his lonely tenure as a shepherd boy. He also had the Hebrew scriptures to buttress his understanding of God’s praiseworthy attributes. Praise grows out of a deep appreciation for all that God has done for us and an intimacy with the Bible through reading, meditation, and memorization. “If your law had not been my delight,” says Psalm 119:92, “I would have perished in my affliction.”

Focus on God rather than negatives. David wrote of remembering God while in bed at night (v. 6). Instead of mulling over problems, turn heart-tugging scriptures into prayers. I remember a difficult time when Psalm 18 seemed to glow in neon lights from the pages of my Bible. I’d pray (from verse 33), “You promised to make my feet like the feet of a deer. I’m feeling wobbly now. Help me to stand on the heights. Train me for this battle to come.”

Don’t limit God. He can do amazing things. Ironically, after seeing Dry Falls, we spent the night at Post Falls, Idaho. As I took a photo of these falls the next morning, I thought of Jesus, days away from His death, standing near a public water source in Jerusalem and crying out, “Whoever believes in me, as the scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him” (John 8:38). Not Dry Falls. Not Niagara Falls. Something far greater, far better, and far more satisfying!