What Did I Just Read?

It might just be the most shocking verse in the Bible. It is certainly one people don’t embroider on a throw pillow or sticker on the wall.

How blessed will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones Against the rock.

Psalms 137:9

It’s violent overtone toward children. A prayer to God to harm others. It’s gleeful delight in the worse happening to an enemy. Should such a bitter outburst belong in the Bible?

To understand its place and inclusion, we need to examine the whole psalm. The 137^th Psalm is the song of a people forced into captivity. Those ripped from their homes. Poets forced to sing songs about a homeland that now lies in ruins. To their captors they are just entertainment, but to the captives they are just pain.

That is why they are lashing out. How can such a wicked people win? How can evil dominate? “God” they cry, “do something!”

Pain doesn’t talk with reason. Agony does not come as a measure response. Hurting people lash out. They express the hideousness of violence. Unless we feel the depths of the pain, we can’t understand the depths of God forgiveness or the terrible consequences of sin.

You see that’s why the people of God were in this place. Their sin had led God to punish. That punishment was harsh. And so also would it be to those that would punished for their actions on the people of God.

Hell is described as a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. Where pain and suffering overcome all other feelings. When we read lines like Psalm 137:9, we catch a tiny sliver of the retribution awaiting those separated from God. Yet it also shows us how God listens and cares even when we lash out in pain. When we hurt, he hears. His love tempers our pain.

True loss and pain are understood by God. The cry for justice reaches his ears, but so do the cries for mercy. This passage only shows us one side of the coin. His mercy is great but so will be punishment for those outside of it.

Comments

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...

Master Your Self

In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt. He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!) Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest. Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt! Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way. He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal. As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself. He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors. But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...

Why Does A Lion Tamer Use a Chair?

Ok, I know you have seen the image. A lion tamer enters in the cage of the beast and forces it to obey his commands using a whip, a gun and a chair. Now you can see how the whip and gun could come in handy but you might be wondering why a chair would intimidate an animal as powerful as a lion? Clyde Beatty taming a lion with a chair It's not that the lion is afraid of the chair -- it's that the lion is confused by the chair. Cats are single-minded, and the points of the chair's four legs bobbing around confuse the lion enough that it loses its train of thought. Casually put, the chair distracts the lion from wanting to claw the lion tamer's face off. The powerful creature could destroy the chair in moment’s notice but instead it is distracted into submission. It’s not too much different than how Satan controls us today. By the power of God we could overcome anything that he would use to subdue us. We can overcome the evil one (1 st John 2:13-14). ...

Ecclesiastes 12:10

Search This Blog