The Bible Study Hour

Guest (Male): In ancient times a slave who had served his master a long time and knew his ways had only to look to his master for direction. A mere movement of the hand was all it took to reveal his master's wishes. Likewise, we as believers are encouraged to lift up our eyes to our God.

Guest (Male): Welcome to the Bible Study Hour, a radio and internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically. Psalm 123 has been called a psalm for the eyes. Unlike the world that looks downward or inward or anywhere but to the Lord, believers are called to look up.

Join Dr. Boice as he explores this short but poignant Psalm and discover why the psalmist encouraged God's people to lift up their eyes to the Lord.

Dr. James Boice: Not long ago, we were studying Psalm 121, and if you look back to that psalm, you find that it begins with the same words as Psalm 123, which we are studying today. It began with the words, "I will lift up my eyes to." But Psalm 121 said, "I will lift up my eyes to the hills" and then only asked as a secondary thought, "Where does my help come from?"

While Psalm 123 gets to the point directly. It says, "I will lift up my eyes to you, to you whose throne is in heaven." Now, that's a good reminder for us at this stage of our study of these psalms of ascent. We remember that these are psalms that the Jewish pilgrims would sing together as they made their way up to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was their goal, and the temple that was situated there in Jerusalem.

But although they had their eyes fixed on Jerusalem and were going there and were thinking about the temple and were going there, it really wasn't to Jerusalem or to the temple that they were going, but they were going to God. That's what our pilgrimage is all about. There are various earthly manifestations of the presence of God. A local church is such a manifestation because God has promised that where two or three meet together in his name, there he is in the midst, and so we come joyfully to a time like this.

But it's not to church that we're coming; it's to God, and we are dissatisfied until we actually rest in him. Now, this is a beautiful psalm, and one way of getting into it is to notice that it's a psalm for the eyes. You actually find that word "eyes" four times in the psalm. It's there in verses one and two, and then in reference to eyes, it talks about lifting up our eyes once in verse one and looking to someone with our eyes three times more in verse two.

We can find a New Testament equivalent of that very easily in the book of Hebrews. I'm sure you know the passage. After that great chapter on faith, Hebrews 11, we come to the 12th chapter of Hebrews, and we read this: "Let us then fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down on the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."

Now, there's a very direct sense in which that is what the psalmist is doing here. We read the psalm, especially as we get to the end of it, and it's a very short psalm, we find that the people had been losing heart. They were discouraged. They were cast down. They were almost defeated by their circumstances. Their enemies were scorning them and ridiculing them. But they weren't really cast down if they were doing what the psalmist is saying here because instead of being cast down, they had lifted up their eyes and they had fixed their eyes on God.

Now, the beauty of the psalm comes from the lovely images that it employs. The psalmist begins in the first person. He says, "I will lift up my eyes," but then almost immediately, he draws in the whole assembly of the congregation, the righteous, and says that they are together with him like a slave that is looking to the hand of its master for the slightest indication of what he ought to do.

And then having spoken of a male slave, he switches over and talks about a female slave who he says is likewise looking to the hand of her mistress for whatever she might want the slave to do. This is a time in history, of course, when there were many, many slaves, almost half of the people were in bondage to the other half at any given time in the ancient world, and so right away, everybody would understand exactly what the psalmist is talking about.

"As the eyes of slaves look to the hand of their master, as the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress, so our eyes look to the Lord our God till he shows us his mercy." Now, that's not endorsing slavery, of course. That's not the point. But it is saying that the disciple's dependence upon God should be no less careful and deliberate than the attendance of a very best slave upon the wishes of an earthly master.

How should we look to our heavenly Master, that is to God? Well, Alexander Maclaren, a great preacher of the last century toward the end of the last century, wrote about it. He talked about God's servants saying they should stand where they can see him first of all, they should have their gaze fixed upon him, they should look with patient trust as well as with eager willingness to start into activity when he indicates his commands.

We come to a psalm like this, we have to say: Do we do that? Is that the way we fix our eyes upon our God? Here's the way Charles Spurgeon wrote about it. He said we must use our eyes with resolution, for they will not go upward to the Lord of themselves, but they incline to look downward or inward or anywhere but to the Lord. He seemed to have been writing about our time when he talks about our eyes looking inward. We're always focused on ourselves.

But here he says we should focus our eyes upon God. Spurgeon continued: "True saints, like obedient servants, look to the Lord their God reverentially. They have a holy awe and an inward fear of the great and glorious one. They watch obediently, doing his commands, guided by his eye. Their constant gaze is fixed attentively on all that comes from the most high. They give earnest heed in fear lest they should let anything slip through inadvertence or drowsiness. They look continuously, for there's never a time when they're off duty. At all times they delight to serve him in all things."

"Upon the Lord they fix their eyes expectantly, looking for supply, succor, safety from his hands, waiting that he may have mercy upon them. To him they look singly because they have no other confidence, and they learn to look submissively, waiting patiently for the Lord, seeking both in activity and suffering to glory in his name. When they are smitten with the rod, they turn their eyes imploringly to the hand which chastens, hoping that mercy will soon abate the rigor of the affliction."

Well, that's an interesting set of adverbs, isn't it? Do we look to God like that? Reverentially, obediently, attentively, continuously, expectantly, singly, submissively, and imploringly? The answer is probably not. But that's the pattern. That's how we ought to be looking to God, and if we are faithful in our discipleship, that's what we'll try to do. We'll try to do it through our Bible study, where God meets with us.

Now, most of these psalms, unlike some of the earlier psalms in the psalter, give no indication when they were actually written. We've seen that a couple of them here in this collection of psalms claim to be by David and probably were, used at a later time for a later purpose. But generally speaking, most scholars who study these and who identify them as the psalms of ascent assume, I think rightly, that they were written somewhat later in the history of Israel at a time when, following the exile, this small, relatively small little group of Jewish people had returned to their land, and particularly to Jerusalem, to try to build up their walls again and reestablish their worship in the temple.

We know from the books of Ezra and Nehemiah that this was difficult. They had much trouble. And if this is the setting for this particular psalm, as it seems to me it is, then we get a great deal of insight into what was going on by going back to those days of Nehemiah. You recall that Nehemiah came back to lead the people as the civil ruler or governor in the rebuilding of the walls.

And after they had begun that, they began to get a great deal of opposition and ridicule from the surrounding heads of state. When you read the last couple verses of Psalm 123, it seems like a very direct description of this time. "We have endured much contempt. We have endured much ridicule from the proud and contempt from the arrogant." Well, what is it that Nehemiah describes?

They had two main enemies in that day. Their names were Sanballat and Tobiah. And when they realized that the Jews were back in the land and were trying to rebuild their walls, they must have assembled people for a great public meeting in the city square, perhaps of Samaria, and they began to ridicule the Jews for what they were doing.

They said things like this: "What are these feeble Jews doing? Will they restore their wall? Will they offer sacrifices? Will they finish in a day? Can they bring the stones back to life from those heaps of rubble, burned as they are?" And Tobiah said, "What they're building, why, even if a fox climbed up on it, he would break down their wall of little stones." Well, it was an attempt to oppose the rebuilding by ridicule.

And the hard thing about that is that ridicule is often very effective. Why is ridicule effective, that kind of opposition? It's because it strikes at the basic feeling of inferiority or insignificance that most of us have. If somebody ridicules us, it touches a note in us, and we sense that yes, we really are rather ridiculous people. And certainly that's what was going on here.

If you take just each of those sayings, you realize that it was very effective. "What are those feeble Jews doing?" asked Sanballat. "Ha! What are those feeble Jews doing?" That was very effective because they were feeble. This was a tiny little band. This wasn't the great nation that had existed under David and Solomon or even some of the later kings. This was just a little group of exiles returning from Babylon, a little remnant, and they must have felt their feebleness greatly.

"Will they restore their wall?" Indeed, will they restore their wall? They had to build a wall that was about a mile and a half to two and a half miles in circumference. How were they going to get that done and get it done with all those massive stones? They didn't have machinery. How would they accomplish such a thing? How utterly ridiculous it must seem.

"Will they offer sacrifices?" Some commentators say, well, they're going to build the temple and offer sacrifices in the temple. But I think Derek Kidner is probably right in his study of it when he says what that really means is what we would probably mean if we would say they're not going to get it done by any earthly means; perhaps they're going to pray it up. Maybe if they offer enough sacrifices, God will do it for them. How ridiculous that would be.

Then they said, "Will they finish in a day?" That means, don't they realize what a difficult task they've taken on? Will they finish in a day? Of course not. They're never going to get it done. And when Tobiah said, "What are they building? Why, even if a fox climbed up on it, he'd break down that wall of stones." I think the exiles who were rebuilding the wall were well aware of that because archaeologists, as they've studied what happened in that day, report that the wall that was built in Nehemiah's day was not anything to compare with the great wall that had existed a period of time before.

Well, they were effective taunts. And yet there's this to be said for them: The taunts would not have been uttered if what these Jews were trying to do had not been significant and perhaps perceived as a threat by Sanballat and Tobiah. You see, that's why you ridicule something, because it really does seem significant, and so you try to put it down. If it had no significance at all, you wouldn't even bother with it.

So we carry it over to our experience. Here we are trying to bear witness for Jesus Christ in a hostile secular age, and we're often ridiculed for that. You see, it strikes at insecurity in us. We feel that we don't have the answers to people's questions, and after all, the world does seem to be more dominant, and the Gospel does at times often seem to be ineffective. But there wouldn't be any reason for the ridicule or the opposition if it weren't that there's something significant in the Gospel.

And so we have to do what this psalmist is doing. When from the contempt and ridicule of his surrounding contemporaries, he lifts his eyes to heaven and to God. We're illustrating this from Nehemiah. Let's just go back and see what Nehemiah did. Nehemiah did a number of things. First of all, he didn't retaliate. That's a negative, but it's an important one. You see, when somebody makes fun of us, our natural human instinct, the sinful instinct, is to fight back.

Here are these surrounding leaders making fun of the Jews. I suppose it would have been natural to Nehemiah to say, "Well, Sanballat, you're not such a big leader yourself. You're just a little petty governor of a little petty state over here on the fringes of the Persian Empire. Who do you think you are to make fun of us?" But you see, if he'd done that, he'd just brought himself down to their level and would have betrayed his insecurity too. So he didn't retaliate.

Second thing he did is a positive thing. He prayed. Nehemiah laid it all before God. He admitted that he was hurt by what they were saying. He admitted also that he was angry because of what was being said. "We are despised" is the very words he uses and puts down in the book that bears his name. But still, you see, the work wasn't his. The work was God's. He'd come to do God's work, and so having prayed, he could leave it in God's hands.

And then finally, having done that, he did what is really essential: He went on with the work. They were making fun of him, but he laid it before God, and because he laid it before God, he could get on and do the task that he'd been given. What he says is very nice. Nehemiah said, "So we rebuilt the wall till all of it reached half its height because the people were working at it with all their heart."

Now, I suppose that that's the same kind of thing that the pilgrim who wrote this psalm is thinking of when he's making his way up to Jerusalem. He's saying, "Yes, we have been despised. We are ridiculed by people roundabout. But nevertheless, our eyes are set on God. We're on a pilgrimage, and we're going to go. We're going to get there." Do you feel that way about the Christian life regardless of what people have to say to you?

Do you say God has called me? God has set me upon this pilgrimage. It doesn't make any difference whether people are making fun of me or whether they're putting down my faith. They do that, and it hurts, and I acknowledge that and I'm timid and all of that too, but nevertheless, I'm following after God. You're able to say that, then you'll lift your eyes up from the ridicule, you'll fasten your eyes upon God, looking steadfastly to him, and you'll pray the way the psalmist does.

Now, I said when we were getting into this that it's a psalm for the eyes, and I pointed out how many times the word "eyes" occurs there in the first verses, along with verbs that describe what the eyes do. At the end of that first stanza, that is at the end of verse two, you find another word which you'll notice is also repeated. It's the word "mercy." It comes at the end of verse two, explaining why the psalmist and those with him are lifting up their eyes to God. They're doing it "until he shows us his mercy," that is, that's what they want from God. And then in verse three, he begins to pray for exactly that: "Have mercy on us, O Lord. Have mercy upon us."

Mercy is one of the great words of the Bible. It goes together with a couple other words that are often found together in verses, words like goodness and grace, and then you have mercy there as well. Goodness is the broadest of all. It refers to God's very nature. God is essentially and in all things good. So he's good in his judgments. He's good to the elect; he's good to the non-elect, though in different ways. Everything God does is good.

And then within that overall concept of the goodness of God comes grace. Grace has to do with favor, particularly to the undeserving. And it's what God shows to his people when he rescues them through the work of Jesus Christ. And then you have mercy as well. Mercy is perhaps the strongest of all because it has to do with God in his goodness showing grace to not merely the undeserving but the pitiful, those who have no hope whatever of making any progress at all in spiritual things or finding God or getting to heaven or living for him or bringing him glory, except that God should be merciful.

And you see, that's what the psalmist is praying for here. Pink talks about mercy. He says it denotes the ready inclination of God to relieve the misery of fallen creatures. And then he adds, so mercy presupposes sin. You find yourself to be a sinner, you discouraged by that? Come to God. God is a God of great mercy, and he's provided for it in the death of Jesus Christ.

I mentioned Eugene Peterson a number of times because he's written such a good book on these psalms of ascent called "A Long Obedience in the Same Direction," and I want to share a little bit of what he says about mercy at this point. He's talking about how it actually works. "This prayer for mercy is not an attempt to get God to do what he's unwilling otherwise to do, but it's a reaching out to what we know that he does do, and expressed longing to receive what God is doing in and for us in Jesus Christ."

"In obedience, we pray, 'Have mercy upon us' instead of 'Give us what we want.' We pray, 'Have mercy upon us' and not 'Reward us for our goodness so our neighbors will acknowledge our superiority.' We pray, 'Have mercy upon us' and not 'Punish us for our badness so we'll feel better.' We pray, 'Have mercy upon us' and not 'Be nice to us because we have been such good people.' Understand how that works and why a prayer for mercy is so important?"

Now, we have confidence when we pray in mercy. You see, if we're asking God to be good to us because we're good, we can never be confident because the question would be, "Are we good enough?" And the answer, of course, is that we're not. But you see, when we come to God and ask for mercy, we can have confidence because that's the way God describes himself to us. We've had many occasions to think of that great revelation of God to Moses on the mount when he asked to see his face.

It was so important in the Old Testament to the Jewish people that it's quoted again and again throughout the Old Testament. Moses said, "God, let me see your face." God said, "Nobody can see my face and live, but I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll put you in a cleft of the rock. I'll cover you with my hand. I'll pass by." And as God passed by, there was an earthquake and wind and fire and all of that. But God wasn't in any of those things. It wasn't the very essence of God, though it was a manifestation of the power of God.

And then there came a still, small voice, and the voice had to do with God's very nature, and it spoke like this: "The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin." Exodus 34, verse 6.

Are you ever discouraged? If you ever feel that God is not there to hear you, if you despair of mercy through Jesus Christ, turn to that verse. Exodus 34:6. Memorize it. Get it in your mind. The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God. We know God is merciful because he tells us so and because he's demonstrated the mercy in Jesus Christ.

"Therefore," says the author of Hebrews, "let us approach the throne of grace with confidence so we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." It's what the psalmist is doing. And let me suggest that the only thing that will really lift you out of your sin and complacency and put you on the pilgrim trail and keep you there is confidence that you serve a merciful God and that he shows his mercy to you constantly.

Now let me give you the illustration of John Newton. The story of John Newton is often told, but it's hard to think of the mercy of God without thinking of Newton because his story is a great demonstration of God's mercy. Newton ran away to sea as a young man, virtually a boy, and he went to Africa to participate in the slave trade. He went there, as he says himself in his own autobiography, that he might sin his fill.

And so he did. But although he did that, God was merciful to him. He fell so low in this slave practice that the time came when he was, as he himself also describes it, a slave of slaves. What happened is that he was working with a trader in the coast of Africa. The man often went inland to get the slaves that he would then sell to people who came in boats down the coast. And when this man who controlled the compound went off, Newton was left behind and he fell under the power of the slave trader's African wife.

She hated all white men, and she took out her spite on Newton. He grew sick. He was forced to eat his food off the dusty floor like a dog without using his hands. He was beaten if he did anything contrary, and at one point he was actually put in chains. Why he called himself a slave of slaves. He grew emaciated, sick; he was almost going to die. But somehow he managed to escape that, and he got to the coast and he got back into the slave trade again, and he had many trips across the Atlantic Ocean as slaves were brought from Africa to this country.

Now, on one of those trips on the way back, sailing across the North Atlantic, the boat in which he was sailing got into a terrible storm. All the rigging was destroyed and the boat was pounded by the waves. The boards were sprung apart, it began to leak, and Newton was sent down into the hold of the ship to pump water. Worst of all places to be if the boat was going to sink, and he was sure it would, and he was down there petrified and pumping for all he was worth.

But he wasn't merely doing that. While he was doing that, God in his mercy brought back to Newton's mind verses from the Bible that he had been taught by his mother when he was just a child. His mother had died when he was very young. It's one reason why he ran away to sea. But before she ran away, she had taught him these Bible verses. And while he was down there in the hold of the ship, these Bible verses came back to his mind, and he remembered them, and he repented of his sin, and he expressed his faith in Jesus Christ and was converted.

And then the ship didn't flounder. It made its way to land, and some time later, Newton left the trade and he studied for the ministry, became a great preacher, very well known throughout the British Isles, even preached on one occasion before the Queen. Now, it was this John Newton who understood something of the mercy and grace of God and not only preached about it, he wrote about it, and he wrote perhaps the best known hymn that has ever been written.

It's certainly the one that has been most sung: "Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see." Someone said to Newton on one occasion, he was talking about another man, he said, "You know, I sometimes despair of that man." And John Newton said, "I never did despair of any man since God saved me."

Newton grew to be an old man, and when he got old, he began to become senile and finally his mind had deteriorated so much he couldn't preach anymore and he was just at home. People would come to visit him. And one thing Newton would say is this: He would say, "I'm an old, old man. My mind is almost gone, but I remember two things: I remember that I'm a great sinner, and I remember that Jesus is a great Savior." You see, the mercy of God. There's nothing greater than that for sinful men and women like you and me.

So you and we waver in our discipleship. We stumble on the pathway. We sometimes fall down. We're discouraged. We're inclined to quit. But what we have to do is what the psalmist did and which the Holy Spirit as he takes that word would encourage us to do as well, and that is to lift up our eyes to God whose throne is in heaven and from whom our hope comes.

Let me remind you of this great text from the second chapter of Ephesians that describes your experience and mine if we actually are Christians and have come to God through Jesus Christ. It talks about what we were like before God had revealed his mercy to us. It says we were dead in trespasses and sins. It says that we followed the ways of the world and the ruler of the kingdom of this world, that is Satan, and it says that we were by nature objects of God's wrath.

But now listen to what God did: "Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It's by grace that you've been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness toward us in Christ Jesus." That's what God has done. And shouldn't that alone motivate you to the most complete offer of yourself to him and to the highest level of obedience? How can it not? Let's pray.

Our Father, we do thank you for the mercy that has been shown to us in Jesus Christ. Mercy which when we think of it and compare it to the contempt and ridicule we sometimes feel and the discouragement that often overtakes us, is so great and so wonderful that it is hard even to find a ground for the comparison.

Certainly you have been merciful to us. We didn't make the slightest move toward you until you reached out to save us in Jesus Christ and to draw us by the power of your Holy Spirit to faith in that one who is our Savior. Our Father, because of that mercy, grant that we might trust in your mercy and live for you in such a way that people might actually look on and in spite of themselves say, "Their God is a great God. He's a God of great mercy." We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to this message from the Bible Study Hour, a listener-supported ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is a coalition of pastors, scholars, and churchmen who hold to the historic creeds and confessions of the Reformed faith and who proclaim biblical doctrine in order to foster a Reformed awakening in today's church.

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