Psalms Lesson 35

Psalm 121

I’d like to give you an overview of where we’re moving. Tonight and next we’ll be dealing with a group of Psalms called the Pilgrim Psalms or the Psalms of Ascent and that’s one broad category. After this category we’ll be dealing with the Royal Psalms and the Royal Psalms are Psalms that depict the nature of the King and the ideal King and therefore actually point to Jesus Christ. And the Royal Psalms are Psalm 2. Then 110 is one of the key Royal Psalms. So that category of Psalms, the Royal Psalms all speak of Christ from the standpoint of His humanity. And I’d like to wrap up the Psalm series finishing with what we call the Songs of Enthronement, which look forward to the ultimate conclusion of history when God reigns. And these Psalms look upon Jesus Christ from the standpoint of His deity. So both Christ’s humanity and His deity will be depicted in the Psalms.

If you have been consistent in your study of the Psalms will by now have seen something operating here and that is it seems that the more you stick with the Psalms the more you tend to capture and recover the way these people reacted to life, particularly it’s been beneficial to me in studying these Psalms to capture the mentality of prayer. I have read book after book after book about prayer and some very great classics have been written on prayer, but still they don’t come close to conveying to you the attitude of the Psalmist in prayer. I think this series has been beneficial and I encourage you to go over your notes.

The Psalm that I am speaking of tonight are called the Psalms of Ascent in your Bible but we call them the Pilgrim Psalms and they consist of Psalm 84 and every Psalm between Psalm 120 and 134. If you turn to Psalm 120 you’ll see what I mean. All the headings, these Psalms have particular sub headings under them, notice in Psalm 120, “A Song of degrees.” Remember we take the headings as part of the inspired text. These headings, just because they are put in fine print do not mean that they’re not part of the inspired text. Psalm 121, notice it says “A Song of degrees.” Psalm 122, “A Song of degrees of David.” Psalm 123, “A Song of degrees.” Psalm 124, “A Song of degrees of David.” Psalm 125, “A Song of Degrees.” Psalm 126, “A Song of degrees.” Psalm 127, “A Song of Degrees for Solomon. Psalm 128, “A Song of degrees.” Psalm 129, “A Song of degrees.” Psalm 130, 131, 132, 133 and 134, so there are 15 Psalms, one right after another with the same common heading.

Now the problem is why this heading on these Psalms. Three answers have been proposed. The answer that the Jews have for this given in the Mishnah and in the extra-Biblical traditions of the Jews, for the Jewish people have long claimed that these songs were sung in a procession as the men in a temple was not built, with due respect to Women’s Liberation, and it had the women’s section and the men’s section, and the men’s section was higher than the women’s section, but as the men ascended to their section they stepped up 15 steps, according to this tradition, and they would chant these Songs as they moved up each of the steps. So Psalm 120 would be chanted on the first layer or the first tier, stairway, then as they went to the second one Psalm 121 would be chanted. And there would be a chorus of Songs sung one after another as they ascended these 15 stairs. Well, we don’t have any Biblical direction that would tell us whether that tradition is true or false; it’s an interesting speculation and one that is held by many believers.

However, an alternate interpretation to these Psalms and the one I think fits the content better is that these Psalms were sung by the pilgrims as they made their ways to the worship centers for the three great national holidays of Israel: Passover in the spring; Pentecost in the early summer and the Feast of Tabernacles in the fall, and that men were called to come to the centers of worship, in particular once Solomon’s temple had been constructed they would come there because there was the meeting place with God Almighty. And when they came and they would have to travel over many… sometimes those who lived outside of the land would have to travel hundreds of miles; others traveled less than that, but the people would sing these as they traveled.

Now I think you’ll see from some of these Psalms that they do have a motif of travel and journey’s mercies, as we say today. And therefore if this interpretation is correct, it would offer a very exciting application. These are all traveling Psalms and they all are asking for journey’s mercies as the believer moves from geographical point to geographical point to pursue the will of God. By application, of course, it would mean that all these Psalms would help us in our trip called life as we seek to move throughout life in the will of God.

Tonight I’m going to take Psalm 121 because it’s the most familiar to most of you, and I’m going to show you why Psalm 121 fits into these pilgrim settings. Many of you have memorized Psalm 121; I hope you have, it’s one of the very short Psalms, it’s easy to memorize, and I hope if you’ve memorized it what I can provide you with tonight will give you some good content so when you recite it from memory your mind will go along with it in depth and you will be able to think through the doctrine taught in Psalm 121.

As you look at Psalm 121, let’s look at the structure for a moment; we’re not going to have much of a help here as far as the categories we’ve studied previously to help outline, but if you were to outline this Psalm, where would you make a break as you look at it verse by verse. Do you notice anything about the structure of the Psalm. We’ll just throw it open for some random observations. [someone says something] He points out that between verses 2 and 3 there’s a shift from the first person to the second person. See where it says “I,” and in verse 2, “my help,” that’s all first person, verses 1 and 2. And promptly at verse 3 it shifts into the second person, you, it’s addressing the person, the individual believer, your foot, “He will not suffer your foot to be moved,” verse 5, “The LORD is your keeper,” in verse 8, “The LORD will preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth,” so it’s second person. I think that’s a good observation to start with and then we can divide the Psalm right there.

I realize some of you have objected somewhat and one of the new ones is that they don’t like to participate in the give and take. Frankly, I don’t think you can learn unless you can participate and I like a maximum amount of participation because we can’t do it during the main services. As we go through this I hope this will bring bells with you to break these Psalms down when you do your study. You may out alone some place without face to face Bible teaching from a bona fide local pastor, you may find times in your life when you’ll be in that situation; you’re going to have to get the word by tapes and by your own personal study. And I hope you remember how we’ve done it; we’ve looked at these Psalms, we’ve tried to break them down, tried to outline them. Why do you want to outline a Psalm? To get a thought content, you want to squeeze it and get all that juice out and the way to do it is by applying various grammatical tools and outlining, a very common tool, but it’s a very helpful one to gain content. So make this a practice in your own personal study.

How would you summarize the first two verses. If this is all the psalmist himself, writing in the first person, can anyone summarize in a nutshell verses 1 and 2? What is the psalmist thinking about, what is he doing there? If you were singing that Song to yourself or to God, what would be on your heart as you went through verses 1-2? You might get a little tip of thinking of that first category of Psalm we studied, the individual lament Psalm, remember when the psalmist comes into a problem what does he usually do? [someone says something] A trust section, okay, you would point to verse 2 I presume there. Do any of you have any other translations besides the King James. How are they handling that last part of verse 1? The King James is not handling it as a question, all modern translations that I know of handle it as a question and that is correct, the King James is wrong here, there should be two sentences, “I will life up mine eyes unto the hills.” Period. “From where does my help come?” Question mark. And the answer is given in verse 3.

Now if verse 3 is addressed to the psalmist, shift gears here for a moment and try to visualize yourself back in the time that this Psalm was written. Who do you suppose who would be talking to the psalmist this way? It starts out the psalmist himself is saying it; but then when we get to verse 3 somebody is talking to the psalmist. Now if you were a pilgrim and you were going on a trip and you have on your mind verses 1-2 and then you read verse 3, can anybody just guess who would be saying verse 3 do you suppose? We can’t be dogmatic here, based on our studies of culture we can guess, maybe, some of the people that most likely would be the ones who are talking in verses 3-8. We know this is the pilgrim or the psalmist, the one with this problem, but who is it talking to him here? [someone answers] Okay, why would you say the Levites? [can’t hear] All right, the tribe of the Levites were appointed as itinerant Bible teachers and that’s about the best guess that this was a priest here, or a Levite, all priests were Levites but not all Levites were priests. And this probably, we can’t be dogmatic but probably this is the kind of person that was saying this.

Which therefore, if that’s the case, before we start with Psalm 121 let’s back off a moment and see if we can dramatically visualize the background of Psalm 121. What, then, is happening. If we were to act it out here how would you set up the situation in life where Psalm 121 occurred. What would be the situation, do you suppose? Just a little creative imagination? To what situation in modern life would Psalm 121 correspond as to its process, the process that’s involved here between the two? [someone says something] Well, it’s hearing the teaching of the Word but isn’t this very close to counseling? If the man in verses 1-2 presents his problem, verses 3-8 is the counselor addressing the counselee. And this is one of the functions, I’m going to conclude the Psalm series, since there’s an interest in this music situation in the congregation, I thought we’d kind of conclude the Psalm series with a little short study on the believer priest because this is where the believer deals with music primarily. And since we are on the lookout for what the functions of a priest are, notice one of the functions of a priest in the Old Testament. He was a counselor. Now the wise man was the main counselor but here the priest is counseling and exhorting and so on. He’s encouraging.

[someone says something] You can conclude from verse 2 that the man is not out in the toulies, right, to use a favorite expression, translated in other terminology he’s in trouble spiritually. [someone says something] Kiel and Delitzsch, the two men that did a very extensive study of the Psalms, of the Old Testament and Delitzsch wrote the commentary of the Psalms, proposed this very solution, that what we have here is a soliloquy between the person’s ego and his own soul, beginning at verse 1 and then the shift over in verse 3. For reasons which I’ll try to show as I go through this, I think the weight of the evidence is on the classical position that there is an actual dialogue going on between two people. But that’s a possibility, the fact that there are soliloquy in the Psalms is correct, and David often says, “O my soul, why art thou cast down within me.” And David is talking to himself. Now you’ve often heard it said somebody is crazy, he talks to himself. But there are people that talk to themselves that aren’t crazy and David was one of them, and we call that soliloquy. So if somebody accuses you of being nuts, just say no, I’m just having a little soliloquy and by the time they run to the dictionary to find out what that word means you’ll be off the hook.

[someone says something] Yes, notice the Lord, the reoccurrence of the word Lord, and you’ll notice another one in there that occurs often. What is another word that occurs throughout this Psalm? It isn’t so obvious. Keeper, see “he who keeps,” to make it even more forceful do you see in verses 7 and 8 where you see “preserve, preserve, preserve” three times, that’s the same Hebrew word for “keep.” So now count the number of times that “keep” or “preserve” occurs in this Psalm. How many times do you get? It’s repeated over and over and over. What’s the total number of times you see that popping up here? Six. Now that’s an awful lot, that’s a high repetition, and when you read Scripture and realize that by the doctrine of inspiration the Holy Spirit has used the human author with his vocabulary, using the normal literary forms of the day, that this should be a red flag waving in front of your face saying watch it, there’s something to do here with this word “keep.” And however we interpret Psalm 121 we’ve got to grab this word “keep” and find out what’s going on. The Psalm forces us to answer the question, what does the word “keep” mean because it’s put there so many times.

Now let’s go through the Psalm. Whether you take the soliloquy approach or the priesthood approach, I want you to notice that there is a mental process involved in the Psalm. This is going to be very helpful for you if you notice what’s happening. In the first two verses you have the pilgrim announcing his need and his faith. This is a declaration primarily of the pilgrim’s need and his faith in the general sense. This would be analogous in your life to meeting some situation, some pressure, something that has knocked you off balance for a moment, or something that threatens to decrease your stability, something that threatens to undermine you, and the first two verses is how this man responds to his immediate situation. How is he going to respond to it? Before he completes his whole response to the situation he has got to think… he has got to think back through doctrine. He has got to take time to think and so verses 3-8, regardless of whether it’s the priest talking to the counselor or the counselor talking to the counselee or whether the person is doing his own counseling in soliloquy, it doesn’t make any difference, the dynamics are the same in that verse 3-8 show you the mental process the psalmist has in his head to handle his situation.

Now the Bible tells us that we should model or mimic ourselves and pattern ourselves after the men of Scripture. This Psalm is going to give you an excellent blow by blow coaching to show you how one man met his situation. If you want to have success in this yourself, then what you want to do is pay attention to how he meets it and try to start in your head and in your soul the same mental process that’s going on in this Psalm. So let’s look at it now.

Verses 1-2, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.” Now lifting up is in the Hebrew imperfect and it means, not that he is necessarily going to in the future but that he is habitually doing it in the present moment. In other words, it’s on his mind, this is a pressure in his life as a believer. And it’s on his mind as a situation. Visualizing immediately as a pilgrim setting out on his journey to go to Jerusalem to one of these feasts, isn’t it going to be on his mind, the hills, for several reasons which I’ll handle in a moment but my point here is the verb, “I will lift up mine eyes,” it means I lift them up and I lift them up and I lift them up. It’s an idiom that means I am occupied with this, this occupies me, I can’t get it off my mind. And that should ring bells, haven’t you have pressures that you can’t get off your mind. Psalm 121 is talking about that kind of pressure that you can’t get out of your head, it’s there all the time. And that’s what he means, I keep looking up and I get my eyes on the hills.

Now the hills in Scripture, it’s the same word for hill as mountain. And the word “hill” or “mountain,” obviously in its primary sense meant an impediment to travel, an obstruction. It also meant a hiding place for robbers, and so it was a threat to the journey. The hill was a threat by virtue of the fact that if the man had animals and he had to get them up over the hill, if he had carts if he had baggage, he had very low horsepower, better mileage than we get but less horsepower than we have, and therefore hills were an obstacle, an obstacle in themselves and also because they were favorite places for highway robbery. They did not have the highway patrol, travel in those days was a major undertaking and you had to take your soul in your hands to travel anywhere.

So, “I lift up mine eyes,” means there’s things on my mind, I’m going to travel, I keep looking up to those hills. So the hills, by application, mean any problem that we face. This is why Jesus said one who has great faith will say to this mountain, be thrown into the sea and it shall be thrown into the sea. Jesus was simply using the Hebrew idiom. He didn’t have in mind earth moving equipment, He was talking about the response to pressures and when Jesus Christ spoke of the man able to cast mountains into the sea, He was talking about able to handle the greatest pressures that you can as a believer, throwing the mountain into the sea, and it would be understood as that by any normal Hebrew because they would be schooled in this kind of thinking.

So, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains,” or “unto the hills.” Always my problems are there, I’m setting out on a journey, which by the way, to give you further guidance in this, this is a problem that is in the will of God, this man is not out of the will of God, he’s not out of fellowship at this point. Using our six categories of suffering, which category of suffering is he dealing with? Remember the first three categories and the last three; which is the set of categories of suffering that this psalmist is encountering in this situation? The undeserved suffering. This is undeserved because it’s not given to him by way of personal discipline. This is undeserved suffering because he is in the will of God and because he is in the will of God he has the hills. If he didn’t go to Jerusalem out of obedience to God’s command he’d never have to worry about the hills. He is following the will of God, the will of God says pilgrim, you shall come to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, and the very fact is that this is a believer who is submitting to the will of God and when he begins to submit to the will of God, all of a sudden bang, mountain in his way.

Now some of you have had this experience and some of you get all upset when you commit your life to some aspect of the will of God, you submit to it with thanksgiving and all of a sudden, bam, hill in the way, mountain in the way, I’m worse off now than I was before. The more I go the deeper I get, etc. Well, join the club, Psalm 121 is the founder of this club of believers who get in more trouble because they follow the will of God. And so here is a person in trouble because he is following God’s will. Now he asks the question, “From whence will come my ezer,” the word “help” is the word used for a wife in Genesis , ezer, “where is my ezer,” where is the one to help me through the problem. And this verse should give you an idea of how the Hebrew uses ezer and therefore what it meant in Genesis when it says the wife is the ezer of the husband.

Think of Psalm 121:1, that’s what an ezer is for, when you have a problem, when you have an obstacle you need an ezer and Eve was man’s personal ezer; she was designed to be an ezer for her husband, that when her husband, being in the will of God, because remember Adam was innocent so he didn’t need Eve because he was a sinner; he did not need Eve because he was suffering justly. God did not give Eve to the man, he did not make woman to help the man out of the sin; He gave woman to man before the sin even occurred to help him with the will of God. And so this shows you that the ezer here means help to do God’s will. And this is why often times people can’t find the best man or the best woman, or after they’re married they have tremendous marital problems; it basically goes back to a spiritual problem if the man is not actively following God’s will and/or the woman does not want to submit to God’s plan for her husband’s life. It’s one or the other or both of those problems at the heart of every major marital conflict. It’s got to boil back to that because that’s basically the design the way he built us. So no matter how proud we may get and how sophisticated we are in making excuses, when it boils right down to it this ultimately is the problem; either the husband is not following God’s plan for his life, or/and his wife is not willing to submit to God’s plan for her husband and it’s got to be one or the other, the Bible doesn’t leave any other categories.

So the ezer in verse 1 obviously turns out to be God Himself, and I want to show you why ezer is such a precious word. You see, when God called the wife an ezer He was calling the wife by a very precious title that generally in Scripture is only used of God Himself. Think of that, think of the tremendous impact this must have had in the ancient world where the woman was considered just a little bit more valuable than a good horse, sometimes not quite as valuable, this was basically the value structure in the ancient world, then for Israel to assert that the woman is not just valuable, she’s an ezer, using for her the title that is normally used for God. You see where women’s rights flow from? They basically flow from Scripture.

Isn’t it interesting that the modern interest in women’s rights shows no connection whatever with Biblical Christianity and it’s Biblical Christianity that gave woman her rights in the first place. Women would not have any rights whatsoever if it were not for the role of Biblical Christianity in the world. It’s the only intellectual justification; the woman cannot gain rights by any other method. By any other approach you want to try to justify the woman’s rights it fails. The woman is not as strong the man, the man can manipulate the woman in all sorts of ways, and in ancient societies this is true and in modern societies this is true. So the woman trying to establish her rights on any other basis than the Word of God is ultimately going to wind up as a loser. She always has down through the centuries, always has wound up a loser. The women Rome tried it, the women of Greece tried it and every time they wound up lost as a class of people. The only women who have ever really come out of it are the Jewish women in the ancient world because they were solidly locked in to the divine viewpoint framework. So the ezer is a very valuable help and this verse shows how ezer was normally used in every day life; it was normally used of a helper to help me through a trouble that I was facing while on the road in God’s will.

Now in verse 2 the psalmist turns around and makes his confession of salvation. Verse 2 identifies the psalmist or the pilgrim as a believer. Remember in the Old Testament you had all people, believer and unbeliever, living under the Mosaic economy. So you had believer, unbeliever, believer, unbeliever, unbeliever, unbeliever, believer, believer, believer, unbeliever, believer, unbeliever believer, you had a mixed population and they all had to abide by the civil code called the Mosaic Law. So therefore just because some person overtly fulfilled the Mosaic Law Code, that wasn’t enough to show that he was really a citizen of true Israel. So verse 2 identifies the man not as just an unbeliever living under the civil code of the Mosaic Law, not just as a physical Jew but as a physical Jew who has been born again and therefore this man is a believer. And this is his confession of salvation. This is analogous in the New Testament to say I have believed on Jesus Christ as Savior.

So he says “my ezer is from the Lord.” Notice in here it’s interesting, he doesn’t say the Lord is his ezer, he says “my ezer is from the Lord,” he’s referring to a secondary help from the Lord. And then he adds a most startling claim. Can any of you dream why the end of verse 2, he makes this claim for God from a hint given you in verse 1, think of it just in its raw physical concrete form. [someone says something] Okay, just think of the Psalm physically in the most naïve obvious way, what does he see literally? He sees a hill, so he needs an ezer to help him with that hill. So who does he call upon? The guy who made it. The logic is so naïve it’s disarming. Why not go to [can’t understand word], you know, why play with little piddly secondary authorities, why not go to the big boss over all. And so he says, “My help is from the LORD, the one who made heaven and earth.” You see what a magnificent view he has of God to start with.

So he goes back to the doctrine of Creator/creature, a doctrine only found in ancient Israel and in no other culture. Please remember this, all these pocket testament Christians running around trying to establish Christianity out of the New Testament alone; it can’t be done. The whole New Testament falls apart unless you have the doctrine of the ex nihilo creation from the Old Testament, that the God of Israel is qualitatively different from gods of all other cultures because in the other cultures nature forces were gods. Our people on the average doesn’t real that at all because they haven’t read that much in ancient documents but that last clause in verse 2 is a confession of tremendous importance. It goes back to our divine viewpoint framework and the first plank in our divine viewpoint framework. The foundation of the divine viewpoint framework has four parts to it; the first part is creation, fall, flood and covenants, and I want you to notice that creation is the first thing and you can’t move an inch spiritually in any doctrinal area without dealing seriously with creation. This is why the whole heresy of evolution in our own time is very, very serious. It cuts the jugular vein of everything and Christians who don’t see this are very, very shortsighted.

Creation is a primary point and so when he says this he’s simply saying my Lord is different from all other Lords. Why? He’s the One that created. This is analogous to Romans 8 in the New Testament that no matter how big your problem is, God is bigger. When you say it you say oh yeah, well that’s obvious, but when you’re in the middle of the problem it doesn’t somehow feel obvious. Your subjective feeling in the middle of a pressure situation is that you’ve really got a fish on the line that’s bigger than you are, it’s going to pull you in, until you realize that there’s somebody else holding the pole too, besides you, that’s bigger, and He’s not going to be pulled in, He made the fish. In other words, God is much, much bigger than any problem you’re ever going to face. Do you see why the doctrine of creation is very, very important.

Now we shift to verse 3, the man has a problem, but in verses 1-2 he defined his need, verse 1, and he’s confessed to his own personal salvation, verse 2. Now he’s got to work this out. At this point he’s like most of us, here we are, here’s our mind, here’s the situation, boom, and there it goes, and our initial reaction is we have a need. In our minds we say boy, I’ve got a need now. There’s an awareness of the problem, and then the second thing is you briefly remember somewhere back along the time I did receive Christ, so we at least have your spiritual position in a very naïve way but it’s there. So verses 1-2 are the immediate response to the pressure, I’ve got a need, and somewhere I know at least theoretically that God is the maker of heaven and earth. Now beginning in verse 3 you have this initial reaction developed and worked over and worked over and worked over until finally the problem is resolved in your soul. Now this process that begins in verse 3, it’s interesting to watch because ultimately if you’ve been successful in handling your problems, you’ve done this, whether you’ve been conscious of it or not, you have.

Verses 3-4 form one section; verses 5-6 another, and verses 7-8 another. There are three sub sections to this last part. Verse 3, “He will not suffer thy foot to be moved; he who keepeth thee will not slumber. [4] Behold, He who keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.” Verse 3 has a particular kind of negation in the Hebrew, it looks like this, al, and when that negation is used on a verb it means “may it not be.” This is not a denial of a principle in verse 3, it’s a wish, “may He not suffer thy foot to be moved. May He that keeps thee not slumber.” Then verse 4 uses another Hebrew negation which is lo, and that means absolute principle. So verse 3 is a wish, verse 4 is an absolute principle. Taken together, verses 3-4 interact with the problem.

In other words, here’s the counselor or the priest as he comes and he begins to interact with the problem. He identifies the problem, verse 3, this is empathy, he says isn’t this really what’s on your mind psalmist; you have a need here, and although you haven’t actually made a petition you’ve kind of waltzed over here and I know that you want help and isn’t this the help that you want? Isn’t the prayer petition that you’re going to ultimately want to make is that God might keep you, that He might not take a doze while you’re out in the hills and mistake something and overlook your problem, isn’t that really what you want to do. So verse 3 is where the priest begins to identify the problem and pull it out.

So he says, “May He not allow your foot to be moved,” now the very way the priest states this is a beautiful illustration of this mental process I’ve spoken about, in that when he begins to interact with the problem he starts immediately using categories of divine viewpoint because the verb given in verse 3 is “allow.” The first verb that you encounter, “may He not allow your foot,” now to take a believer who is in a panic situation, he’s all upset, he’s suddenly been hit with a big problem, the immediate thing always is to visualize the problem bigger than God and you’re the victim of an accident or chance, even though in theory we’d never say it, in practice we proclaim it with full volume. And that is chance, God really isn’t sovereign over this thing, we’ve just been hit, His back has been turned or something, He wasn’t looking carefully and we just got hit. So verse 3 cleverly begins to eat away at this little human viewpoint tendency by using the one verb that would depict God’s sovereignty. So what part of the divine viewpoint framework is the priest immediately bringing to bear on the problem? He goes back to the essence of God, God is sovereign, He’s righteous, just, loving, omniscience, etc. and he takes this attribute of sovereignty and he says when you get into a jam the first thing to remember is if that is a problem that’s come into your life it has come in there through God’s screening. 1 Cor. 10:13, “There has no testing taken you but such as is common to man, and God will not allow you to be tested above that which you are able,” no matter what the test is, no matter how bad it may feel or anything else, you go back to that first off, that that problem couldn’t have come into your life except by divine permission. So it’s a question of what God has allowed to happen; it’s not a question of what suddenly happened, what accidentally happened, it’s not that at all. The question is what has God allowed sovereignly to happen.

Then the last part of verse 3, “may your keeper not slumber.” Now here’s the first occurrence of this verb “keep” which we’ve got to come to grips with. It looks like this, shamar, and it’s used six times in this Psalm so obviously the Psalm has something to do with this word shamar. Here the verb is pointed as a participle, “pointed” we mean those little funny marks, you put a point here and two little dots there, it turns it from a verb into a participle. That is what a Hebrew participle looks like, and this is when used as a noun refers to an abiding character. So this means God’s essence or His character is that He’s your keeper. He’s your keeper!

Now what does the word “keep” mean, what’s the fine point. The word shamar is generally used to guard what is already yours; it is not taking from something, and it does not mean grab something that is somebody else’s and they’re trying to pull it away from you, that’s not the concept. Shamar means that you own it and you’re to hold on to it. Shamar was used by God in directing Adam in the Garden. What did Adam do in the Garden? God said I want you to shamar the Garden, the Garden is yours, I’ve given it to you Adam, now you take care of it; it’s your Garden but you’re going to have a little competition as to who’s going to control the Garden and I want you to hold on. So shamar means you hold on to what is already yours by position. Now that’s an important word because the whole attack in this pressure comes from understanding this one Hebrew word, shamar. And when the Jewish man would say “He’s my shamar,” wheels would go in his head and he’d say I know what that means, I know what that’s saying; shamar is He who keeps you, or your keeper.

Now why do you suppose the priest is saying this? The first part of verse 3 he says, listen, let’s look at this, is your problem just an accident: no, it’s come into your life because God in His sovereignty has permitted it. That’s the first thing he hits the person with. Now this is how you should hit yourself, just look at the sequence of thought, these are just like little bullets that you can fire and these problems and when the thing comes along just start shooting at the thing and the first bullet you want to fire at it is… shamar means then a second item. Not only has this problem come about because of God’s sovereignty but it is under a covenant control. So you progress from God’s general sovereignty down to something that is more precious than just general sovereignty, you move down to a tight covenant relationship and this deals with what we call here positional truth. The priest is pointing out something to the man by the use of this word shamar. He’s saying now look, somebody owns you, you’re not your own, you’ve been bought with a price, so let’s look at this top circle from the standpoint of the Old Testament.

The top circle is God’s ownership of this man. That is the Abrahamic Covenant. We said in verse 2 he confessed that he was a saved Jew, that he was a believing Jew. What does that mean? That puts him in line with the Abrahamic Covenant which means therefore he shares the eternal election of Abraham, he with Abraham shares all blessings that flow out of the Abrahamic Covenant, because he has personally believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Down here he has a bottom circle that defines the will of God in time and that is the Mosaic Law. That’s his bottom circle in the Old Testament. So the Old Testament saint had a top circle and a bottom circle just like we do; it’s a little different but nevertheless he had it.

Now when he says shamar, that refers to the top circle, so he says now look, you are God’s property locked in an eternal plan. So we can break verse 3 down in a modern church sense, if you want to verses that depict 3a and 3b as the first shots that are fired at a pressure situation, 3a would be analogous to 1 Cor. 10:13, that this problem has not come into your life except by divine permission and in 3b you have Romans 8:29-30, God has predestinated you to be conformed to Jesus Christ and that’s the eternal decree and nothing can break it. So you see immediately against all of this pressure what is introduced? Doctrine. Doctrine!

And this is why we go over and over and over and over, sure you’ve heard this before. There’s not one person here that’s been here more than three or four times who hasn’t heard at least some of this before. Why do we repeat and repeat and repeat? Because you know as well as I that when the chips are down you’re not going to remember it unless you have had it repeated and repeated and repeated. This is in the military, this is why they go through repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. Why bother, you can go through a check list and say yeah, I know the check list but not until you’ve gone through it 1008 different times do you really know it and can function like this. Now this process of Psalm 121 is what you want to get down so you can just rise off your bed at 2:00 a.m., get a telephone call, some natural catastrophe or something else has happened, and immediately this process begins to flow. Develop this so its automatic response and you won’t have a lot of the problems you do.

There’s 3a and 3b, and the New Testament equivalent. Verse 3 was a wish, he’s saying isn’t this, believer, what you really want, and he asks the question very skillfully to recall Bible doctrine. And then in verse 4 he moves to flat all out dogmatic statement. “Behold, Israel’s keeper shall neither slumber nor sleep.” Now there’s a contrast between verses 3 and 4 and it involves shamar. One is a personal pronoun, “my keeper,” or this is “your keeper,” that’s verse 3; and then shamar Yisrael, means Israel’s keeper. Now why do you suppose the priest is doing this? Do you see what he’s contrasting? He starts with a man personally because obviously what’s on his mind most? His personal problem, but he doesn’t stay with the man’s personal problem, he moves back to the great historical categories. He does not stick with the individual’s personal problems. If he stuck there he would be stuck there all the time.

In order to get your soul out of a kink or out of a bind you don’t stay with the problem, you move the problem back to the historical framework, the overall picture, and you automatically bounce back and forth like a ping pong ball between the specific problem right at the moment and the great eternal historic program of God. So you don’t leave your problem just by itself, He’s not just your keeper, He happens also to be the keeper of the historic nation of Israel and He’s been doing a pretty good job for the last five centuries. That’s the implication of verse 4, “The One who keeps Israel never slumbers or sleeps.” This is not a wish, this is a strong absolute negation. And it is a statement of historic fact and it goes back again to the nation’s positional truth, Abrahamic Covenant, Mosaic Covenant.

Now I want to show you something about how this thing works as far as personal faith. I just got through drawing these two circles for the individual believer. Now you know as well as I do when you get involved in a pressure situation you can say yeah, yeah, I know those two circles, I’ve seen those before but when those circles are made nobody thought of the problem I’ve got now. This time it’s bigger than those two circles, so we don’t bother with those two circles now, we just bother with my problem. Now that we’ve disconnected and unplugged my problem from all Bible doctrine, let’s sit here and wallow in it. You see, you’ve disconnected the whole problem separating it very skillfully, like surgeon, you cut it out away from the divine viewpoint framework. Verse 4 is rejoining your problem back into the divine viewpoint framework, you say okay, so your problem is believer, you’re in the Abrahamic Covenant but as far as you’re concerned under the pressures of the moment, you’re not quite sure the Abrahamic Covenant works… you’re not quite sure that it’s trustworthy at this point. So obviously, whatever he does, the priest here has got to do something to fortify the faith of the believer that’s in trouble.

Now this basically is what is involved in any counseling situation. Finally, when you get it down to the last analysis, the problem is you’ve got to plug the believer onto believing again. Now how do you get a person to believe? By trying to squeeze it out of them? No way you can, so the priest very cleverly says all right, let’s go back to the historic objective, historic record. And thy this time it’s at least 400 years old. Now he says, does the keeper of Israel slumber and sleep over the last four centuries of our nation’s history? Can you point to a time when God has abandoned us? No. All right, then that’s adequate verification that the Abrahamic Covenant works, the Mosaic Covenant works and therefore works for you.

Now translated in New Testament terms, this means that we go back to the historic evidences of the life of Jesus Christ, His death, His resurrection, the giving of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the survival of the Church down through history, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. propping all the other evidence of miracles in the Old Testament underneath all this. And then we say now look, Christianity works; it has never failed, so what’s your problem. You see what this does? It heads off at the pass the old excuse, well it doesn’t work for me. Well what kind of a creep are you, it worked for everybody else, what’s so special. This has to be there, and this is the way the psalmist does it, he goes back to the historic framework that nobody is so special and so almighty peculiar that Christianity isn’t going to work for them. That’s what he’s doing in verse 4.

Now verses 5-6. At this point, verses 3-4, the priest is taking up his problem, verses 5-6, now he gets to the central confidence section. You see, in order to get to the central confidence section he first had to get the believer in his mind… here’s his conscience with God-consciousness, and here’s his mind, his mind thinks it’s a crisis situation. Now his mind, like all good minds of fallen creatures, has a mixture of divine viewpoint and human viewpoint in it. So the tendency always is under pressure is to make the solution or response come out through whatever pieces of human viewpoint we’ve got knocking around. In other words we disconnect the situation from the divine viewpoint, we build a barrier, we say oh, that’s so nice, by golly I just got through drawing a dispensational chart, I know all about that. I just got through going to Bible class, I know all about that, I took wonderful notes, I’ve got a notebook and it’s all in there. So I’ve got my divine viewpoint, but when the situation hits I’ve got a nice fat little barrier between the divine viewpoint in my mind and the particular situation. So verses 3-4 is a little program in crashing the wall to break that thing down and bring the situation up against the divine viewpoint framework.

Now why is this so necessary? Because if you can plug the problem, the specific problem into the overall framework, if the person insists the problem is too big for the Lord, then you automatically tear the whole framework apart. It creates a shock effect is what it does. In effect what you’re saying is okay, you say it doesn’t work, all right, if it doesn’t work in this one problem for you, all Christianity goes right in the basket. So you tie the specific problem, the point problem into the whole thing, and it’s sink or swim; the whole system goes out the window or it stays. Now obviously, no matter how bad a believer is, when you put it those terms they usually say well, I’ll have to reevaluate, but they’re not usually prepared to say well then junk the whole thing. Once in a while you encounter somebody like that and you say all right, go ahead and junk it, see where that gets you. But I want you to notice how he connects in here with the overall program.

Now verses 5-6 are the confidence section, once he’s plugged in the situation with the residual divine viewpoint in his mind, then he can make quick assertions about God. He says “Yahweh is your keeper,” now why does he make that statement in verse 5? Because here is where he’s enforcing the bridge between his specific problem and the divine viewpoint, because he said now look, what did I just get through saying, the shamar Yisrael, or Israel’s keeper which is Yahweh, He is your keeper. So with this equation between Israel’s keeper he’s locked those two together. In other words, translated another way, the risen Lord Jesus Christ today is our problem-solver and if His problem solving is insufficient to meet our particular needs, that disqualifies Christ. Any time we say that Christ can’t give me a solution to my problem, that is tantamount to saying He is disqualified, He has no right to sit on the Father’s right hand, He is not the sufficient [can’t understand word/s] He is inadequate. This blows what started out as a tiny little problem into a major all out heresy. And this has to be seen. Do you know why the Holy Spirit is preserving stuff like this? To show us the awfulness of the nature of [can’t understand words]. This is the only way apparently the Holy Spirit has of doing this because normally you say oh yeah, I know worry is a sin, ha-ha, but do you really see what a sin it is, that worry is tantamount to denying God’s character, that’s what it is, it’s one of the most fundamental sins of the universe, to be worried and to be concerned.

Then verse 6, after saying verse 5 that it’s “Yahweh, the Keeper of Israel” that’s your keeper, “the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand, [6] The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.” This is again an idiomatic structure, the sun and moon were both used for ruling bodies in Genesis 1, they ruled the day and the night, and so the idiom is, let’s put it this way, the most powerful force in the day versus the most powerful force in the night, neither of those, no matter what the force is, day or night it won’t touch you. Now normally this was thermal situation, in other words it was heat and cold, if you want to check this look at Genesis 31:40 and Jeremiah 36:30 and you’ll see where this similar idiom occurs so you can get the flavor of what it’s saying. The point is that there is no nature force in existence that is going to touch you by, in and of itself, again a denial of the potency of nature forces versus the God of creation, a rehash of Romans 8:28, 1 Cor. 10:13.

Now finally verses 7-8, it is the petition of the priest. These again should be translated as “may,” “May the LORD preserve thee from all evil; may He preserve thy soul. [8] May the LORD preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.” These are all petitions that the priest makes. After having declared the confidence in verses 5-6, here now is the personal petition and this terminates in a problem which we must answer before we finish, and the problem is this: if it is really true that God neither slumbers nor sleeps, if it is really true that He is our keeper, then why is it necessary that a specific petition, like verses 7 and 8 be ever made? Why, if God automatically guarantees my keeping, my safe-keeping, I’ve entrusted my soul to Him, why is it then that you have to bother to make the petition of verses 7 and 8. Why bother.

Well, the answer goes back to the relationship between sovereignty and volition in Scripture. The relationship between a creature and the Creator is one that is a personal relationship. Even though God sovereignly vows to take care of us, that does not eliminate the intermediate cause and effect, namely that He wants us to personally claim His sovereignty for ourselves. Now He’s going to take care of us, obviously, He takes care of many things. Let’s look at an example here, maybe you can see what happens. Imagine this to be all the problems that you’ll ever face, from the time that you are physically born till the time you physically die, all the problems packed into one little bundle here. Okay, everything that you can ever imagine that happened to you or has happened to you or will happen to you is in this circle. Now God has promised to be your shamar, that means He has promised to take care of every single one of those problems and pressures, every one of them! And if He doesn’t, if He fails on one He fails on all. So shamar means 100%.

But then why the petition of verses 7 and 8, why petition God to do what He has promised to do already? Because God is a personal God, and though He is our shamar, and in practice does take care of us, He wants us to take at least some of those problems, maybe it will only be 15% of the problems we have, and consciously take those problems before Him and consciously decide to lay them in His lap, because if God takes care of all of our problems unconsciously, what’s the difference between that and a machine. Isn’t it far more personal, and don’t you think God gets something out of the thing too, by having a personal relationship where we come, His children come to Him and they say Father, take care of me here. Even though the Father has already promised to take care of it, the children are consciously feeding on their Father relationship. God likes that because God’s overall plan is to glorify Himself, to expose Himself to all His creatures. So God enjoys His creatures to come to Him consciously and claim what He’s already promised.

Next week we’ll deal with another one of these Songs of degrees.