I want to say right out of the gate
that this morning's sermon is not
one that you will hear preached in most churches.
I know that's an ominous start.
But most preachers and teachers will skip right past the psalm
that we're going to cover today and move forward
to other more encouraging psalms, all those psalms that
speak of God's grace and mercy and loving kindness.
And those are wonderful psalms, and we've
covered a whole bunch of them in this series,
covered several of them just recently.
But what do you do when you turn to a particular psalm
and you have to wrestle with its description of God's searing
hatred for the wickedness of man?
And what do you do when the psalm describes God
exacting justice through violent judgment on Earth?
When it speaks of repaying the nations for their heinous
policies and their wicked actions.
Now, we seem to understand that that's
going to happen in the end of days.
We've sort of accepted that.
It's built into the gospel story that someday Jesus
is going to return, and there he will pour out
his wrath upon the Earth.
We sort of get that.
We accept that truth, even if it does sound pretty horrific when
you get to the details.
But what about the temporal aspect?
What about when God intervenes in the course of human history
to judge and destroy a nation?
How are we to feel about that?
I'm not going to sugarcoat where we're headed this morning.
Our text for today has some very, very difficult things
to say, probably the two most shocking verses
in the entire collection of the psalms.
And trust me, when you read them out loud,
they will jump off the page.
And trust me, when you read them out loud, they will jump off the page at you.
Psalm 137 is only nine verses long, but it is so chock full of biblical themes.
The dreadfulness of sin and its consequences,
a passionate love for the things that God loves,
how to maintain a godly mindset in the midst of exile and suffering.
And finally, today's Psalm is about the vengeance
that God promises to render upon the heads of his enemies.
So this morning, what we're going to try to do is put ourselves back
into the world of the sixth century BC, which I know is not an easy thing to do,
because obviously, the world has changed so much.
But at least one thing has never changed,
and that is the absolute depravity of human nature.
And we'll see that in our text for this morning.
So buckle up, grab your Bibles.
Let's go to Psalm 137.
I'll warn you, this is not going to be shallow or short today.
So prepare accordingly.
Now, this Psalm can be categorized in a number of ways.
I'll refer to it first and foremost as a lament Psalm,
although you're also going to hear why some scholars look at this
and refer to it as an imprecatory Psalm, something
that we've covered in this series already.
In terms of the collection itself, this Psalm
is part of a short series of three Psalms, 135 to 137, that come right
after the songs of ascent.
But these three Psalms are dedicated to recalling
certain parts of Jewish history so that people can see the faithfulness
and the justice of God.
So let's read together these nine verses, Psalm 137, beginning at verse 1.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept
when we remembered Zion.
Upon the willows in the midst of it, we hung our harps,
for there our captors demanded of us songs, and our tormentors mirth,
saying, sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you, if I do not exalt Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O Lord, against the sons of Edom the day of Jerusalem,
who said, raise it, raise it to its very foundation.
O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,
how blessed will be the one who repays you with the recompense with which you
have repaid us.
How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones
against the rock.
So did those last two verses cause you to wince just a little bit?
If so, you understand the controversy of this song.
But before we get to that, and we will explain that,
and I think you'll walk away with a good understanding of what the psalmist is
intending to say here.
But first, let's talk about the historical setting.
This is actually one of the easiest psalms for us
to date in terms of a biblical era, because it's built right there
into verse 1, where it says, by the rivers of Babylon we sat.
And that tells us that this is describing that 70 year period,
70 years of exile of the people of Judah in Babylon between the years
586 and 516 BC.
But while we know that it's covering that era,
we're still not really sure exactly when this psalm was written down.
So I promised you timelines and maps today.
So let's look at a timeline, and we'll talk about some options
about when this psalm was written.
Let's start, if you look at the timeline on the left,
with the completion of the first great temple,
built by Solomon around 960 BC.
Sadly, after he passed away around the year 930,
the kingdom of Israel split into two.
It was split into two.
Solomon's son, Rehoboam, ruled over the southern kingdom, which
is known in the Bible as Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital.
His rival, Jeroboam, went up north and ruled the northern kingdom,
which came to be known as Israel with its capital in Samaria.
Now, as you can see there, the utterly wicked northern kingdom
fell to the Assyrians in the year 722.
And the 10 tribes, the 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel,
were scattered all over the ancient world.
The southern kingdom, you see, lasts longer,
primarily because it did have a few good kings who resisted idolatry
and reform worship in the land.
But they, too, were conquered in that.
And that's a really important date that every Christian should know.
586 BC.
The southern kingdom of Judah is conquered by Nebuchadnezzar
and his Babylonian army.
And as most of you know, it was then that the city of Jerusalem
was destroyed, its walls were brought down,
and Solomon's temple tragically was demolished.
And the people who survived the invasion and the massacre,
they were then sent to Babylon in exile.
Now, let's keep going with the timeline.
We'll look a little bit more detail.
Again, if you look to the left, that's the fall of Jerusalem
and the destruction of the first temple in 586.
But then shockingly, and as we'll find out in scripture divinely,
the Babylonians themselves are conquered 47 years later,
in the year 539 BC, by a military alliance of two kingdoms
to the east, the Medes and the Persians, brought together
and coalesced in an alliance by a very important biblical
character by the name of Cyrus the Great.
We'll come back to that at the end of the message
because that's very important.
539, Babylon is conquered by the Medo-Persians.
So it was that change of kingdoms from the Babylonians
to the Persians that God used to then begin
to send his people, at least a portion of the population,
from Babylon back to the Holy Land.
And that happens in several waves.
The first wave happens in the year 537.
And as you can see, there's two other important dates there.
516 is when the second temple, much less glorious
than the first, but the second temple is rebuilt in the land.
And then it takes all the way until the days of Nehemiah
in 445 for Jerusalem's walls to be rebuilt.
All those dates are important.
So going back to when Psalm 137 was written,
it could have been during the exile period
when the pain of it was at its height.
During the 46 years of the Babylonian rule,
could have happened then, or it could have happened
after the Medo-Persian assault and after the psalmist
had been sent back from Babylon to the Holy Land.
We're not sure, sometime after 537.
If this is being written after he returns to the land,
then he's writing Psalm 137 looking back on the events,
looking back on his experience.
So you know we need a map.
After a timeline, always comes a map, right?
So let's talk about the ancient Near East here
so that we can get some geographical details.
First of all, you see that greenish region.
That's known as what?
Good job, historians, the Fertile Crescent.
Right, that is where large ancient civilizations
were established for one reason, the availability of water.
So you see this from the left.
You see Egypt, which had, of course, the Nile Valley,
the Nile River.
Moving north, you had the coastal region
of Israel and Lebanon that's fed by Mount Hermon
and into the Jordan River.
And then moving east, you see Mesopotamia,
which is fed by these two very large rivers, the Tigris
and the Euphrates, that flow out of mountains way up
in modern-day Turkey, flow all the way through Mesopotamia
and exit out in the Persian Gulf.
The blue dot is Jerusalem.
And the red dot is Babylon, where
the survivors of the massacre in Judah
are ultimately sent into exile.
And you can see there that blue line that I've highlighted.
That is the Euphrates River.
It runs straight through the ancient city of Babylon.
So as the psalmist is talking about sitting down by a river,
he's either referring to the Euphrates itself
or to one of its many canals, one of its tributaries
that come off the Euphrates.
Now, just a few other fun notes, because, man, I just
love geography.
A couple really important, you have up there that yellow,
that's Nineveh, the former capital of the Assyrian Empire,
which the Babylonians conquered in the year,
I think it was like 615.
That's where Jonah was, of course, sent.
But that was the capital of the Assyrian Empire
when they fell to the Babylonians.
You have the green dot is Ur.
That is where Abraham originally comes from.
We talk about Abraham being a pagan
and then being called out of his homeland
to come to the land of Canaan.
That's where he was from, right on the Persian Gulf there in Ur.
And then the pink dot is Susa.
And that is the setting, the Persian city,
the setting of the Book of Esther.
So you should know all those things just for fun.
OK, with all that background in mind,
let's dive into the psalm now.
And let's begin with the lament portion,
the obvious lament portion of this particular psalm.
And I'll just walk you through the three parts on the screen
as you look at it.
Let's talk about verses one through four.
There are times when the church is guilty of taking a psalm
like this and expositing it in a very sort of cold
and indifferent manner.
We have a tendency in the modern world
to just look at a text and diagram it
and try to find the core truths and then apply it
to our lives.
But can I caution you, especially
when you're reading historical psalms like this,
that is not the right way to approach the scriptures.
When we read a psalm like this one,
we should start by trying to place ourselves
in that historical setting to put
on the sandals of those people, as I'm fond of saying.
Consider these things.
I want you to think carefully about this.
Consider your life right now, where you live, your family,
all of it.
What would it be like to be driven out of your homeland
by an invading army, to see loved ones and friends
and your countrymen slaughtered, to see your town or your city
burned to the ground, to be pulled from your home
by soldiers with your children hiding behind you,
everything you've ever owned taken from you,
then to be force-marched at the point of a sword
for months on end, on foot, some 900 miles,
around that Fertile Crescent from Jerusalem to Babylon?
Imagine.
And then when you arrive, probably placed in something
like a refugee camp.
Definitely not luxurious accommodations.
But there's even more.
What would it be like to witness the entire foundation
of your religion disappear?
Everything that you knew about your spiritual life,
your religion, suddenly vanishes.
Solomon's Temple, which it stood for 400 years, brought down.
The Holy of Holies desecrated.
The sacred furniture stolen by these pagans.
The sacrifices brought to an end.
The priesthood absolutely decimated.
The walls of your city lying in ruins.
It really is impossible, impossible to overestimate
the trauma of this event in the life of the Jewish people.
And now these devastated families, at least the ones
who survived the massacre, then survived the forced march,
now they find themselves in this foreign land.
And they've got to build a whole new life apart from this city
that they love, apart from the city where they're told
Yahweh dwells in their presence.
Now what?
Can you imagine?
So the psalmist picks up the story with the immense grief
and mourning in verse 1.
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down
and we wept when we remembered Zion.
And in that time and culture, sitting down
was the posture of mourning when you
were lamenting over great loss.
And how could you even process the extent of a loss
like this for all that Zion symbolized
in the community of Israel?
But there's even more going on.
It's not just what's been lost, but why it was lost.
Why was it lost?
And for the faithfully worshiping Jews,
who by the way, had been caught up
in this judgment against the entire nation,
and that's just a reality.
Sometimes godly people get caught up in judgment
as God judges a nation.
They're caught up in this judgment.
But they knew in that moment why they were now in exile.
They knew.
Judah had turned its collective back on God's law.
They had broken covenant with Yahweh.
And they had ignored all the warnings
that the prophets gave to them.
And now they were reaping the consequences
of the idolatry of Judah and their foolishness.
And it's important to say this clearly.
God's judgment upon Judah was absolutely warranted and just.
You see, there's a principle that's on display
throughout the Old Testament.
And it's clearly stated in the New,
judgment begins with the household of God.
Believers don't get to say, oh, well, we're fine down here,
Lord.
Judge everybody else.
No, God says, no, it starts with you.
You are my witnesses.
You are my ambassadors.
Judgment starts in the household of God.
And that's because of a second biblical principle,
to whom much is given, much is required.
And so if Yahweh places his unique love on you,
and you turn your back on him, and you disobey him,
then there should be an expectation
that discipline is coming, which, by the way,
had been clearly laid out in the Torah.
In Deuteronomy 28, we have this blessings and curses
part of the covenant.
And God was clear.
If you do not obey the Lord your God,
you will be driven out of the land of promise
and into exile in foreign lands.
He had been very clear this was not a surprise.
And so as they sat by the river, they wept over all this.
They wept over the sins of their nation.
They wept over the tragic loss of everything
that they held dear, both in their physical lives
and in their spiritual lives.
Again, cannot overestimate how difficult this moment was.
Verse 2 now.
Upon the willows, or the poplar trees,
and those were common along the banks of the river,
upon these trees we hung our harps.
Back then they were called lyres, right?
L-Y-R-E-S.
So you have musicians, possibly Levites, who
had survived the massacre, had gotten to Babylon,
and they had brought this precious thing,
this instrument with them.
But they hang them up on the trees.
It's interesting, for those who doubt small details like this
in the biblical record, archaeology
has something to say about this.
Just as an aside, about 175 years ago,
a British archaeologist discovered,
and some of you guys know this story.
They discovered the ruins of an Assyrian palace
under the ground in the ancient sort of wiped out
city of Nineveh.
And it was the palace of the great King Sennacherib,
who by the way is mentioned in the Old Testament 16 times.
He's an important character.
And they dug up a whole series of these massive reliefs,
these intricate carvings that had once
adorned Sennacherib's walls.
And they were images of all of his greatest victories.
And one of those reliefs depicted the victory
over a Judean city called Lachish.
Some of you have seen pictures of this.
So to commemorate his great victory at Lachish,
Sennacherib had a carving made, get this, 16 feet tall
and 40 feet long.
This is how grand his palace was in Nineveh.
And it portrayed the image of himself sitting on his throne.
And these generals and these soldiers
are coming up to give him the spoils of war.
And right in the middle of this train of people,
you see very clearly three prisoners of war.
And what do they have in their hands?
Harps.
They have liars in their hand.
So these are two different slabs in the British Museum.
And so the one on the right, it's 40 feet long,
so I can't give you the whole thing,
is Sennacherib sitting on his throne.
But here you see three Jewish, these are Jewish men from Lachish.
And the Syrians always pictured the Jewish prisoners
with skull caps.
See how they have different hats than the Syrians?
And they're carrying in their hands
their musical instruments.
Now this is a different time period
than the one we're looking at today,
Assyrian versus Babylonian.
But the cultural issue is exactly the same.
These instruments were precious to any Jew who went into exile.
And given enough time and resources,
it's amazing how archaeology consistently
confirms the biblical account.
So back to our text.
The Jews are now sitting along the banks of the river
in Babylon.
And they're not playing these instruments
that they love so much.
Why?
Look at verse 3.
For there are captors demanded of us songs,
and our tormentors mirth.
And that word just means joy or gladness.
They demanded songs of joy from us saying, hey,
sing us one of those songs, one of those songs of Zion.
And you can probably picture the scene
because you've seen something like it
in a movie or a documentary at some point in your life.
You've got Babylonian guards now who
are overseeing these Jewish refugees.
And they're harassing them.
And they're taunting them.
They're pouring salt in their collective wound.
Sing us a song about how great and powerful your God is.
Sing us a song about the majesty of your city,
which we leveled.
In his commentary on this Psalm, Calvin says this.
Their design was less to wound the hearts
of these miserable exiles than it was to cast blasphemies
upon their God.
Basically, they're saying, sing us a song.
By the way, where is your God?
Uncomfortable, right?
So the Psalmist says in verse 4, so how can we
sing the Lord's song in this foreign land?
So for them, singing the praise songs of Zion
was spiritually unthinkable in this moment.
To give their tormentors the satisfaction
of hearing a precious worship song
would be like casting pearls before swine.
And it might also be interpreted that they were acknowledging
that somehow Yahweh had been defeated
by the pagan gods of Babylon, which they knew wasn't true.
So they aren't going to sing.
The best description I've heard of this would be,
a parallel would be, if you or I were
invited to go to an interfaith event,
and we were to stand on a stage, and they said,
OK, you go ahead and sing a song to Jesus,
and then we'll let the Hindus sing their song,
and the Muslims sing his song, and the New Agers sing his song,
you'd say, no, thank you.
No, thank you.
I won't be a part of that, because it muddles
the identity of the one true God.
And that's what's happening here in this verse.
So that's the lament in verses 1 through 4.
The next two verses, 5 and 6, we hear
the exiles commitment and resolve to remain loyal to Zion.
Verse 5, if I forget you, O Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget her skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you, if I do not
exalt Jerusalem above my greatest joy.
Friends, this is spiritual loyalty.
This is spiritual resolve, committing oneself
to remember and not to forget, to never forget,
never allowing the goodness of God
to fade from your heart, to fade from your mind,
no matter where you are, even in Babylon,
no matter what circumstances you're in,
being an exile, a refugee in a foreign place.
Because these people, these exiles,
they knew that renewal and restoration are always
possible with God.
These exiles knew their Jewish history.
They knew what God had done in the past to redeem his people.
So they had hope.
Even in this moment, they had hope.
All they had to do was endure, persevere, and wait
for God's promises to unfold.
And that is a great lesson for all of us.
When we're going through the storm, we look at the past.
We look at what God has done for his people.
And we have hope because we know his promises
will unfold in our lives.
He will never forsake us.
And you hear the psalmist make a personal vow in verse 5.
Notice in verses 1 through 4, it was all about we and our,
all these collective terms.
But now in verse 5, it gets very personal.
He says, I will never forget Jerusalem.
I will never forget the house of the Lord.
I will never forget the songs of praise
that my people have sung there together.
He was so sure of completing this vow
that he even placed a curse upon himself if he should fail.
If I forget Jerusalem is my greatest joy,
may the hand that I use to play my instrument become crippled.
If I forget Jerusalem, may the voice
that I use to sing praises to Yahweh, may it become mute.
He's a psalmist, after all.
He's a musician.
And for a musician, the hands and the voice
are your most valuable possession.
But far better to lose them or even lose your life
than to let my God in the city he loves fade from my memory.
Whatever your most valuable thing is,
better to lose that than to lose the Lord in the city
that he loves.
As I was working on this message,
that reminded me of this beautiful, some of you
guys know this story, this beautiful and well-documented
story from church history.
The story of a man named Polycarp,
who was the head of the church in an Asian minor city called
Smyrna around the year 155.
And Smyrna was devoted to Roman worship.
And Polycarp, who was a very old man at the time, in fact,
Polycarp is known as the last living student who
sat under the teaching of the apostle John,
he had become a problem for the governor of that region.
So they had him arrested.
He was leading the people to not worship the Roman gods
and to not worship the emperor.
So they had him arrested.
According to the man who wrote down
his chronicle, the story of his martyrdom,
Polycarp could have run away, could have escaped,
but he refused, he said, let God's will be done.
And when he heard that soldiers had come to arrest him,
he came out, he spoke with them, he offered them food and drink,
and he asked for one thing, may I
have an hour of uninterrupted time to pray to my God?
By the time they got him to the local arena, where
he would be mocked and tortured and burned alive
before a crowd, the governor of that region
gave him one last chance.
He said, revile your Christ and swear an oath,
and I will set you free.
Here's what Polycarp said in response.
86 years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong.
How can I blaspheme my king and my savior?
It is unthinkable for me to repent from what is good
and turn to what is evil.
So what are you waiting for?
Bring on whatever you wish.
And Polycarp was burned alive that day.
Loyalty, resolve, commitment.
OK, let's get to the last verses.
Let's get to the really hard ones.
Deep breath.
As we come to verse 7, notice that there are two nations
in the crosshairs.
There's Edom and there's Babylon.
And both the Edomites and the Babylonians
have been utterly cruel towards Israel.
They had brought immense pain and suffering
into the lives of the Jewish people.
And so the psalmist lays a prayer request before the Lord.
Notice this is a prayer request.
Verse 7, remember, O Lord, against the sons of Edom,
the day of Jerusalem, who said, raise it, raise it,
or level it to its foundation.
OK, so who are the Edomites?
Many of you know the answer to that question.
The tragic relationship between Judah and Edom
goes all the way back to Genesis 25,
to the two sons of Isaac, whose names are Jacob and Esau.
Jacob, the child of promise, Esau, the fool
who despised his birthright.
And because of a whole series of events
we don't have time for this morning, in Genesis 27,
we're told that Esau held a grudge against Jacob.
And he determined to kill his brother.
Later, his descendants, the descendants of Esau,
they moved away from Judea.
They migrated south, below the Dead Sea,
to a region that today is like right
in the middle of Israel's Negev Desert
and the western border of the country of Jordan.
Map time.
So now we're now centering on Israel itself.
The blue dot is Jerusalem.
That's where Edom settled later on, the descendants of Esau.
And as they settled there, and they built cities,
and they built some beautiful mountain
fortresses in that region, as they did,
they became sworn enemies of Judah.
And I mean that sworn enemies.
And there's a long history of conflict we could walk through.
But for our purpose today, notice in the Psalm
how it refers to a specific day.
He calls it what, the day of Jerusalem in verse 7.
That is the day, listen now, that Edomites
chose to side with Babylon in the invasion of Jerusalem.
They sided with the world.
They sided with the pagan as their brothers were attacked.
And they took great pleasure in seeing Zion destroyed.
The psalmist tells us they cheered from the sidelines,
level it, bring it down to its foundations.
And by that, they meant more than just the city walls
and more than just the temple.
They meant everything.
They wanted Zion wiped from the face of the earth
and everything that it represented,
including the sovereign rule of Yahweh
because he chose Jacob over Esau.
The grudge remained.
We even know from the prophets that when some Judeans tried
to flee the massacre, they fled south from Jerusalem to escape.
What did the Edomites do?
They captured these Jews and then handed them
over to the Babylonians.
The fact that the Edomites are so closely related to the Jews
makes their treachery so bad.
Brother turning against each other,
choosing to ally themselves with this depraved,
violent pagan people.
So the psalmist pleads his case, remember them, oh Lord.
Remember what they have done.
Think of it as a judicial request.
Lord, you are a God of justice, so remember your word.
Fulfill your promises to your people
and punish this evildoer.
It's an imprecatory statement, isn't it?
So that's Edom.
Next, the psalmist turns his attention
to the invaders themselves, the Babylonians.
Look at verse 8.
Oh, daughter of Babylon, you devastated one,
or the one doomed to destruction.
How blessed will be the one who repays you
with the recompense with which you have repaid us.
How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes
your little ones against the rock.
Now obviously, that is, listen, that
is shocking language that sort of shakes
our modern sensibilities.
But let me share a few things so that we can understand
what's going on here.
First of all, historically, this is hard for us,
especially young families.
Slaying the children of defeated enemies
was a common practice in the ancient Near East.
Why?
Because children are the future of any nation.
Little boys grow up to be warriors.
Little girls grow up to be the mothers of warriors.
So executing children in that time and place, so hard,
was viewed as practical and sensible.
And it would not have shocked the original audience
of this psalm at all, because it was so normal.
That's number one.
Second thing, what the psalmist is requesting here
is adherence to a principle known as lex talionis,
or the principle of retribution.
And that is first stated in the Torah in Exodus 21.
And most of us know this, right?
This is the verse that comes up every time we discuss
capital punishment in America.
If there is injury, then you shall
appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye,
tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
In other words, justice should be equitable.
The punishment should be commensurate
with the crime committed.
And so all of the violence and injury
that Babylon brought upon Judah should be brought down
upon their own heads, including the dashing of children
to pieces before their eyes.
Because that's what the Babylonians did to the Jews
in 586.
And I have to wonder as I was thinking about this,
did the psalmist witness this?
Did he see children murdered in front of his eyes,
Jewish children?
How would that image not be seared in your mind
as you prayed and as you asked the Lord for justice?
And I don't want to get political here this morning,
but you can also help to think about what Hamas did in Israel
back on October 7, the bloodshed that we witnessed.
Third thing that's important to see here,
notice that the psalmist is not asking the Lord for permission
to dish out his own personal vengeance.
He's not saying, Lord, let me, give me a sword.
I'll go deal with this.
He's asking God to do it.
And that is a huge distinction.
Remember, both the Old and New Testaments command this.
So not just a New Testament thing,
it's an Old Testament thing.
Do not take your own revenge, but leave room
for the wrath of God.
Vengeance is mine, says the Lord.
I will repay.
Not us, the Lord.
So this is not about personal revenge or personal hatred.
This is a collective and national prayer
that God would punish the ruthless enemy of his people.
And really, this is the psalmist turning his anger over
to the Lord and praying that justice would be done.
Fourth thing, and this is the most important one.
If you really want to understand verse 9,
this is the most important one.
The thing that often makes the reader wince at these verses
is that specific word used by the psalmist where he says,
blessed.
Right?
We tend to think, wow, blessed is
the one who brings violence against Babylon
and murders his children.
Really?
Blessed?
Here's the key to understanding this.
What the psalmist is asking for is actually not his idea.
What he's asking for is actually not the psalmist's will.
It's what God had already promised to do.
Again, that makes a huge difference.
He's not saying, Lord, I demand that you do this.
He's saying, Lord, do what you've promised to do.
God had already promised through his prophets
to repay Babylon for their wickedness.
That's why the psalmist uses that word remember.
Remember, God, what you said in your word.
Remember what you declared and do as you said you would do.
Act justly in this situation.
I'm going to give you some examples of this.
200 years before this event, through the prophet Isaiah,
this is what God said.
Behold, the day of the Lord is coming with fury
and burning anger to make the earth a desolation
and to destroy its sinners.
I will punish the world for its evil
and wicked people for their iniquities.
I will put an end to the pride of the arrogant
and humiliate the insolence of tyrants.
Whoever is caught will die by the sword.
Look at that last statement.
Their children will be dashed to pieces before their eyes.
Through Jeremiah, who prophesied right before the exile,
God had already promised to fully repay Babylon
and to destroy its walls.
In fact, it's no coincidence that the verse I'm
about to show you, Jeremiah 51, 56,
shares some of the exact same language as Psalm 137.
Because the psalmist would have known Jeremiah 51.
He's only asking God to do what God said he would do.
Jeremiah 51, 56, for the destroyer
is coming against her, against Babylon.
And her mighty men will be captured,
and their bows shattered.
For the Lord is a God of what?
Recompense.
He will fully repay.
Then in addition to those two major prophets,
we have multiple references to the downfall of Babylon
in the minor prophets.
Habakkuk, for example, speaks of the violence and cruelty
of the Babylonians.
And he says this, because you have plundered many nations,
all the peoples who remain will plunder you,
speaking of Babylon.
You will be filled with disgrace instead of glory.
The cup in the Lord's right hand will come around to you,
and utter disgrace will cover your glory.
Going back to the Edomites, I have to mention Obadiah.
Did you know the book, when was the last time you read Obadiah?
The entire book of Obadiah is a prophecy
against the Edomites, the entire book.
God's serious about this.
And it also has language that we see in Psalm 137.
And by the way, this predates Psalm 137 by 300 years.
This is what Obadiah says about Babylon.
You will be covered with shame and destroyed forever
because of violence done to your brother Jacob.
The house of Jacob will be a blazing fire,
but the house of Esau will be stubble.
No survival will remain of the house of Esau,
for the Lord has spoken.
For the day of the Lord is near against all the nations.
As you have done, it will be done to you.
What you deserve will return upon your own head.
That is lex talionis, the principle of retribution.
So just to recap and to summarize,
the word blessed in verses 8 and 9 of our Psalm
can be misleading.
Hear me now.
This is critical.
If I've lost you, wake up.
In and of itself, invading and destroying a city
and slaughtering its people and its children
is not righteous, obviously.
But fulfilling God's will is a righteous thing.
And this is a tough principle for us to embrace.
In fact, the Book of Habakkuk, this
is the question that the prophet asked God
in the whole discussion between him and the Lord.
Because he's having a hard time grasping it, too.
Listen now.
Sometimes God uses wicked people as a tool
to fulfill his divine plan.
In particular, he will use them as an agent of his wrath.
Let me say it again.
Sometimes in human history, God will
use a wicked people, a wicked army,
as a divine agent of his wrath.
By the way, we see this principle,
shockingly, in Romans 13.
God establishes government, even wicked governments, to do what?
To bear the sword for a reason.
They are avengers of the Lord, Paul says in Romans 13.
They bring wrath on evildoers.
Even wicked governments are used by God for that purpose.
So in both of these cases, both with Edom and Babylon,
listen to the intent of the psalmist here.
First of all, Lord, you have already spoken about this.
It's in your word.
So remember what you have declared,
and act justly, repay these two enemies.
But second, listen now, blessed is the nation and the army
that does your will in punishing Edom and punishing Babylon.
As they have done, may it be done to them.
Deep breath.
Is that hard?
You know what?
We don't take evil seriously, not seriously enough,
not as seriously as God takes it.
I know I read once where C.S. Lewis commented.
He didn't like this psalm much, but he said, you know what?
He said, one thing that comes out of this psalm,
they understood evil more than we do in the modern world.
They understand right and wrong more than we do
in this world we live in.
It's hard.
OK, I'm available for coffee this week
if you want to talk more about this.
I told you that most churches just skip over this psalm,
right?
But we can't skip over hard things.
And it does give us a different perspective
on a Christian worldview, on the way
we need to see things like righteousness and evil.
And the consequences of sin.
Let me share a few more thoughts,
and then I promise we'll be done.
First of all, we should do a little PS to the story
about Edom and Babylon.
And we should ask the question, what happened to them?
God's faithful to His word, right?
So what happened to those two nations?
Well, as a people, the Edomites were gradually
absorbed into a mixed race people known as Ijumeans,
by the way, which was the source of wicked King Herod.
Lovely.
And by AD 100, they'd vanished from the history books,
never to return.
And all the great fortresses that they once
stood in the mountains in the ancient region of Edom,
later they were abandoned, taken over by the Nabateans.
And today, some of you have been in that part of the world.
It's a desolate wasteland.
The only thing that lives there now is one tourist site, Petra,
and a bunch of desert creatures.
Edom is gone, as God promised.
As for the Babylonians, the history of their downfall
is well-documented.
I talked about this at the beginning
of the message in 539 BC.
Cyrus the Great unites the two empires,
the Medes and the Persians.
I'll go back to a map.
And he launches an invasion, a daring invasion,
against Babylon.
The two arrows, the Medes were the northern kingdom
on the other side of the Zagros mountain range.
The Persians are the lower orange arrow.
And together, they marched their armies,
and they invaded the entire nation of Babylon.
They conquered the city of Babylon in less than three
weeks, less than three weeks to take down powerful Babylon.
To this day, historians still shake their heads at it.
It's amazing.
They're like, how could a nation so powerful fall so quickly?
We know the answer to that.
God had declared it.
Doesn't surprise us.
We trust in God's word.
We trust in what he has promised.
Babylon will fall.
Once again, God had prophesied this.
This is going back to Isaiah 13.
He literally says, before this happened,
I am going to stir up the Medes against them, who will not
value silver or take pleasure in gold,
and their bows will mow down the young men.
They will not even have compassion
on the fruit of the womb, nor will they I pity children.
And Babylon, the beauty of kingdoms, the glory
of the Chaldeans' pride will be as when I overthrew Sodom
and Gomorrah.
How ironic is it that Babylon fell so hard and never
recovered?
If you go to ancient Babylon today and look at it,
there's almost nothing to see.
This glorious city, nothing to see.
Just as Habakkuk had said, disgrace will cover your glory.
But Jerusalem was not only rebuilt,
it was made more glorious by the coming of Christ.
Not only does it still stand today,
2,600 years after the Babylonians
tried to scrape it from the earth,
but the Babylonian people are no more,
and the Jewish people live on.
And their nation is reestablished now.
Amazing, right?
Amazing.
You never would have predicted it in 586 BC, what we see today.
But God knew.
Amazing prophecy.
OK, I just have a quick bullet point list
of five other things.
I know.
I know, as if it's not been enough.
Five quick practical things I want
you to think about that come out of this historical setting.
Number one, I want you to take note of the symbolism
that you see in this song.
Three kingdoms which symbolize spiritual realities.
You have Zion or Jerusalem, the city that God loves.
Really the symbol of the future eternal state
that we're longing for, right?
The new Jerusalem.
On the other hand, you have Babylon,
the city that would not acknowledge
the lordship of Yahweh.
And when you open up Revelation 17 to 19,
it represents everything that stands opposed to Christ.
Two completely different poles, right?
And then in the middle, you have Edom.
And Edom is an interesting character to look at.
It represents those who are close by to God's people,
close by the church, just as Esau was once
close to his brother Jacob.
But in reality, this Edom is a sworn enemy of the church.
And when push comes to shove, he will side with the world
over believers.
So we're talking about counterfeit liberal
Christianity.
We're talking about those who teach a false gospel.
We're talking about deconstructors
who turn against the body of Christ
and stir up others to mock her.
God will not forget them on the day of judgment.
That's number one.
The symbolism is powerful in this Psalm.
Number two, we've got to recognize
the sinfulness of sin.
I know that's redundant, right?
But the way the psalmist writes is designed to shock us.
It forces us to see the evil in this world,
that it's a reality.
This is what the world doesn't get.
Have you noticed that so many people in the world
they don't even want to talk about evil,
but it is so pervasive?
And to see the awful consequences of sin,
how it spreads out like ripples and touches
every human being on Earth.
It's possible to read this Psalm and conclude that,
you know what, maybe God's just being too severe towards Edom
and Babylon.
But if that's where you go in your heart and your mind,
honestly, you really have not wrestled
with just how wicked human nature is
and what we actually deserve.
And so I would just exhort you to take a second look at this,
at how wicked human beings are and what we actually deserve.
And yet even this is part of God's plan,
because what does it do?
The more we go deep into that concept, what do we see?
A need for a Savior, a need for forgiveness.
All of these things is what God uses to point us
to the cross and the mercy that we find there.
And so those of us who are evangelizing,
these are the types of things.
If you're going to talk about the cross,
you've got to talk about evil.
You've got to talk about the devastating effects of sin
before you get to the remedy.
Amen?
Number three, we have to guard our hearts
against vengeance and hatred.
And I know it's getting more difficult every day, isn't it?
Because we look out at how replete the world
is with wickedness.
We could spend all of our days shooting up
in precatory prayers towards everybody that we see.
But know this, in both the Old and New Testaments,
we are called to love our enemies
and pray for their salvation.
Yet there is also a time for us to ask God
to do what He's promised to do, to judge
those who oppose His kingdom.
It is a very difficult balance.
But Jesus did both, didn't He?
He talked about love and mercy and grace.
But He also called down curses on cities.
He called down curses on the spirit
of the scribes and Pharisees.
Paul did both.
He said, pray for those who persecute you.
But He also called down a curse upon those
who preach a false gospel.
So it's a very difficult balance.
Here's the point.
We have to pray that God gives us wisdom in this.
We have to pray that God would keep our motives pure
and our hearts aligned with His.
To be able to distinguish those two things.
Pray that we would not become angry about what's
happening in the world around us.
Bitter or vindictive, because it's easy to get that way.
Instead, ask the Lord to give you a greater
heart for reaching the loss.
Ask God to bring your enemies to a place of repentance
before it's too late, because we know how the story ends.
It ends with judgment and wrath.
It's a tough balance.
Number four.
We ought to value what we've received from God's gracious
hand.
This is an interesting one.
The exiles wept when they remembered Zion.
But catch this now.
In their days of comfort, the people of Judea
had taken Zion for granted.
And it was taken from them.
They didn't acknowledge the blessings of the Lord
until they were lost.
One scholar puts it this way.
Those who do not esteem the privileges of Zion
when they have them will be forced
to acknowledge their worth when they don't have them.
What an important warning this is for us.
We are a truly blessed people.
We are so blessed to live in this country,
so blessed to live in this town, so blessed
to be a part of this church family.
But it can all be taken away in an instant.
So value what you have right now so you
don't have to remember.
Value what you have right now and worship accordingly.
Amen.
Last thing.
We should foster a passion for the kingdom of God.
Just as the exiles in this Psalm had an unrelenting hunger
for Zion.
Listen, they could have just assimilated
into Babylonian culture.
Most of the Jews did that, by the way.
Most of them did not come back.
They could have assimilated, but their intense longing
for Yahweh and for Zion would not allow for it.
So for us today, it's about the affections of our hearts,
not being distracted or drawn away
by all the shiny objects out there in the world.
It's about refusing to forget Christ
and His sacrificial death.
It's about meditating on the truths of the gospel,
not letting them fade from our hearts and minds,
but instead stoking the flames of faith each and every day
as we stir up one another to love and good deeds.
Do you exalt Christ overall?
Is His church your greatest joy?
Never forget where your true citizenship lies, friends.
Your true citizenship is in the heavenly Jerusalem.
Ultimately, that's where our hearts need to be directed.
So we'll take the advice in the New Testament authors.
Set your mind on things above and turn your eyes to Jesus.
Amen?
Let's bow our heads.
Father, this is a tough word for us this morning.
Tough for us to put ourselves back in the sixth century BC.
Tough on our modern sensibilities, Lord,
because we do have it so good right now.
We are so comfortable compared to previous generations,
compared to other parts of the world.
We are so comfortable.
Even as we complain, we are so comfortable.
And so it's hard for us to recognize
the absolute sinfulness of sin.
It is hard for us sometimes to look dead in the eye
of the depravity of mankind.
So I pray, God, that you would seal these things to our hearts.
I pray that you will show us more and more
about what holiness looks like, what righteousness looks like.
And also show us, Lord, about the depravity of man.
And we're so grateful this morning as we look at this Psalm
that we have been shown the remedy, Lord,
that you sent your one and only Son to this earth
to show us who you are and to provide us with mercy
and a sacrifice for our sins.
So God, this morning, even as we were in the sixth century BC
and we're in the Old Testament, help us now to bridge that gap
and to look to the cross and to turn our eyes to you
and to worship you for who you are and what you've done.
Jesus, we are forever grateful, forever grateful.
We praise you this morning.
Lord, may our praise be not just from our lips
but from our hearts for your glory.
Amen.