Psalm 120
I call on the Lord in my distress,
and he answers me.
Save me, O Lord, from lying lips
and from deceitful tongues.
What will he do to you,
and what more besides, O deceitful tongue?
He will punish you with a warrior’s sharp arrows,
with burning coals of the broom tree.
Woe to me that I dwell in Meshech,
that I live among the tents of Kedar!
Too long have I lived
among those who hate peace.
I am a man of peace;
but when I speak, they are for war.
Matthew 10:16–22
I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.
“Be on your guard against men; they will hand you over to the local councils and flog you in their synagogues. On my account you will be brought before governors and kings as witnesses to them and to the Gentiles. But when they arrest you, do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.
“Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death. All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.
We are beginning a new series now on the Psalms of Ascent, or Songs of Ascent. They are a collection of psalms associated with the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the main festivals of the Jewish calendar.
The ascent—the going up—in mind here might be going up from the low country around Jerusalem to the hill country in which Jerusalem is situated. It might also refer to walking up the Temple Mount once you get to Jerusalem. It might even refer to walking up the steps of the Temple that the priests used when they went to perform the sacrifices.
But whatever its exact historical context, the main theme of these psalms is starting somewhere low and ending up somewhere high.
Psalm 120 is the first of these Psalms of Ascent. The key verse, I think, for us this morning is verse 7 of the psalm, which says:
I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war.
So there are two things for us to think about from this psalm this morning: first of all, longing for peace, and secondly, looking forward to peace.
Longing for peace
Before we dive in and think a bit more about that, we need to understand what the psalmist means by peace. The Hebrew word, of course, as many of us know, is shalom.
Shalom means a lack of serious lack, if you see what I mean. To put it another way, it means a healthy, complete, and harmonious unit—whether that unit is one’s inner life, one’s body, perhaps society, or even the whole human race functioning harmoniously. The great high priestly blessing given by God to Aaron in the book of Numbers says this:
The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face towards you and give you peace.
And we retain the central place of peace in blessing at the end of our services, when the priest says:
The peace of God, which passes all understanding…
Yes, the lack of war is part of it, but shalom is more than that. It is the lack of long-standing grudges, for example. It is the lack of deceitfulness, lack of envy, lack of misunderstanding. And it is this that the psalmist longs for.
Remember, the Songs of Ascent are all about the journey to Jerusalem, and the name of the city means the city of shalom — Yerushalayim. So the psalmist longs not only for the literal city of Jerusalem, but for the broader place of peace in all of life. But this is certainly not where the psalmist finds himself. Look at verse 1. He says:
I call on the Lord in my distress.
That word distress means a tight, constricting place — a feeling of being forced into a situation you can’t escape from. Then look at verse 2:
Save me, Lord, from lying lips and deceitful tongues.
The psalmist longs for the harmonious integrity and truth-speaking that come along with shalom, and yet everyone around him seems fine with constant lying. Then look at verse 5:
Woe is me that I dwell in Meshech, that I live among the tents of Kedar.
Now Meshech and Kedar were pagan tribes, not only geographically far from Jerusalem but also culturally far from the central place of Israel’s worship.
Perhaps the psalmist was literally living among these pagan tribes, these foreign people. But it is more likely he was living in Israel, yet it felt to him as though he might as well have been living in Meshech because of the behaviour of the people around him. Then look at verses 6 and 7:
Too long have I lived among those who hate peace. I am a man of peace, but when I speak, they are for war.
Again, this need not be literal war, but rather widespread opposition to a shalom way of life. And the whole point of this psalm appearing at the start of the Psalms of Ascent is to give voice to a feeling of dissatisfaction with the world around us — and a longing for that place, that city of peace.
So I wonder: do we feel distress at the lack of shalom around us?
Our news outlets and headlines are full of distressing stories about the lack of peace in our world, in our country, even in the Church of England. But I doubt many of us would describe it as a deep, constricting distress like the psalmist. I think the key thing here is what we deep down feel is the standard.
I felt deep distress when I lived in Russia, because lying, corruption, and distrust were standard. Russians did not feel the same level of distress, because they accepted that standard. That was just the way life was. In the same way, we will not deeply long for shalom in our world, in our country, in our villages, or in our church if deep down we have accepted a lower standard. That is why we need to keep reading our Bibles, why we need to keep going to home groups to read our Bibles together — to remind ourselves of the standard of shalom that God expects.
We looked recently in our sermon series at Acts chapter 2, where we were told that the early church:
All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people.
That is the standard that God sets for the church. C.S. Lewis put it like this: we are often like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he can't imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the seaside. We are far too easily pleased, said Lewis. We won't long for the city of peace if we have accepted a lower standard of what shalom really means—the healthy, complete and utterly harmonious functioning of the family, the church and the world.
Perhaps this morning you are in fact keenly feeling a dysfunction, perhaps in your family, perhaps in your own body. Perhaps there's a situation in the news which is really disturbing you. Psalm 120 allows us to give voice to that pain, to say woe is me that I have to live in such a situation. It doesn't require us to put a brave face on it, but it does require us not to wallow in it, but to look forward to a better future.
And so now, secondly, let's look at what the psalmist says about looking forward to peace. So returning to verse 1, we see that at the outset the psalmist trusts and hopes that his distress will not be permanent.
I call on the Lord in my distress and he answers me.
And then as we look through the rest of the psalm, notice that the resolution to his problems is framed as being in the future in verses 3 and 4.
What will he do to you. Deceitful time.
He will punish you.
You may be thinking, well, hold on, wait a second. How is the solution to a belligerent mindset punishment with sharp arrows and burning coals? Well, the word punish isn't actually in the original. The idea is this. What is the comeuppance for lying and deceiving? Nothing good, says the psalmist. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword. A culture of lying, deceiving, refusing to make peace may benefit those who practice these things for a bit. But sooner or later, the lying, the deceiving, the belligerence will hurt those who practice it too.
And we must not think this is some kind of karma, some kind of impersonal law of nature that what goes around comes around. Our Bibles include the words, he will punish you for a reason. The psalmist has cried out to the Lord, save me from deceit. and the salvation of peace, of shalom, will come when justice is carried out.
Think back to Russia. Why is it that they all just accept that you have to pay the university if you want good grades for your kids, or that it's part of life to pay protection money to the mafia? Why do they just shrug? Because these people get away with it and they're never justly punished. Sadly, it's human nature to get away with it as much as you can before justice is brought to bear.
I think of Neville Chamberlain and his famous declaration that he has secured peace for our time after the Munich agreement with the Nazis. But now we know, and many at the time knew full well that the Nazis were lying. They were seeing how much they could get away with.
Churchill was no saint, but he knew that when it comes to deep evil, shalom peace requires justice being seen to be carried out. Because remember, shalom means a healthy, complete, and harmonious unit. And sometimes this requires the removal of whatever is preventing such health and harmony.
So at this point, we need to consider several things. First of all, we were created to be in a healthy, complete and harmonious whole with other humans and with God. But sin entered in and it threatens to prevent such health and harmony between us, between other people, between us and God. Therefore, sin had to be removed.
Like the Nazis, it had to be seen to be publicly brought to justice and defeated. So for God, there were two options. Bring sinful humans to justice or take the punishment upon himself. And he chose the latter on the cross.
Christianity is all about peace. It's all about shalom with God. It's about the fact that we were the ones who have lied about God and refused his offers of peace. He was a man of peace and we instead preferred war with him.
So the central question of Christianity is this, are you at peace with God? Do you admit that you are by nature his enemy? Do you accept that peace is only possible on his terms, because only he can secure it? So each of us must ask ourselves that question this morning.
We must also remember the Psalms of Ascent are about movement from a low place up to a high place, from disharmony to harmony, peace and shalom. Psalm 120 is a freeze frame of being in that low place, when the high place of shalom seems a long way off.
Perhaps that is you this morning, feeling not at all in a place of harmony, but longing for it. whether in your body, in your family, or in the world. Psalm 120 reminds us, God will. God will bring shalom. He's promised it. He's God, so he will do it. He will bring us to the eternal Jerusalem, the heavenly city of everlasting peace. Weeping may last for the night, but joy comes in the morning.
So this morning, let us be those who long for peace, who long for the completeness of perfect shalom. Let us not be content with a lower standard. Let's make sure we're not those who have lying tongues or who prefer to keep conflict going rather than to resolve it. And let us make sure we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ and his crucifixion. And let us hold to our sure and certain expectation that one day we will enter into our master's rest, where sorrow and sighing will flee away, and he will wipe every tear from our eyes.