Beside the rivers of
Babylon, we sat and wept as we thought of Jerusalem. We put away our harps, hanging them on
the branches of poplar trees. For
our captors demanded a song from us. Our
tormentors insisted on a joyful hymn: “Sing
us one of those songs of Jerusalem!” But how can we sing the songs of
the Lord while in a pagan land?
Psalm 137:1-4
I kinda know how the Psalmist felt…captured, caught, defeated, deflated of
any hope that the future will get better.
There are millions of scenarios you could draw from the history of human
experience to match the pathos of a soul caught in weeping, unable to sing, or
even manage a faint shadow of a smile.
All tragedy (and even humor) arises out of the difficulties of
life.
It's impossible (for me) to talk about trouble without remembering that
Job said we humans were born for it, just as certainly as the sparks fly upward
from a fire.[1] Each week in untold numbers of churches
across the world, hands are raised to call a name in prayer. These requests are the communication of the
compassion of Christians for believers and unbelievers alike. We pray for all sorts of illnesses,
surgeries, accidents, and war victims.
We pray for a myriad of life’s mayhem and mourning. And then, we’ll sing a hymn. Often a joyful one.
The point is, nobody likes to stay in the dark too long. We want to be lifted by brighter thoughts and
posssibilities. And thus it is ever – we
pray against the dark, drawing hope against the extant shadows. But sometimes our darkness sings a joyful
song as if it were a funeral dirge. We
know the words, but have sadly lost the joy of the melody.
According to the Psalmist, it was worse than that for the former residents
of Jerusalem. They’d been defeated
politically; their homeland decimated by the unstoppable armies of Babylon, and
all their young people carried off to the enemy’s homeland, to serve as
slaves. Not much to celebrate
there. It was time to hang the harps on
the tree branches – there would be no happy songs with which to sing and
dance. Life was going to be one long,
dreary treadmill; the only relief would be the graveyard. That certainly would not be the advertisement
you’re looking for on a travel brochure!
Jeremiah understood the national mood of the captives, and their
weeping. It’s not stretching the truth
when I say most Christians understand that profile in our day, even though we
still live in a land of relative prosperity and personal freedom, greater than
many countries in the world. We still
celebrate remnants of a Christian national heritage. However, truth be told, we can also see the
gathering storm clouds, a darkening horizon of godlessness in this worldly
culture. We have moved past the God is Dead stage of the 1960’s to the
next-worse stage; we have entered the age of God is Irrelevant! And…God help us…if that is an accurate
forecast, we are in the Days of Noah, just waiting for the flood of judgment’s
hammer to fall.
For You Today
If there is one
thing I have learned about dark times, it is that it is proof that God’s
promises are true, and always kept. It
matters little what cultural trends want to proclaim…God is never irrelevant…He
is patient, but even that will end some day.
There
are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library. To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some
of these:
Boiling Point and Joy in Troubling Times
[1] Images: via Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
