A Little Help

Francis Spufford writes about the experience of those restless nights where we say: “Hello? Hello? I don’t think I can stand this anymore.  I don’t think I can bear it.  Not another night like last night.  Not another morning like this morning.  Hello? A little help in here please.  And nothing seems to happen.”  March is a month in the church year when we express our most painful thoughts and experiences.

Where do we find a little help?  The Psalms of Ascent were traveling songs that God’s people would sing as they made the physical climb up to the hills around Jerusalem.  They would sing full of excitement together, and maybe the closest Gloucester comparison might be a sea shanty.  Isn’t that an idea?  And in Psalm 121, they sing about where help is found:

Psalm 121 ¹ I lift up my eyes to the mountains— where does my help come from? ² My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. ³ He will not let your foot slip—he who watches over you will not slumber;⁴ indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. ⁵ The Lord watches over you—the Lord is your shade at your right hand;⁶ the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. ⁷ The Lord will keep you from all harm— he will watch over your life; ⁸ the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.

Six times in this chapter we’re promised that God will guard over us, watch us, keep us, and help us.  My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth.  But let me repeat that first part too: “I lift up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from?” It’d be easy from that to get the impression that the Lord is like Zeus, up in the snow-capped mountains, high and mighty.  But I want to share this picture with you of the view from the temple, where those Psalms pilgrims were hiking to:

To be clear, we're now standing on the Lord’s house and lifting our eyes to the mountains around us, that are all much higher than where God is. The Lord’s temple is actually on the smallest hill you can see.  Which puts a very different spin on Psalm 121 doesn't it? People sometimes talk about meetings with God as mountain top life moments, and the rest of life as in the valley. But God is claiming in these verses that unlike all the other gods who take the highest, safest, most fortified terrain for themselves, the God of the Psalms isn’t like that at all. God actually chooses to be in the valleys, on our life's smallest stages not the grandest ones. The Lord isn't found high and distant from all our pain and hurt.  The Lord is by your side, God is the one securing each step of your departures and arrivals, the Lord is ever vigilant, your ever present help in times of trouble. 

And ultimately, all our worship throughout the whole year builds to celebrating how the Lord Jesus helps us, by not just staying in heaven but becoming a human, in humility dying, and offering the quietest rather than the loudest help, but the one that really brings the greatest relief to us: the Lord by our side in the midst of our pain on the cross. We lift our eyes up to the mountains – where does our help come from? Our help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.