Well, we come a long way. This is our sixteenth blend final lesson on the Psalms. This is the terrific. I hope you've been enjoying it so far We're gonna be looking at the final Psalms of the study.
So we're at Psalm 137 going into 150 This is the third cycle of the fifth book So I've been dividing up the past number of lessons accordingly So we got second number one we tackled the two lessons last lesson 15 was the second cycle and now the third cycle is 137 to 150 And we do have that same theme of the movement that trajectory from lament to praise And we're gonna see that a lot in this third cycle as we can reboot everything with some of David's final Psalms here So you have a lot of lament Psalms coming back up and then we're gonna end on this great crescendo the final halal praise Psalms And 146 to 150 so a lot of great stuff now these are a lot of Psalms 137 150 right? So we don't have the advantage of tackling half a dozen like we've been able to do sometimes in the past So unfortunately we're just gonna have to focus on the highlights of each of these Psalms a few of them I really want to spend a lot more time on especially like 137 is just fantastic 139 is fantastic spend some more time in those final halal Psalms at the end of the Psalter as crescendos But just be aware that as we go through some of these and I'll take you through it step-by-step By the way, but as we go through these we're gonna look at some of those great highlights and a lot of beautiful one-liners Things that I can find very very beautiful. I hope you will too so that any further ado then let's open up our Bibles to Psalm 137 This is a lament Psalm So like again, we're going back from lament We're gonna build up towards praise like we've been doing in the whole Psalter from book one all the way here to book five And 137 is very special because it's the most detailed and explicit description of the various exiles suffering while they're in Babylon now It's really interesting to get a perspective of what they might have been feeling when they're in exile in a foreign land under the foreign power Right, that's that's very difficult. I mentioned I think before Tobit Tobit is actually not of Judah But still nevertheless you have a good idea to read the book of Tobit what that might have been like and so 137 is very special so it is referring back to the themes of the Psalms of the cent remember we talked about that before or the Psalms of the cent began in exile and then the pilgrim or the person and exile returning back to the homeland the promised land to Jerusalem has That movement from exile to coming back home again, right?
So we're kind of going back to that idea here so very explicit explicit It's really describing the the sufferings of the person bomony the stressful times in Babylon So let's begin here and read verses one through three where it says by the waters of Babylon there We sat down and wept when we remembered Zion on the willows there We hung up our liars for there are captors required of us songs and our tormentors mirth saying seeing us one of the songs of Zion All right, so pretty stressful there they are pretty depressed, right? They've hung up all their musical instruments. They're not singing anymore and their captors are like seeing us You know perform for us Oh monkeys right you know perform for us and they don't want to do that because I'm not feeling very happy at all right? So reminiscing on these times in Babylonian captivity when they remembered Zion and the word remember is gonna come up here Priesten verse six as well the word for remember is not just remembering times past It's there's a bit of a theme of the very important Hebrew word as a car as a car is covenantal fidelity covenantal Well, it's covenantal remembrance remembering the covenant that you have with God or someone else God is always as a carring or remembering his people He remembers Noah he remembers Hannah he remembers Israel And so the people are supposed to remember him and be faithful to the covenant and not forget him And so there's kind of that going on right now where the faithful Israelite is as a carring remembering Jerusalem the remembering God remembering Zion all right So then he utters this almost your udders this self curse right they hung up there musical instruments Then they say here in verses four and following how shall we sing the Lord song in a foreign land?
How is that possible if I forget you? Jerusalem let my right hand wither and let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not zakar you remember you If I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy So this line here is in response to the request to sing right? So if I forget you Jerusalem if I turn my heart away from you Jerusalem if I ever cease to love you whatever it might be May my right hand wither now there's a face value many commentators will say like let my right hand With in other words I won't be able to play the liar I won't be able to play the harvest musical instrument and the same thing goes when he says let my tongue cleave through my mouth In other words may I never sing of you again, right? So this is a self curse if you ever forget Jerusalem the opposite of the car I will never be able to sing I will never be able to play musical instruments So that's that's pretty clear But some people have pointed out some other connections here that I think is a very very interesting when he enters the self curse of let My right hand wither there's a couple of things going on here first looking backwards It's probably echoing King Jeroboam's rebellion now real brief trip down memory lane here Jeroboam was the first king of the northern kingdom after Solomon died and his son Reha bone was an absolute moron He was a tyrannical ruler and he insisted on inflicting more punishment and pain and misery on his people the northern tribes Forget that we're out of here and they split right so Jeroboam was the first king and God I promise to bless him and give him all kinds of great things even a dynasty if he would just obey But unfortunately he did not so Jeroboam famously made the two golden calves up in the northern kingdom on the far northern and southern borders And there's this little story in first Kings chapter 13 where he sacrificed in at one of these golden calf idols God sends a prophet to confront him and to issue a sentence upon him for his idolatry and The king raises his right hand pointing towards the prophet saying sees him and then his right hand wither And of course the prophet prayed and restored at the hand of the king, but the king didn't repent So the idea there is that Jeroboam did forget about Jerusalem did forget about Zion God gave him political power But all the religious worship was supposed to stay in Jerusalem under the leadership of the Levitical Kings and he didn't do that So his rebellion and sinfulness was symbolized by his right hand being withered and of course being healed by the prophet So there might be an echo to that where the Psalmist here in Babylon is saying in other words May I be like Jeroboam Jeroboam who rebelled against Zion and for God it Zion forgot God I don't want to do the same thing So that's kind of an interesting connection there that may be very true And then pointing forward Jesus has this miracle in Matthew 12 of healing the man with the withered hand So Jesus is the true prophet of Israel sent by God to call his people back from their idolatry and for their sinfulness and for their disobedience So when Jesus heals this man with the heals the man with the withered hand It's not just a cool miracle like I mean all of his miracles are awesome right giving sight to the blind healing the paralytic There those are all symbolic of Israel each in their own way So to his man with the withered hand because he symbolizes Jeroboam and he symbolizes anybody who's turned away from God So this line 137 verse 5 has a beautiful meaning in and of itself But looking backwards towards Jeroboam sin and looking forward to the sinfulness of Israel when Christ comes to heal their withered hand In other words to draw another point here Jesus comes to heal the man with withered hand miraculously in order to restore Israel to worship God So Israel can then sing to God again can now play the metaphorical harp and liar and worship of God So I think that's pretty awesome there now Of course there's typological connections with this as well when the Psalmist says may I never forget you Jerusalem right may always be faithful to you Well, that's us may we always be faithful to Jerusalem and to God our heavenly Jerusalem though, right?
So Saint Augustine says on this very point quote together We hasten along the path of our life We desire to see our heavenly home and we long for it We feel ourselves to be pilgrims in this world Then you will come to the fountain with whose waters you have been anointed and then you will see with naked eye the rays of light That followed oblique and twisted paths to shine into the darkness of your heart in that beautiful That's such a great quote from Saint Augustine And we were talking about that a lot over the course of our Bible study right all the typology of Zion and Jerusalem Referencing our heavenly homeland and the fact that we are all exiles or remember the Psalms of ascent You have the initial application of individual historical people on pilgrim is Jerusalem and that's all beautiful and great But it does point forward to our ascent into the heavenly home man and that's just more of the same thing They're that so beautiful So that's the prayer I mean we never forget our heavenly home if our if we do forget Jerusalem our heavenly Jerusalem may our right hands with her like Jeroboams did either literally maybe not so much literally but certainly spiritually metaphorically and let our tongues cleave to our mouth if we Can never praise God again, that's just so beautiful Okay, so then verse seven He's now going to ask the Lord to take vengeance on those who rebelled against them and fought against them and and made them suffer and Kill them because it was a pretty ugly scene I can't get back into all the history of the conquest but when Babylon fought against Jerusalem really there were three waves of exile It was a really ugly series of years where Israel kept rebelling and Babylon came in one time after another and the destruction got worse and worse until ultimately Everything was destroyed and then fellow not fellow but a nearby people's like the Edomites really took advantage of the situation and Went way overboard now the Edomites are really the cousins of the Israelites because the Edomites descend from Esau So it's this bad situation And now the Psalmist is saying remember those times when we were conquered and mistreated and our captors went overboard and killed our innocent children So on and so forth so he's asking in this deprecatory imprecatory kind of way may you Lord take vengeance on our enemies So this is what he's saying in verse seven remember Lord against the Edomites So I'm not just the Babylonians like I said the Edomites were quite brutal against the Jews Remember the Edomites the day of Jerusalem how they said raise it raise it down to its foundations Oh daughter of Babylon you devestator happy shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks and that's so brutal Oh my gosh that's such a brutal imprecatory prayer It's probably the worst imprecatory prayer of the entire Psalter. We've seen some do's of course So what's going on here now? This is a tough passage is actually called by Pope Benedict the 16th one of the dark passages of scripture Let me share this quote for you from your nation's Catholic study Bible which gives a little bit of insight into it It says that Psalm 137 verse 9 is one of those quote unquote dark passages of the Bible that are notoriously difficult to interpret And that's quoting Benedict the 16th the Psalmist seems to relish the thought of getting back of the Babylonians who are guilty of war crimes against Israel By perpetrating violence against their young and who are innocent of any such wrongdoing He appears to reason according to the Torah's Alex Talionius which basically is I for I to for tooth hand for hand right? This is very common also in the ancient world You can only punish people in proportion to what they did to you I go on the Alex Talionis which states that a punishment must fit the severity of the crime and strict proportion again I for an I to for two nevertheless This would be a gravely immoral means of trying to balance the scales of justice in quote so on the one hand Yes, it this this imprecatory prayer of asking for justice Asking God to inflict justice on the Babylonians and by extension the Edomites and anyone else who wreaked such havoc Even upon the most innocent of the Jewish people asking for them to suffer the same thing has its Old Testament background here So they must suffer as they made us suffer.
All right, that's very very interesting on its own of course in the New Testament Jesus calls and we're gonna see this again very shortly in many of these Psalms here Jesus does call us to rise to the moral standard of forgiveness as Christ forgives us We are also to forgive others who sin against us now We are still called to pray for justice. We're still called to hate sin and to hate God's enemies But to pray for them and to love them in a real supernatural way ultimately people don't repent We know that God will have justice on all of his enemies And that's really what we're praying for is justice in God's way We let God have vengeance and we said this many times before in our journey to the sultry here God will have vengeance on his own He says this clearly when Paul quotes the oronomy vengeance is mine says the Lord, right? So it is a difficult passage a dark passage We understand the the grave situation that the Jews are in because of their captivity and they're praying for that justice But nevertheless even in these dark passages like many of the other dark passages that we study throughout these various Bible studies that I have been providing here is always typology even for example a famous dark passage is the The command to utterly destroy to obliterate whole cities within the promised land part That's called harem warfare or the ban kill men women children all the animals anything that breathes There are specific reasons that make a lot of sense of why Moses commanded that which I discussed this in the Bible study on Deuteronomy as well as Joshua But there's a typology there where we need to obliterate all sin within our souls The same thing is kind of going on here And so saying Augustine again Takes this dark passage and applies it to our spiritual life and the spiritual battle in warfare that we're engaged in every single day So what St. Augustine says about this passage making it relevant and applicable to us is he says quote What are the little ones of Babylon?
They are newborn evil desires when lust is born before it is strengthened by evil habit while it is still little Strike it against the rock which is Christ end quote now that's very very interesting So certainly we can understand this difficult passage in its historical context according to the Mosaic law of Lexalianius We can very have compassion upon the Israelites or specifically the Jews who want their enemies to suffer as they have We can understand that certainly in the New Testament called to forgive and lower enemies That'll make sense, but when we apply it to our own personal life We must strike these newborn evil desires against the rock which is Christ and that makes so much sense In fact, there's a little passage from an older commentary from Haydock Which I share from you with you from time to time He says basically riffing off of St. Augustine in the spiritual sense We dashed the little ones of Babylon against the rock when we mortify our passions and stifle the first motions of them by a speedy Recourse to the rock which is Christ. I find that really beautiful And I hope that helps you as you read this particular song here that we that's exactly what we need to do Right whether it's the season of Lent or Advent or really honestly any day of our lives We in there's a little moment where greed or pride or lust or wrath or whatever it might be when it rises up We need to squash that desire while it's young against the rock which is Christ Okay, and by the way, the rock which is Christ that is going to be Saint Paul in first Corinthians chapter 10 He explicitly says the rock is Christ so very beautiful very applicable to us I want to move on out of Psalm 138, but I hope that's very helpful for you because that is pretty difficult Alright 138 is a Thanksgiving song now This Psalm 138 and following is the first part of an eight-part collection the first Psalm of an eight-part collection that's attributed to David David So this is the last of David's Psalms put together in a little eight-part collection now why eight many most In fact, I haven't seen anyone reflect on the numerology there I just wonder for myself eight is always the number of new creation new beginning resurrection So it may be strategically placed here in the third cycle of the final fifth book of the Psalter because David is teaching us that Christ will renew all things And the expectation of the coming Messiah remember that book five is all about the restoration of the kingdom the restoration of Zion and Jerusalem But it's partial the full restoration has not yet come so the whole sultere ends on this desire For that it can't come back which of course is Christ he is the Messiah So this final eight-part collection of David might be alluding to that fact that we're still waiting for the new creation Resurrection of the son of David the son of God who is Jesus So I kind of think that's interesting there. So let's read verse one Psalm 138 verse one I give you thanks O Lord with my whole heart that whole heart references really quickly It's not in your notes, but when I read this it reminds me of the Deuteronomy 6 We are the great Shama prayer We are to love the Lord with our entire heart soul and strength so David is saying that because David is a man who truly does love the Lord with all of his Heart he is the only person in scripture if you remember who has a heart after God even in his sins He immediately repents in love of God because his heart is pain having offended the Lord So that's a really beautiful connection there He loves the Lord with his whole heart anytime you see that and the rest of David's Psalms just remember Deuteronomy chapter 6 It's the greatest of all the commandments.
All right, I love you with my whole heart before the angels I sing your praise I bow down toward your holy your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your mercy and for your faithfulness For you have exalted above everything your name and your word on the day that I called you answered me my strength of soul You increased all right so a couple of little highlights here just really quickly right off the bat He loves the Lord of his whole heart as I said and he praises the Lord towards the temple in the presence of all his holy angels This is a very beautiful scene really of kind of all of the heavenly host before God's presence worshiping God and David or the psalmist and all of us By extension we join our prayers to the angelic prayers and worship of God now There's a lot to say about angels whenever the topic of angels come up and guardian angels I always like to take a moment because I have personally a good devotion to my guardian angel and the guardian angels of my family members I always have stories about how like my son's guardian angel is working overtime because my boy is a very much a boy And he's always doing dangerous things carefully He does dangerous things carefully which is important and that's good for him But my angel is really helping him a lot and even just doing very simple things my that angel is protecting him all the time So I have learned by having children that we really should turn toward guardian angels And he has helped me personally in so many different instances I can just tell you stories upon stories about that So this is a great passage of how we praised God in the presence of his angels And there's a great quote from Saint Bernard that I found for you from the bar Bible I wanted to share here in the notes It says this so Bernard is talking about the presence of angels in our lives and how we should turn to them and love them because God has entrusted Angels to protect us and that's really all over scriptures and this is just one instance But this is what Saint Bernard says the angels are present to protect you They are there for your good and though they are present because God has ordered them to be there We should not show any less gratitude because they obey their orders with such love and help us with all of our needs Which are so great therefore let us always be devoted and grateful to our eminent guardians May we respond to their love and honor them when we can and as we should However, may we never forget all that our love and honor should be that all of our love and honor should be directed to him From whom all things come to the angels and to ourselves Thanks to whom we may love and show honor and be loved and honored ourselves End quote so I really wanted to share this with you number one because it's great appeal for us to have a relationship with our angels They do protect us. He's very Catholic and Eastern Orthodox approach to things sadly too many Protestant Christians Just don't realize this biblical truth But God loves us so much that he's entrusted angels to protect us and guide us in our spiritual battle Right, but then I also like how Saint Bernard says remember However, and this is a very balanced approach that all good things come from God to the angels and to us God is the source of all that is good So even in the Catholic devotional life of having a relationship or praying to angels and even asking our deceased brothers and sisters Who are truly alive in the Lord to pray for us and help us fight the good fight All things come from God as the source the source of love the source of goodness the source of honor So that's a very good balanced approach. Hope you like that quote there All right So he continues to go on Psalm 138 still verse 4 all the kings of the earth shall praise you O Lord for they have heard the words of your Mouth you shall sing of the ways the Lord for great is the glory of the Lord Verse 6 for though the Lord is high he regards the lowly but the hottie he knows from afar That's a great little line of the theme of reversals God is constantly in scripture. He's saying he raises up the lowly He raises up the humble He raises up the meek but the prideful the hottie those filled with hubris and Self-overly self-worship he's not close to them at all I like that a lot, but what I really want to share with you here when he says all the kings shall praise you all the Kings of the earth We've seen this in so many different Psalms this concept of worldwide blessing God loves all nations and all peoples every tribe and color and tongue He comes to save them all through the ministry of Israel Right and then the church is the new Israel so through the ministry of the church today all nations are called to receive the gospel And to repent and to believe and to receive everlasting life So this is just another one of the many references here that the big picture of God salvation is that all kings of the earth Not just David the king of Israel But all kings all nations would come to worship God and be blessed by God So I really like that a lot as well and then finally if you skip down to verse 8 the Lord will fulfill his purpose for me For your mercy.
Oh Lord and doers forever I like that so much because David says despite everything that's going on in my life And of course he's had many lament Psalms and many praise Psalms and todach Psalms and he's keeping me pretty much It seems about everything over the human condition right but he says the Lord will fulfill his purpose for me That's wonderful for David as the king of Israel But again always make it personal the Psalms are the prayers of the church remember as I said 16 lessons ago The Psalms are prayed in every single mass and the Psalms are prayed every single day in the liturgy the hours They really kind of form the backbone of our prayer because as St. Anthony says they're a mirror for the soul So take that prick but that particular verse to heart that the Lord will fulfill his purpose for you No matter what it is and he has a plan for your life and he is guiding you every step of the way So don't despair never despair that's to send against the virtue of hope even in distressful times as we've seen in lament Psalms The Lord has a plan for you He will fulfill that purpose and praise him in all things now The link in the chain for this is the next Psalm 139 because Psalm 138 has ends on beautiful note the Lord will fulfill his purpose for me Because he knows everything about me. So 139 is one of the most beautiful Psalms I think in the whole Psalter because it's so darn personal how the Lord has formed us from the moment we're conceived in our mothers Wombs he has intricately formed our bodies and given us a soul and he is taking care of us and protecting us in his omnipotence in his omniscience So some it's a beautiful flow from 138 to 139. So let's read 139 almost I'm certainly gonna read the entirety of the first half here because it's just so personal and I really hope that you're edified by it Okay, so 139 verse 1 begins Oh Lord you have searched me and known me.
So there's there's your link in the chain right? 138 eight is the Lord will fulfill his purpose for me. So 139 begins you have searched me and you know me This is a personal application to David and to all of us. Alright, let's keep going verse 2 Hey, this is Dr.
Nick Thank you so much for listening to this course sample if you enjoyed it and want to listen to the entire lesson Please become a student over at scripture and tradition calm where you come listen to this entire course But also all the other courses that we have available in the S&T audio library where you can listen to them on demand however And whenever you want so thank you so much God bless you and keep setting your Bible