I don’t mind telling you that Psalm 132 has been something of a struggle this week.
Psalm 131 tripped off the tongue – there was so much in that image of the weaned child with its mother that spoke into our experience.
But Psalm 132 has been very different. It’s the longest of the Psalms of The Ascent and it’s steeped in the language of temple and covenant; language we’re familiar with but which doesn’t necessarily move us or connect with us.
It assumes a lot of background knowledge too – things the people of Israel would have known, but only those with more than a passing interest in the Old Testament would know today.
But after much head scratching, I finally found a way in, and what I want to do is give you three snapshots of this Psalm, three perspectives on it which I think might help us. And then I’ll finish by saying a little about what it might mean for us.
So the here's first perspective – King David’s, which would date it at about 1000 BC.
More by accident than design I gave you some helpful background for today’s Psalm a couple of weeks ago when we were looking at Psalm 131. David, the shepherd boy who became King, wanted nothing more than to build a temple for his God. It would be a place to worship, and also a place to house the Ark of the Covenant which was an ornate box containing the law of Moses: a symbol of God’s enduring presence with them.
If you’re interested in the story you can read it for yourselves in 2nd Samuel chapter 7, but the first few verses read like this:
“After King David was settled in his palace and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a palace of cedar, while the Ark of God remains in a tent”. Nathan replied to the king, “Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with you”.
Now – a wee bit of history here. Way back before David’s time, the Ark of the Covenant had been captured by the Philistines, but they soon discovered that whatever town of theirs it rested in began to suffer illnesses and hardship. Putting two and two together, they reckoned this had to be Israel’s God taking revenge. So to get rid of the thing they placed it on a cart, pulled by two oxen, and sent it over the border back into Israelite territory.
The people of Beth Shemesh found it, and they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing at first. And after some deliberation they took it to the house of a man called Abinadab and placed guards over it. And the Ark remained there for decades because King Saul, being the man he was, tended to want to keep God at arms length.
But when David became King, he wanted the Ark back in Jerusalem as a symbol of God’s centrality to all that they were as a people. So he organised a great procession, where they carried the Ark all the way up to Jerusalem, with sacrifices and fanfares along the way, and with David himself leading the dancing at the head of the march.
But there was still no permanent place to put it. In the years they’d wandered in the desert after escaping from Egypt, the Ark was kept in a special tent, and once again a tent was its home, albeit a tent pitched in the heart of the city. David lived in a palace while the Ark of God lived under canvas. And he didn’t feel that was right.
So with that history, we now have a handle on verses 1-9 of the Psalm. Verses 1-5 are about David’s honourable desire to build a temple. Verse 6 says “We heard it in Ephrathah, we came upon it in the fields of Jaar”, and that’s looking back to that time when the Philistines sent the Ark back into Israelite territory. And verses 7-9 are talking about that first great procession up to Jerusalem with the Ark – a day of feasting and worship.
About 30 years later a magnificent temple was built to house the Ark – one of the wonders of the then known world - but it was David’s son Solomon who built it, not David himself.
Now there are two things I want you to note from the rest of the Psalm – two promises of God.
The first is the promise to bless David’s line: 11-12
“The Lord swore an oath to David, a sure oath that he will not revoke; “One of your own descendants I will place on your throne – if your sons keep my covenant and the statutes I teach them, then their sons shall sit on your throne for ever and ever”.
The second is the promise of God’s presence – vs 13,14 “The Lord has chosen Zion, he has desired it for his dwelling; “This is my resting place for ever and ever; here I will sit enthroned, for I have desired it”.
So at this point, two promises weave themselves into the fabric of Israel’s story – a promise to do with David’s line, and a promise to do with God’s presence. And we’ll come back to those shortly.
Now, fast forward with me a few decades to our second snapshot. David’s been and gone and this time, we’re among the pilgrims singing the Psalms of the Ascent on our way up to Jerusalem.
At the heart of the city is Solomon’s beautiful temple. Some of us have seen it before, others are eagerly anticipating our first glimpse of it. We remember David’s good intentions in our songs; we rejoice as we remember how the Ark came back into our hands from the Philistines, and as we make our way up to the city, we remember that very first procession when David brought the Ark home with joy and dancing.
We’re a part of that, we think. We are the inheritors of those two promises. David’s descendants are still on the throne, God’s presence is still with us in the temple and all is well with the world.
Now, fast forward with me one last time, about 400 years to 586 BC. This is our third snapshot.
The plains around Jerusalem are swarming with soldiers. A vast army from Babylon has surrounded the city and kept it under siege for almost two years. The people are starving and some are eating their children to stay alive.
The walls finally give way and the defences are breached. The Israelite soldiers try to make a break for freedom, but they’re slaughtered as they go. King Zedekiah is taken and the last thing he sees before they clap him in chains and gouge out his eyes is his sons being slaughtered.
Sit and watch that scene in your minds eye for a moment. You’re on a hill beside Jerusalem. The gorgeous façade of the temple now engulfed in flames, as solders carry away the last of the sacred vessels and fittings, laughing as they go. A few of the priests offer some resistance, but it’s utterly futile. The Ark of the Covenant is either burning or taken – no-one knows which, but it will never be seen again. The royal palace is ablaze, the King’s family slaughtered. You watch him stumbling blindly over the rubble, dragged along by chains at the front of the long, snaking line of captives.
What of Psalm 132 now? What of those promises? A descendant of David on the throne for ever? God’s presence with them for ever?
Those words must have sounded pretty hollow, as a pagan army marched through the streets of the city God was said to dwell in, and systematically reduced it to rubble.
So there you are: three snapshots of this Psalm, seen from different perspectives.
And now three observations, given what we've just said.
Firstly – a word about ifs and buts.
I know I’ve said it recently, but I’ll say it again just now. We need to pay more attention to the ifs and buts in the Bible. God makes promises, and God being God we can be sure he will see them through. But more often than not, God’s promises come with conditions, and the promises in Psalm 132 are a good example of that:
Listen to verse 12 again:
“if your sons keep my covenant and the statutes I teach them, then their sons shall sit on your throne for ever and ever”.
The promise comes with a condition. If your descendants keep the covenant and the statutes, then they’ll have the throne for ever. Did they keep the statutes and the covenant? No. David was good, Solomon started well but finished badly and from then on it was a rollercoaster ride over 4 centuries with more bad kings than good, some of whom even took up the practice of the local gods and got involved in ritual sacrifice of their own children.
Was God beholden to such men because he’d made a promise centuries earlier to David? I don’t think so…..
God promises to bless his people, but the condition of the blessing is faithfulness to God. Step outside that, and there are no guarantees.
In a way it’s like a couple getting married – they enter into a covenant in faith, trusting each other. But if, after a few weeks or months or years, it becomes clear that one of the partners has no intention of keeping the vows they took, is the other one beholden to stay with them despite serial infidelity, or domestic abuse? I’m not sure that’s what the Scriptures teach. Jesus says that divorce is not desirable, but he also says it’s permissible where one or other partner has not been faithful to the covenant of marriage.
Israel thought God was duty bound to keep things as they were. After all – he’d made promises to them! But they’d forgotten that those promises came with an ‘if’.
Secondly – a word about exile.
I don’t doubt that as they were marched out of Jerusalem, those people were convinced that they had been abandoned by God for ever. The Davidic line was severed, and the temple was destroyed. As far as they were concerned, that was the end of the story.
Only it wasn’t.
About 150 years later, with the then Emperor’s blessing, a remnant led by Nehemiah returned and rebuilt the walls and the temple and many of the exiles returned home to live in their own land again.
What felt like the end wasn’t the end. In exile, the people of Israel learned a really important lesson – they learned that they could still be the people of God without a temple, without a king, and without a homeland.
Perhaps these things had become too important to them. Perhaps being stripped of them reminded them that what really mattered was that they did what the ten commandments asked of them and learned to love God and love neighbour.
There’s a lesson for us there, I think.
All of us find ourselves wedded to particular aspects of church life – the things we have a particular in investment in. Might be the building, the style of worship, the music we find meaningful, a group of people we feel especially at home with, a particular pew that we sit in.
Can those things become too important to us? Well, if they become what we focus on, rather than the business of loving God and loving neighbour, then I think we have our answer.
Try this for a thought exercise. For the first 300 years of its existence, the churches met not in dedicated buildings, but in homes, where people prayed together, sang together, ate together and reflected on Scripture together. They shared their lives with one another at a deep level. But they had nothing else to offer. If that’s what your local church were like, would you want to go along to it?
At its foundational level, before it’s about anything else, the church should be a community where, in fellowship, we are learning to love God and neighbour. Everything else, everything else should be secondary.
When he was starting out in ministry, planting a new church in the suburbs of Baltimore, Eugene Peterson went door to door in the community he was living in, inviting folk along to his first service. They met downstairs in the basement of his home, with the only natural light coming in through some small slatted windows near ceiling level. They sat on stacking chairs, and the only church furniture they had had been donated by a local church that was closing down. Around fifty folk came.
They met there for three years, with nothing much to offer in terms of aesthetics or beauty, but lots to offer in terms of fellowship and friendship. The church grew. Because of its subterranean character, some of the youth nicknamed it Catacombs Presbyterian Church, and the joke caught on.
After three years they had raised enough money to build a sanctuary. They worked hard on the project, they built a beautiful and functional church building. And once it got built, something changed. A good number of folk stopped attending every week.
On reflection. Peterson realised that in the beginning, with no aesthetics to distract them, fellowship and worship was what it was all about. But the minute they had a dedicated building, that became the focus for some of his people. The ground of their commitment shifted from the community to the building. They lost something in moving from the Catacombs to the new Sanctuary, and he spent the next few years of his work trying to counteract that.
Peterson’s folk started in exile in their sparse little Catacomb church; Israel ended up in exile. But either way, exile teaches us something. It teaches us that we really don’t need what we think we need in order to be the people of God.
One last word to end with….
Read today’s Psalm in the light of the burning temple, and we might well say ‘so much for those promises God made. Now there’s no king, and no temple”.
But in a way that neither David nor the Psalmist could have guessed, God fulfilled both of those promises in Christ.
Every Christmas we read about how Mary and Joseph had to return to Bethlehem for the census. Why did they have to do that? Because Bethlehem was David’s town, and they were of David’s line.
What does the Psalm say? “One of your descendants I will place on your throne”.
One of the first things Matthew and Luke do in their accounts of the birth of Jesus is show through detailed genealogies that Jesus’ ancestry went all the way back to David. This newborn king, this King of Kings, who reigns for ever, is of David’s line. That's the first promise.
And do you remember what Jesus said as he walked in the courts of the Temple in his own day, the one built as much for Herod’s vanity as any desire to worship? “Destroy this temple and I will build it again in three days”.
He was drawing a parallel between the temple and his own body. What did he mean by that? Well what made the temple special wasn’t its magnificence, but the promise God had made to be present there.
It was God’s presence that counted, and In Jesus, the people of his day had God’s presence with them in a unique way – not in bricks and mortar, but in flesh and blood.
But he promised still more than that. In talking to a Samaritan woman by a well Jesus pointed to a day when temples would no longer be the focus because God’s Spirit would be present in the hearts of those who believed.
“Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. A time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks”.
Jesus, the descendant of David, made it possible for anyone who wanted it, to know the intimate presence of God: anytime and anywhere.
In Jesus, the promise of a royal line, and the divine presence, coalesced.
The promises of Psalm 132, made 1000 years earlier, weren’t forgotten. They were fulfilled in a way that no-one could ever have imagined.
Thanks be to God.
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