Daniel Lesson 19

Babylonian Exile of Jews II – Psalm 137

Psalm 137 was the great prayer that was prayed by the Jews in captivity, a prayer that was very controversial and one that many skeptics of the Christian faith loved to point to, to demonstrate what they perceived to be an internal contradiction in the Christian system; how, they ask, can a loving God condone this kind of praying on the part of His followers, prayers that call for the slaughter of babies as in verse 9. With this kind of praying, praying for retribution, praying for vengeance, praying for justice, many people have a problem. Psalm 137 was prayed sometime before October 12, 539 BC. Actually the Psalm was written later because as we saw in verse 1 it is written in retrospect, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,” it’s time past, and there we did certain things. So the Psalm was actually written about a prayer, it was prayed a lot earlier.

On October 12, 539 BC, in Daniel 5 we just finished the fall of Babylon. We saw in the book of Daniel that the city was, from the human point of view, a perfect bastion of military defense and yet it fell in very odd and freak circumstances. Freak circumstances that were not freak because there are no accidents in God’s plan, there is no luck in God’s plan. There is God’s providence and God saw to it that when He wrote the handwriting on the wall that that handwriting would be accurate to every letter, and the city would fall just as it had been planned, for various reasons. And one of the reasons for the fall of Babylon is the prayer of Psalm 137 and therefore we are studying it. Last week we studied some of the background for Psalm 137 from Jeremiah 29 and we found that Jeremiah had carefully instructed the believers in the face of the destruction of their homeland that while they were in this foreign country as exiles, they were to have an inner tension. They were to participate fully in the divine institutions, but they were to look for the city without foundations, so they were kind of in a way split in their allegiance, they were to be aligned to the divine institutions of their nation, so we have the first divine institution, which is volition or human responsibility; the second divine institution which is marriage; the third divine institution which is family; the fourth divine institution which is the state, state power, and the fifth which is the tribal diversity among men on earth.

These divine institutions were given by God at the point of creation. As these institutions are common to both believer and unbeliever it means that people in Babylon married; people outside of Babylon married. Hebrews in Babylon married, Gentiles in Babylon married. They had families, Gentiles and Hebrews. So there’s no difference. All creatures are subject to the controls of these creation ordinances. That wasn’t the problem; the problem with the Jew in exile was that though he was to submit to the legitimate authority, the legitimate spheres of authority, he was not to submit to the spirit of the nation, the mental attitude of the nation, the autonomous rebellion against God’s Word and its standard that characterized Babylon. And so his allegiance was to be in Jerusalem.

Psalm 137 is a famous lament Psalm, sung by we don’t know how many people, but prayed on at least one occasion by these irrigation areas in the city. The word “rivers” in the case here in point are actually irrigation ditches dug so that the water from the Tigris-Euphrates valley would be pumped into the fields that were relatively flat nearby. So in Psalm 137:1, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, year, we wept, when we remembered Zion.” And these people are weeping legitimately. It’s an interesting study to go through Scripture and see when weeping is authorized in God’s Word and when it’s not authorized in God’s Word. Man is the only creature that cries; man is the one who has the tear ducts. And they are used for things other than just cleansing his eyes. We are made this way because now we are fallen creatures. And tears are part and parcel of living in a fallen world; no one need be ashamed of tears. Tears are a corollary to the fall of man. And so by summarizing, by reviewing many, many passages of Scripture we can summarize certain points about the doctrine of crying or when weeping is authorized in Scripture. Tears are to continue, even among believers until the eternal state. Isaiah 25:8; Revelation 7:17 and 21:4, regardless of even the present work of the Holy Spirit there will be tears shed, and it will be because of the curse that has come into history. And it will not be until that curse is removed when God wipes all their tears away, and the tears will be gone. Until that time, even the works in history of the Holy Spirit is not sufficient to remove all tears.

The second point that is made consistently through Scripture is not only that the tears will continue until the eternal state, but that there is to be a difference between the tears of believers, and the one difference is that believers are to be lacking, minus, total despair. The tears of a believer are there because a believer is a fallen creature too and he too is hurt; and the tears are a result of his being hurt, physically or emotionally or spiritually. But the believer can’t be hurt in the way the unbeliever can be hurt and that is because the believer is in Christ, he positionally shares the place of Jesus Christ, he has salvation for all eternity and therefore he is commanded in Scripture that when he weeps, which he will, he is not to weep as one in total despair. Jeremiah 31:16 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13, in both these passages we have cases where believers cry but they are to cry in a different way than unbelievers.

A third thing that we observe in Scripture summarizing the Scriptures on crying is that tears may often accompany legitimate prayer petitions to God the Father. On a number of occasions the petition is made out of an anxious soul that is hurt and this soul manifests itself during the actual praying in tears. We have the psalmist praying with tears in Psalm 42:3. We have the father praying to Jesus asking Jesus to heal his son with tears in Mark 9:24, because of the tremendous involvement on the part of the petitioner in the prayer process, he has tears when he prays. The repentant prostitute in Luke 7:38 and 44 prays with tears to Jesus Christ. And most of all and the best example, of course, is Jesus Himself prays with tears in Hebrews 5:7.

So therefore we have legitimate Biblical models for prayers that are made involving emotion, but they are not made from emotion, they’re made with emotion. They are not just emotional prayers, they are prayers that are first and foremost deeply spiritual prayers that have been thought out and they use doctrine to make the petition and to design the petition wisely. This is one of the things, this wise design of the petition, that we’re trying to all train ourselves in how to make wise petitions to the Father. Sure, God hears prayers, but don’t you think it would help God the Father out once in a while to hear something intelligent come up instead of some of the ridiculous “God help me” kind of thing. Sure He answers prayer, He’s a gracious God and He always will answer those kinds of prayers, but God the Father is a person and He enjoys someone who is spiritually mature that prays intelligently. So tears may accompany legitimate prayer.

A fourth thing that we notice in Scripture, besides the fact that tears can be involved in petition type prayer, is that the leaders, the spiritual leaders are often in tears for their sheep. And not until you are a leader can you appreciate this. Jeremiah 9:1, Jeremiah 13:17; Jeremiah 14:17, Lamentations 2:11, but also Paul in Acts 20:19 and 31 and 2 Corinthians 2:4, and the reason that these men are in tears for believers is because they have taught the Word and taught the Word and taught the Word and believers have rejected the Word and rejected the Word and rejected the Word, and now God is disciplining the sheep. No Christian leader rejoices to see his people clobbered by the hand of God. And these are two magnificent examples of men in Scripture who did their best in their generation to communicate doctrine to the sheep and the sheep rejected.

All right, the fifth thing that we notice in Scripture about how the Scripture views tears, is that believers when they cry are to cry about the right object, not the wrong one. And we have two passages in particular that emphasize this. One is crying is forbidden toward the wrong object for the wrong reason, Ezekiel 24:16. This is a case where to get the point across Ezekiel had to endure one of the most awful test that any prophet in the Old Testament had to endure apart from Hosea. God took Ezekiel’s wife home to be with the Lord; He killed her, God did, directly and miraculously, and then he told Ezekiel when your wife dies this morning, I don’t want you to shed a tear. And the reason was to illustrate a doctrinal principle that the people ought not to cry about their own sin, they ought to be changing it and not just sitting there crying about it. So Ezekiel had to pass a test in Ezekiel 24:16. And then a crying that is toward a legitimate object is Jeremiah 9:18, when Jeremiah condones crying but for a bona fide reason.

A sixth point, besides the fact that the object has to be tested, the sixth reason is that tears can often mean nothing more than unrepentant emotion and that’s all they indicate. And you have people carry on and put on a big convincing show and that’s all it means. There’s no change in their volition. In Malachi 2:13 people were bellyaching to God in that generation and Malachi says what are you bellyaching about, you brought this on yourselves. And it’s one of the classic passages on multitudinous divorce; Malachi 2:13, that’s one of the passages where God says He hates divorce. Esau is another example in Hebrews 12:17; Esau said he sought repentance with tears and didn’t find it because he sought it strictly on an emotional basis and repentance is not an emotion. The word “repentance” in Scripture is metanoieo and it means to change your mind, and incidentally, you may have emotion and you may not, but the issue in the word “repentance” is not what the word normally means in the English language today. In the English language today, at least in America, the word tends to have an emotional connotation and that’s not true; repentance in Scripture has nothing to do with emotion. And the proof is Hebrews 12:17.

Now the people in the Old Testament were largely, as a people, more emotional than we are, not in the bad sense. Actually they let out their emotions and were done with them; in American people keep their emotions in and have ulcers, so don’t argue that the Hebrews were more emotional absolutely than Americans; they were, it’s just that when they had them they let them go and that was it, they got it out of their system. They had a fantastic system of handling the funeral problem. They had a time of weeping, and it apparently was commanded by God as a time of mourning, and it sounds ridiculous to go through the funeral procedures of the Old Testament but there is a process in there of time and now modern research has discovered in the psychology of sorrow that this time period is needed. And of course it was anticipated 30 centuries ago when God laid forth His law. All right, that’s the weeping, and they’re weeping in Psalm 137:1, because they cannot get to the place where God is. God is in history, located in Zion, that’s where His temple is, and they can’t get there and they’re weeping is bona fide, their weeping is a weeping for a loss of fellowship with God that they had and they lost. A lot of believers have had time and opportunities to get the Word, and then the Lord calls them, moves them away to areas where they no longer have the fellowship they once had and then they cry about it. And often times the crying is because they failed to use the opportunity while they had it.

Now in Psalms 137:2 these believers who were in tears did something that was very, very interesting. They “hanged their harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.” Those of you who are tree nuts and you like to know all about the different kinds of trees and so forth, here’s the passage where the word “weeping willow” came from. Now the weeping willow used to be thought to be named for the tree that the Jews hung the harp on and it caused the willow to actually change into it’s hanging down and that’s not true because the tree that we call the weeping willow does not happen to be the same tree that was planted here. But the concept is okay; the concept is right, that man affects nature; it would have been theoretically possible, in other words, in Scripture for a tree to change its botanical structure in response to man’s acts. This is one of the great and kind of unusual things about the Biblical view of nature, that nature can change. All these experiments that you hear about people with music to their plants and they make their plants grow, that is not necessarily stupid. In fact, as far as the Scriptures go, what that may be is that in plants there is a residual ability to respond to man that was there before the fall and has been partly lost and partly unrecognized and it still may exist. So it may not just be some wives tale and music and talking nice to your plants help them. Now we don’t know, the experiment is still being run on it, but it’s not improbable from the standing of Scripture.

Now they “hung their harps upon the willows,” these willow trees, the trees grew by the side of these irrigation ditches. The harps show that the musical instruments were used in the Old Testament. This business about you can’t use musical instruments in the worship of God is a bunch of bologna. It’s taken from early church tradition when the Christians were in the catacombs and they didn’t have musical instruments. All right, you’re not going to drag an organ down into the catacombs to play, where the Roman police are ready to arrest you. So obviously they didn’t have instruments in the first and second century; they were running from the police most of the time. You don’t advertise by having an orchestra play outside where you’re meeting. So in the early primitive worship of the Christians it is true that no instruments were used. But normally instruments were used because the Bible put its stamp of approval on culture. You don’t have to be culturally barren to be a believer. It’s not pious to be culturally barren. God’s Word would stimulate you who have artistic flavor to develop that and express your humanity, your regenerate humanity artistically. There’s nothing wrong with that and it can be used in worship also. So we “hung our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.”

Psalm 137:3, “For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.” Now we have a very interesting situation developing in verse 3 and out of verse 3 we get a principle of the arts. A principle that I just discovered in working through verse 3, although I had thought about it earlier but I had never ran across a verse that states it quite so explicitly as this. This is one of the few places in Scripture where believers go on strike; this is an actual musician’s strike, and they refuse to play their instruments and they refuse to perform. They refused to use their artistic ability. Now why is this? There’s a tremendous principle in verse 3. The people are going to use them… here the Jews are, and the Jews had tremendous musical talent. Now it says in verse 3 that their captives demanded of them a song and then in the parallel, remember this is synonymous parallelism, “they that captured us required a song,” “they that wasted us mirth.” Now the word “song” is used in parallel to “mirth.” The word “mirth” here is just the Old English for joy. Now the captives were not interested in giving allegiance to Jehovah God, they wanted joy apart from the spiritual allegiance that went into those songs.

Let’s use another illustration. A lot of people like Handel’s Messiah because it’s very beautiful music, so often times they play it in the most liberal of churches and everyone gets an ecstatic experience on the Hallelujah chorus and all the rest, and it is beautiful music. But Handel did not intend, when he wrote the Messiah, for it to be used on a sheer emotional level. That’s why he was so careful when he wrote the lyrics to the Messiah to write them scripturally. The Messiah to Handel wasn’t entertainment, it was worship. So there’s a difference. The Jews have musical talent but when they see music they don’t use it to manipulate people; they used their music to worship God and to them it’s inconceivable to use their musical talents and be used by someone who wants to hear the sweet sound but doesn’t want to pay allegiance and respect to Jehovah their God, about whom they are singing. So when they were faced with a situation of using their talents they would not allow themselves to be manipulated. And this is a very interesting case where music is rejected as a form of entertainment.

This is one thing that’s wrong about most architecture; most church structures had a choir loft and the choir lofts are usually in the front of the church. Do you know why that’s wrong? The choir does not entertain; the choir actually should be at the back. That’s the Old Testament way of doing it, the Levitical choirs never performed for people; they faced the temple with the people because they were leading the people in worship. The whole point was that the people that sung in the Levitical choirs had talent and they had superior talent and that talent was not to be used to put on a performance, that talent was used to help the other people, like myself who couldn’t carry a tune in a bag, so that we can worship too. So music scripturally is to be used to help worship. Not that’s not excluding the place for solo activity in certain performances, that’s all right. That’s fine because that can be viewed as a teaching device. When you hear a soloist and they’re playing you can look upon that as a teaching device to generate appreciation in your soul for the Word of God. When we talk about this area every area of art is going to have its flaws because man is fallen and people are going to make mistakes; that’s not the issue. The issue is the attitude and the reasons why we’re carrying it on. And the attitude and the reasons were wrong in verse 3, these people are quitting in verse 3, not because they’re afraid of making a mistake. If you make a mistake and some jerk laughs at you, that’s their problem. The person who laughs at mistakes does not have a grace attitude and they’re the problem, you ought to be laughing at them. We all make mistakes.

So verse 3, they are not stopping because they are afraid of making mistakes; they’re stopping because their listeners are in rebellion against the Word of God. That’s why they’re stopping and under those conditions these believers will not condone that kind of rebellion. And their way of separating from people who are in rebellion against the Word of God is you are not going to enjoy the talent that God has given me because you’re not interested in the God who gave me that talent. And if you’re not interested in the God who gave me that talent then I am not going to use it just to massage your negative volition. So verse 3 gives a very important principle that ought to be applied across the board as far as believers are concerned. So they say “sing us one of the songs of Zion. Apparently they had superior music in that time; we don’t know what this music was, it disappeared from history. The Jews of the exile did not continue the ancient forms of music. And we lost a vast amount of musical composition because they did this strike in Psalm 137; that was the break, they refused to conduct and continue this kind of music.

Psalm 137:4 is the reason why, “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” The “strange land” is a word which refers to a person who rejects Yahweh, or the God of Israel. The “strange land” is emphasis upon the rebellion in principle of the kingdom of man. They say how is it possible to take a song that is talking and communicating about Jesus Christ, perform it with beauty and embellish it with all the music, play it to a group of people who by their very nature are in rebellion against Jesus Christ. What kind of incongruity is this? So they draw the conclusion, we can’t sing this song of the Lord in a strange land. Music is to be played to deserving audiences and not undeserving ones. You are discriminating and that is a bona fide area of discrimination. Some people aren’t worth the time by their attitude.

In Psalm 137:5-6 we have the second section. Verses 1-4 is the psalmist looks back and recalls the frustration of the exilic experience and verses 5-6 deal with his loyal dedication to Jerusalem. We said that an individual lament Psalm always has what we call a confidence section. A confidence section is a section that tells you what kind of promises the believer is claiming in the midst of the pressure. These are important sections; when you read lament Psalms always look for the confidence section because that will train you on how these believers were thinking when they got hit with the pressure. In other words, what was their response to the pressure; did they claim this promise or did they use that doctrine or what happened. The confidence sections will tell you what was going on in their soul. So here in verses 5-6 we have the thinking of these musicians as they refuse to perform. And here’s the oath, they’ve given us a vow. This is a strange case but it’s a vow of confidence is what it is, the first one we’ve seen; we went through the Psalms but we’ve never seen one of these constructions.

Psalm 137:5-6, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. [6] If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” Now a lot of modern translations have a real problem at verse 5 because verse 5 seems to be incomplete. If you have a King James you notice at the end of verse 5 is in italics, that’s because the italics aren’t in the original text, so the verse originally reads in the Hebrew, “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget” and you wonder, right hand forget what. The King James translators supplied the word “cunning.” We have the wrong connotation of the word “cunning,” we think of cunning as somebody that’s trying to rip you off or something. That’s not the word “cunning.” What they meant to say here was skill, and if you notice in verse 5 there’s a mention about the hand. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my hand forget her skill.” And, verse 6, “If I do not remember thee, then let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

Now in the context, since this is a Psalm that’s talking about musically inclined believers, what do you suppose verses 5-6 are talking about? The hands and the mouth; they would be used in the musical singing and in the instruments, so the vow is if I forget the loyalty of Jerusalem, then let my musical talent be destroyed. You see the theme, of confidence, and it matches why these believers are so intent on not performing and using their musical talent for just any group of people, they are selective in who they use their talent to help and to minister to. And the idea is that God has invested a natural ability; it’s not a spiritual ability, it’s a natural gift. And only some people have the natural gift of music. Adam have probably had it but since Adam few people have had it in history; the majority of us do not have musical ability, musical ability is inherited, you’re born with it. If you don’t have it you can stand on your head and nothing is going to happen, you won’t get on tune. All right, a natural gift is still from God, even though it’s not a spiritual gift like in the dispensation of the church, but the loyalty in verses 5-6 is that I will not prostitute my natural gift for Satan’s world. Satan’s world is full of hostility; the kingdom of man is a dark kingdom, and what Satan always does is he comes over to the kingdom of God and he rips off things that are pleasant. For example, ethics; he rips off “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” he rips off the songs of joy, things like Handel’s Messiah that people find pleasant and delightful and they love to listen to. And he rips these things off and steals them out of the kingdom of God to bring over into his own kingdom to make it look better than it really is. So there’s a constant process of theft in which Satan prostitutes the arts to dress up his world, and it’s always insincere, it’s just taking the fruits of Christianity without the root and enjoying the fruit without any commitment to the God of Christianity.

So these believers refuse to do this, and why have they refused; why have they entered their musician’s strike? Because of their ultimate loyalty to Jehovah. If, in both cases, in verse 5 and 6, are [can’t understand word] type construction, if I forget this, let my hand do this, it’s an oath, and they are asserting, therefore, their allegiance to God by asserting their allegiance to His capital city, Jerusalem. Remember the emphasis in Psalm 137 is on geography, place. “If I forget … if I don’t remember thee.” And then finally, the last clause of verse 6 sums it up; this is the whole idea of priorities, “If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.” Now what would be the chief joy of a believer with the natural gift of music? Obviously it would be the performance and the development of that gift. And the chief joy of this person with musical talent, musical skills…

By the way, some of you have this gift and you’re not developing it and that’s why you’re so miserable. Where God has invested souls with certain abilities there is a difficulty in your Christian life until you break down and acknowledge the fact that God has given you ability in this area and He wants you to develop it, and if you don’t develop it you’re just a round peg in a square hole. You don’t seem to fit in with any group, you’re miserable and you wonder why; because God is calling you to subdue the earth and He put some investment on the grounds that He gave you stewardship over and you haven’t used that investment. It’s as simple as that. People have discovered this after years of being miserable as believers, and just as soon as they have gotten into training their gift, their natural gift as well as their spiritual gift, all of a sudden things are straightening out. Why is that? We must draw the conclusion that the subdue the earth principle applies to your own body and to the gift that God has given you in that body. And if you don’t subdue the earth then you’re in disobedience to God.

The point is that the chief joy in verse 6 would be their ability, and the tendency, once you start developing this gift is to idolize the gift. You either don’t develop it and you’re miserable or you develop it out of control and you’re miserable. So the way these believers figured it out was, they just said okay, music is my chief joy, but I will always prefer Jerusalem over it; I will always place the Word of God over it. Jerusalem stands for the plan of God. So I will always prefer the Word of God over my chief joy. In my art and my music I have all this ability here but I will never let that ability compromise my loyalty and my intake of the Word. I will use the Word to form and to nourish and encourage my natural ability but it will never be the other way around; in other words, priorities.

Psalm 137:7-9, the psalmist petitions God for judgment. Now here’s where everyone kind of gets queasy. The psalmist petitions God for judgment upon the enemy of Jerusalem. Now before we get into all the little gross details, just hold it and think a minute. What, so far, has been the attitude of the psalmist here? What so far has been his tension? Let’s go back. We know certain things, he is a Jew, he is a musician, he is also a son of Adam, so that cancels his Jewishness out as far as our problem is concerned. Because he is a son of Adam he shares something with every member of the human race; he is made in God’s image. Invested in his soul are certain talents, talents which God wants developed under the subdue the earth principle and he wants those talents moved out into all these areas. He wants that person to benefit the rest of the human race. God has the human race under common grace; the principle is theologically known as common grace.

Now common grace means that God will raise up men and women throughout history who have unusual abilities in certain areas, abilities to rule nations. It’s no accident that today we lack leaders. God’s in control and He could raise up a leader overnight. And the fact that we are missing the great leaders of history in our own generation, we haven’t got one person in the world on any continent that we can point to as a great, great man. There have been periods in the past when centuries go by and there’s just nobody great that comes along and then all of a sudden in one generation there’ll be great people all over the board. One of the greatest eras of history was when this country began, in the latter part of the 18^th century. During that century America not only had one great man, America had a cluster of great men; unusual, other countries have had one or two great men when they’ve begun but our country had a galaxy of geniuses when it came to leading people. Now how come our country had that galaxy of geniuses? Was that just an accident that happened in history? Not on your life, God was sovereign and God saw to it that at that point in history the geniuses were available. It goes through the arts, you can trace in the arts and music and so forth, how there have been eras of tremendous creativity and then there are eras when nothing happens. It seems like people are around but nothing ever gels, the concept of common grace, God blesses humanity through these people.

Now let’s go back to this person who dwells in Babylon; here he is, and they have talent; now their talent is given not just as a command to them, hey, subdue the earth individually, but that talent is to be a blessing to other people. Just as you take somebody else over here with a different talent, they are to bless. That’s the way the whole thing is supposed to work, and when it doesn’t, when it’s hindered by apostasy, it causes the wrath of God to spring forth, and in this case we have the kingdom of man crushing in upon these believers. Now it’s crushed in on them physically, that’s true, but Psalm 137 isn’t talking about the frustration of physical incarceration.

If you read Psalm 137 and as we studied it so far, we’re not just talking about being put in jail; we’re talking about being put in an artistic jail, when you can’t release these talents and you can’t develop them and you can’t carry out a full orbed public worship of God. And when there’s that pressure and you can’t go anywhere because of the system, because it just comes upon you, by system I do not mean one political regime, I mean the entire culture just collapses on top of you and you fight for your way. We are entering a period in our own history in which this is probably the case, when believers of the next generation are going to be under it. Your children are going to be living in a different world from you, and you’re coasting because you think that they can carry on spiritually just like you carried on, kind of learning as you go. Huh-un, your children are going to face tremendous pressure and they’d better be well-trained.

Now the prayer of verses 7-9 is a prayer in response to that crush, that cultural crunch. Now who is it that’s ultimately behind it? Not the Babylonians, not the Edomites, who is it that’s really behind that crunch that would wall in the believer, squelch the Word of God, keep it from going too far, keep Christians on trivial paths so they only apply the Word of God in their own devotional life but they don’t apply it across the board? Who is the author of that kind of move in history? Obviously Satan. So the prayer of verses 7-9 is directed against the works of Satan as manifested in 539 BC. So you see the word Edom and you see the word Babylon there, but take those as the historical circumstance in that era of a work of Satan that had to be destroyed, so now the prayer.

Psalm 137:7-9, “Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Raze it, raze it, even to the foundation thereof. [8] O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. [9] Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”

Now what about these situations; the word remember, zakar, in the Hebrew zakar occurs again and again in the Scriptures, in the Torah, in the worship. Why? Why remember. Remember what? Remember history. What is the word spoken every communion service, when you partake of the elements? “Do this in remembrance of Me,” not to get the blessing, but “in remembrance of Me.” What is communion? It’s just the historic memorial of the finished work of Jesus Christ. And so again worship basically is a memory of what has happened. But why does the psalmist pray, “Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom,” why of all things in history remember them? Because there is an unfinished business in history, and that is the matter of justice. The scales of justice, so far, in all of history, have never balanced out.

The scales of justice are tipped, and the psalmist, when he prays this prayer, and the later people who are going to literally pray this prayer again in the tribulation before Christ comes again, and believers who pray this kind of prayer in a spiritual sense during the Church Age are praying Lord, there’s something that when we look at history we haven’t seen yet. And that is, You claim You’re a God of justice but the scales of justice are still warped, there are still injustices; when O, Father, are you going to renew these so then we can say yes, history across the board is a revelation of the character of God. There’s some part of history that’s missing, if history is going to be the arena where God reveals His whole character. God hasn’t revealed His whole character yet, He’s revealed part of his character, and the part of His character that’s missing is the writing of the scales of justice.

Now part of His scales of justice have been righted at the cross; there are two places where justice shows up in history, and you as an individual have your choice where you want to be when the scales are righted. You can take your pick; you can choose to trust in Jesus Christ and at that point have the scales of righteousness corrected; the scales of righteousness are tipped in your case because all of your sins, mental attitude sins, 90% of it, and then a few overt things, but it’s mostly mental attitude, and all this pile of sins sits here unjudged. Now Jesus Christ has taken those sins upon Himself and has borne the judgment so the scales become just; judgment has been executed. But for those who reject Jesus Christ, they’re going to face judgment at the end. So you have a choice of seeing the scales righted….they will be righted, God will finally reveal all His character in history, and it will be revealed chiefly at two points, the cross, time past, and yet future.

But at the time of this prayer in Psalm 137:7 “remember” means I haven’t seen a thing, I haven’t seen any Savior die on a cross, I haven’t seen any final judgment in history, so Lord all I saw was when Jerusalem was falling and when the armies of the Neo-Babylonians came in under Nebuchadnezzar who was it that joined the army against Jerusalem? Our brethren, because Edom are the descendants of Esau, the brother of Jacob. So you have here Esau and Jacob; Jacob begat that nation Israel, Esau begat Edom. When Israel goes down to defeat in 586 BC which is the scene here, the day of Jerusalem, the Edomites came up and they clapped hands, yea for Nebuchadnezzar, go ahead, wipe them out. And so this is a prayer that the treason on the part of the brother of Jacob be revenged in history.

Verse 7 should give some of you a very threatening principle. The principle of verse 7 and it applies to believers; when God is disciplining someone you stay out of the way. You see, God was disciplining Jacob; okay, fine, but Esau couldn’t avoid getting in there and helping God out. And this is the kind of prayer that resulted in Edom is going to get theirs, they haven’t yet. Edom, by the way, today is part of Jordan. They haven’t gotten theirs yet but they will, and it was because they joined in when God was disciplining a believer they got in the way. The Bible has lots of warnings that when you see a believer being disciplined you’d better be careful you stay out from behind the rear end of that person and the paddle that God is using or you’re going to get hit. Matthew 7:1-5, “Judge not that ye be not judged,” which is so misused and the people that misuse it never notice what its real purpose is. In Matthew 7:1-7 it says “judge not that ye be not judged” means when God is judging another believer you get out of the way or you’re going to be judged with the same judgment that believer is being judged with, that’s the concept. The warning is also given in Deuteronomy 32:43 for any people that get in the way of God’s paddle.

Now in Psalm 137:8-9 is a blessing, the word “happy” used twice, once in verse 8, once in verse 9, it’s usually translated blessing. This is an actual blessing, it’s not sarcastic, it’s literal. There is going to be a special blessing for those who smash Babylon, a special blessing. Why a blessing? Because they are instruments of revealing God’s character to man in history. Now let’s take the fulfillment of this, the near fulfillment and then the far fulfillment.

Upon whom did God God’s blessing come initially? On that night of October 12, 539 BC, a man by the name of Cyrus, Cyrus II, Cyrus was blessed prophetically in Jeremiah and in Isaiah, and he received on many occasions in the prophets an advanced blessing. Now why was Cyrus so personally blessed? He was blessed in the sense that God blessed his kingdom, God blessed the financial structure of the Medo-Persian Empire, God blessed him militarily, God blessed him technologically, God had numerous blessings for Cyrus. Do you know why? This prayer; this prayer that was prayed, blessed be the one that crushes Babylon. Cyrus is the one that crushed Babylon; therefore Cyrus is the one that gets the blessing of God. And you say isn’t this crude? Not at all because if Babylon is but one small case of a general principle, and if it’s true that Babylon is a microcosm of the kingdom of darkness under Satan, then who has received the blessing for crushing Satan? Jesus Christ. So Jesus Christ receives the blessing because He is the great crusher of Satan. It goes back to Genesis 3, he shall wound thy foot but the foot shall stomp on you and the foot is Jesus Christ.

Psalm 137:9 when it talks about these little ones, this is the simple way in which annihilation in holy war was done. Infants would be destroyed; infants were considered part of an unregenerate population that was beyond redemption in holy war. Deuteronomy 20:16, not all war, just holy war. During holy war an entire population, including small children, are considered off limits to grace. Grace is refused and these infants die miserable deaths along with their parents because the entire population is condemned by God. That isn’t happening today but it did happen during the holy wars of the Old Testament and will happen again during the tribulation; during the great tribulational judgments babies will die along with their parents, they will be victims of all sorts of catastrophic judgments, geophysically and also biologically. Babies will die and share the same fate as adults. Why? Because they are considered as part of a damned population. The theology of this gets involved but nevertheless that’s the fact of the case as far as Scripture is concerned.

Now there’s an unavoidable warfare going on. Psalm 137 gives you the mentality of a group of believers faced with pressure. Psalm 137 tells you that they refused to be used, even in the area of the arts. There was a separation that occurred and these believers were very sensitive. They would put Jerusalem above their chief joy. The challenge to us is as we see the world system passing away and the lust thereof is: are we as separate as the believers in Psalm 137, or are we part of the system against which they prayed this horrible judgment?