This week I welcome guest blogger, Jeff Byerly. Jeff is my pastoral colleague, friend, ThD classmate, and traveling partner! He and his wife Tasha have two daughters, a son-in-law and new grandbaby!
As we continue studying the lament of Psalm 137, the psalmist recalls the vicious attack from Israel’s enemies that led to Israel’s captivity. The Babylonians had laid siege to Jerusalem to cause widespread starvation. Eventually, they breached the city walls, looted their treasure, scorched their buildings and homes.
They slaughtered the old, the young, and the infirm with sword and spear, and arrow. Women would be violated and become victims of rape. As a sign of total triumph, they took small children from their mother’s arms and thrust them to the ground, killing them.
This is what you did in war. It was a powerful psychological tactic that would prevent the victimized country from raising an army for revenge anytime soon. Additionally, it would terrorize parents into submission.
Finally, the survivors were shackled and marched into exile. The Babylonians were notorious for moving their captives around to mix the various people groups into new settings with other captives, again to subjugate them and keep them from revolting.
Now perhaps, we can understand Psalm 137 verse 9 a little better. The psalmist is crying out for vengeance: “God, look at the evil that was done to us, and repay them with the same punishment that we received.”
In Isaiah 13, we find a prophecy for the Babylonians, “Wail, for the day of the LORD is near …” (Isaiah 13:6) Here is the point of Isaiah’s prophecy: God does remember! The Persians will invade 70 years later and fulfill the prophecy against the Babylonians.
So, if God remembers, that also means that God will do something … in his own way … in his own time … according to his majestic providence.
In other words, the exile would not last forever! As painful as the experience of exile would be, there was a future hope. The people of Israel would not be consumed. They would survive (or at least their next generation would survive.)
It’s probably not exactly what you or I would hope for. Yet, the exile would be necessary to help them find a collective meekness and become less pretentious in their devotion toward God.
Ultimately, they would learn faithfulness during these 70 years. And then they will go home!
So, let me ask you: Now, how do you feel?
Isn’t hope rising within the depths of your being?
Aren’t you considering what it means to trust this kind of God?
This psalm of lament becomes a new song to orient Israel’s grief and focus on hope. It becomes the rallying cry for the collective community of Judeans in captivity … as they sing a new song!
This is the power of lament! To change sorrow into hope!
Lament provides us with an appropriate response to the evil we see in the world.
In the next and final post in this series, we’ll look at another psalm of lament to help us respond to the disconcerting world around us.
Photo by Zhifei Zhou on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 