"Weeping in Babylon" Psalm 137 Sunday Evening Worship Service

Psalm 137.

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our lyres.

From there our captors required of us songs in our tormentors' mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing Yahweh's song in a foreign land?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.

Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.

If I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

Remember, O Yahweh, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they said, Lay it bare, lay it bare down to its foundations, O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed.

Blessed shall be he who repays you with what you have done to us.

Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock.

This is the word of the Lord, Psalm 137.

Should remind you that we are in many ways products of where we're from.

Our identity is wrapped up in our location.

Our identity comes out of who we are, where we were born, what languages we learn.

We enter the world in a place and time and take on the culture of that world.

And that's what we have forever growing up.

Let me grab my remote here so you guys see a screen.

Thank you.

Our identity is wrapped up in who we are and where we're from.

We come into the world at a specific point, we learn that language, we grow up, we eat that food, we go to their schools, watch their movies, drive their cars.

If you were born in this area, which almost nobody, Emmanuel, was born in this area.

I see that hand, Millie.

And if you mean it, there's grace for mercy for you.

If you would have born, Millie, if you would have been born 600 miles north or so, I don't know what it is, 800 miles, you'd be speaking French.

I was born in Albuquerque.

If I would have been born 300 miles south, I would have grown up speaking Spanish.

I had to struggle to learn how to roll my R's.

I grew up liking the Broncos because that's the team that people in Albuquerque liked, at least my people.

Went to the University of New Mexico.

I love green chili.

I'm a product of where I'm from.

And if it's just a little bit of a geographic distance, it would be a different story.

You'd be a different person.

You'd have a different identity.

Even military families understand that principle.

They pack up and move.

I talked to one family recently that has lived in 18 different places in their military career.

18.

And even they understand that concept.

You go and you're stationed in Germany, but you know what?

You live in the base in Germany and they put the shops, the same American shops on the base, and there's this striving idea to make the even the German base as much like the United States as possible.

You can shop at the American schools or American stores and go to American schools and watch American movies, and even there are churches there.

American churches, American megachurches.

Some have satellite campuses on the bases in Germany.

So you can even go to an American church.

Many of us experience that voluntarily.

You graduate college and you move away, or maybe you move away to go to college somewhere, and then you don't go back.

You join the military and you go to basic training and you set out in a new place.

You'll have a new city to live in.

You go to New York to make your money or LA to chase your dream.

And you go there and it starts to affect your identity.

And there's a pull in your heart with you know, are you a product of this new place now?

Or are you really we're a product of where you were from all along?

There's a whole genre of literature and movies about that.

You know, the classic story of the person who goes away to the big city to chase their dream or go off to the military to fight their battle, and they come back home to the city where they grew up in, and it's the that's the drama of the plot.

Did they change, or is this who they really were all along, kind of story?

And this is why, because it's so essential to a human identity.

Ever since the Tower of Babel, the nations have been scattered, languages are changed.

This is why to forcibly take someone from their home is one of the most violent acts that a person can suffer, a person can endure.

It's traumatically violent to physically take someone and remove them, not just from their home, but from their culture and from their language, and to send them somewhere else.

In many ways, the legacy of slavery in our own country echoes that.

You know, the evils of slavery are way more than the scars of forced labor and the brutality of ownership of human flesh and ownership of even human souls, if that were possible.

And that's the most extreme kind of evil we can imagine.

But we understand, and Americans should get this better than most other nations, we understand that the evils of slavery aren't possibly just limited to forced labor.

There's a kind of cultural scar that exists long after the forced labor is ended.

One sociologist writes, quote, to remove someone from their homeland is the most violent and extreme form of trauma a person can possibly experience.

Because it goes right to the culture.

You know, their children will grow up in a place where they don't what are they supposed to have their name be?

A name that connects back to the country they were taken from, or a name that represents their new country?

They long for the days where they're from.

What clothes do they wear?

The fashions that were their parents wore or their grandparents wore, or the fashions that helped them blend in and not cause problems in their new land.

What kind of books do they read?

You know, do you read the books that your grandparents read and that formed your culture?

Well, then you'll be on the outs in your new culture, in your new place.

You won't know the the jokes or the idioms.

There's so much wrapped into that kind of brutal act of.

You know, we have a phrase in the in the the academic woke American world of cultural appropriation.

It's kind of a humorous phrase, you know, don't wear that costume, it's culturally appropriating.

The phrase cultural appropriation is so void for exactly this reason.

The real act of taking people from their nation and forcing them to live somewhere else.

Appropriation is not even a word that can have anything, its fingerprints anywhere on that kind of violence.

And of course, the scars of that last forever.

How do two cultures blend back together?

I mean, it's really hasn't happened before.

And I stopped talking about American slavery five minutes ago.

I'm talking now about what the Israelites experienced.

I hope you read Psalm 137 through that lens because we have a little bit of a grid for that in our own American culture, of course, knowing how much slavery affected our culture and impacted us for generations to this very day, of course, and probably will for the rest of our country's history.

This is what the Israelites are going through, only they're not writing this a hundred years later.

Psalm 137, this is their psalm while they're in exile.

They have been kidnapped.

They were forcibly removed.

Hooks, their king went away with a hook put through his nose and connected to a chain and paraded through the streets.

He's then allowed to eat in the Babylonian court, this king is.

And I'm not the way the book of 2 Kings ends, it ends like a note of hope that the king with the hook in his nose gets to sit at the table and feast with the Babylonian king.

And there is a note of hope in that that even in exile, Israel still has a king.

But I mean, you wonder if the guy's not there is some kind of circus display, that he's just on display in the room.

That's where this psalm comes from.

What does Israel do in exile?

You know this from Daniel 1.

They, of course, killed many of the Israelites, but they took the younger ones, separated them from their family, and forcibly made them eat the Babylonian food.

And this wasn't a dietary issue back then.

This wasn't designed so, you know, just to make sure they're healthy, although there's certainly notes of that.

That's what the guards' fear was, is that if Daniel doesn't eat the right food, he'll get skinny.

But remember, this is all about the violence of incorporating people, and the Babylonians were so violent, of physically incorporating them into their culture.

You will dress like us.

They forcibly renamed them, they gave them new names.

You'll no longer use your Hebrew name.

You don't have to use your Babylonian name.

You will eat Babylonian food, you will wear Babylonian clothes, you will read Babylonian literature.

That's one of the things Daniel points out.

I mean, this is all about the violence of that cultural oppression that you will learn this language.

Your Israelite days are gone.

Gone.

The Babylonians were not counting on a short exile.

This is why Daniel was so profound in reminding them: listen, it will be 70 years.

Okay, that's a long time.

It's not forever.

The Babylonians were not preparing for a 70-year exile.

They were not preparing for Jerusalem to ever be rebuilt.

As far as they were concerned, it was a nowhere city and a nowhere mountain range that had no significance at all.

Let it rot up there.

But the Jews, it was not a nowhere city for them.

And that's the background of this psalm, to be forcibly having your identity forcibly removed from you and brought into a foreign land, which leads us to our first point here.

The first few verses of the psalm are going to show us the impossibility of worship.

The Jews that are born in Babylon are in every sense aliens in a foreign world.

They're untimely born.

Ripped from the womb, so to speak, thrust into a hostile world that doesn't want them.

The Babylonians didn't want them.

In many cases, the Jewish parents didn't want them.

Child sacrifice was common even in the Jewish world.

Those Jews that survived that, they survived the horrible reign of Manasseh, the wicked king.

His son reigned so briefly.

Then exile came a generation later.

Those Israelites that survived that from the tribe of Judah, they weren't, they never lived in the Judah that God wanted them to live in.

They never lived in the holy Jerusalem.

They lived in a cultural bizarre, a den of idols and thieves, while singing songs and having memories that they learned from their grandparents of a time when the Holy Spirit dwelled in Israel, where God's people was there, where there was worship, there were priests.

And that even memory is gone, and now their kids will be raised in Babylon.

So much of the Jewish identity is wrapped up in the songs they sing.

The Jews memorize the Psalms of Ascent, among many other Psalms.

But the Psalms of Ascent are critical.

Psalm 120 through 133 or so, 132, and they sing those psalms.

Every year they sing those psalms in preparation for worship in Israel, worship in Jerusalem.

They can't do that anymore, but now they're still learning the songs.

There's really no American equivalent to that.

You know, if you lived in a country where you weren't allowed to have a Christmas tree, would you still sing the song, Oh Christmas tree?

kind of question.

Would you teach it to your kids?

That's what the Israelites are going through.

They're learning the Psalms of Ascent.

They're teaching their kids there, not believing that they will ever go back to Jerusalem ever.

So why teach your kids songs about going to the temple and worshiping with joy when it'll never happen?

So much of our Americanism is hard for us to appreciate the violence of Psalm 137 because our American culture, to some extent, prioritizes individualism.

You're allowed to be an individual in our culture.

You're allowed to have a different haircut and wear different clothes and have a different kind of personality.

I mean, it's it's in many cases it's esteemed, less so in the military culture, granted.

But in much other parts of American culture, that's prized.

You want to stand out in some way.

You've been celebrated.

It's not the way the Jewish culture was.

The Jews didn't celebrate individualism.

Your goal was not to stand out, but to fit in.

The Jewish people were the ones that stood out, but you as a person, you fit in.

That's why you learned the songs, you sang the songs, you ate the food, you dressed the dress.

Remember, the whole Jewish world was divided between clean and unclean, two categories: kosher and Teref.

Teref is unclean, kosher clean, everything, one category or the other, everything could be touched or not touched.

Their whole life revolved around going to Jerusalem for the Feast of the Tabernacles, bringing the Lamb to the temple for Passover.

That's how they knew God.

And they woke up one day and it's gone.

They woke up one day and there's no more temple, no more feast of the tabernacles.

Thrust into a world with no kosher or treff signs.

No kosher food, no kosher kitchens.

Even today, you go to the store and you get a juice box or something for your kids, and it might have the kosher label on the back of it.

And even our American culture still stamps things with the kosher label for the Jews.

There is no stamps like that in Babylon.

There's the impossibility of worship in their way there.

It's not feasible.

How sudden it must have seemed.

Going to bed in the Jewish world with the Jewish identity, the Jewish culture, and waking up in Babylon.

And of course it wasn't sudden.

Jeremiah had warned them for 50 years this was going to happen.

For 50 years.

Jeremiah stood outside the northern door of the temple and preached for decades and was ignored.

He said you guys are going to be exiled in Babylon and they laughed at him.

He said they're going to put you in stocks.

And remember what they did to Jeremiah?

They put him in stocks.

This is where the concept laughing stocks comes from.

They put him in stocks, and the people paraded around him, laughing at him for saying that they would one day end up in exile.

So that's all past now.

I mean, the idea of them being exiled was so ridiculous that when God's prophet told them that would happen, they rolled their eyes and scoffed, and then one day they wake up in Babylon.

And they're not laughing now, are they?

Look at verse 1.

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept.

That's how this begins.

They have come a long way from locking Jeremiah up and laughing at his crazy prophecies.

Now they're in Babylon.

Babylon is a city of canals.

This is the water where Daniel goes and has his vision where the Lord lays him out.

But that's not yet.

This is before Daniel's vision for sure.

Now they're around the waters of Babylon, and they're sitting there, some respite from their work.

You can imagine this scene of the Jews gathered there, and it's supposed to be a time of celebration, maybe.

You're there with your friends, you're outside of the Babylonians, you know, there's no Babylonians joining you here along the river, and you're you sit there, and it should be a time of fellowship, and they just look at each other and they start crying.

Why are they crying?

Well, it says at the end of verse 1 that they remembered Zion.

They remembered Zion.

Their minds went back to what Jerusalem was like.

Now the canals happen, you know, are inside the city of Babylon.

Let me read to you one little description.

I'm going to read about Jerusalem later on tonight, but I want to read now just a little paragraph from an encyclopedia, the Bible encyclopedia about what Babylon's look would have been.

The city of Babylon was rectangular.

It straddled the Euphrates River and was lined with canals.

Coming in from the north, you would enter the city through a spectacularly beautiful gate, named after a Babylonian god, Ishtar, who was the goddess of fertility, love, and war.

Now, this is the gate that the Babylonians brought all their captives through because it was the most intimidating gate.

You would see the city from a long distance.

You'd be paraded through this gate.

I mean, you're you're feeling your identity stripped away from you.

This goddess is back to the encyclopedia, this goddess, she was the high mother goddess of Babylon.

The largest building in Babylon was a temple for her.

The gate you would walk through was one of the eight gates around the city.

The city walls were 80 feet thick, 320 feet high.

That's a hundred yards in the air.

That's the wall you walk through.

The city was surrounded.

The gates had towers on the side that were covered in ceramic tiles.

So on top of the massively large walls, is this huge spire that goes up that's in ceramic tiles of deep blue with white and yellow dragons on the tiles, lions and bulls.

When you walked in, the road went towards the temple, it curved through the gate, and it was designed to disorient you to the outside world.

See, when you entered the city of Babylon, the way the road curved towards the temple and away from the gate was meant so that you couldn't figure out where you were.

Now, if you grew up there, you would know the streets.

But if you didn't grow up there, it is it's over for you.

You're never getting out.

It's like driving through the mixing bowl for the first time here.

Get in the wrong lane.

Good luck with you.

You may as well just move to Maryland.

This is where Israel takes up residence.

And now they gather along the canals and they weep.

Notice verse 2, they hang their instruments up on the trees.

They just hang them on the trees.

That's not where you would store an instrument.

They brought them there to play, and they can't play.

And so they just hang them on the trees.

They can't even fathom the idea of ever singing again.

That's the city of Babylon.

And this is where their tormentors find them.

Babylonians come along in verse 3.

And the captors, the Babylonians, start demanding to them to sing songs.

Because remember, the Jews have these songs memorized.

So they're saying, hey, sing us one of the songs of Zion.

It would be one of the Psalms of Ascent.

Sing us one of your Psalms of Ascent.

Sing one of those again.

Because remember, those songs are meant to be sung while you're journeying to Jerusalem.

So they're saying, hey, sing us one of the songs about how beautiful Jerusalem is.

Ha ha ha.

And Jerusalem is in ruins right now.

They're never going back to it.

It's just a way of mocking them.

They're so associated with these songs that now the Babylonians are demanding one.

And they can't sing.

Look at verse 4.

How can we sing Yahweh's song in a foreign land?

It's not even possible.

These Jewish people wake up and they find themselves, listen, they find themselves in the middle of this pitched warfare.

This is the same war that Adam and Eve fought.

Adam and Eve were exiled.

Adam and Eve lost paradise.

They were in the garden.

By the way, Genesis points out that the Tigris and Euphrates River intersected in the, there were two of the four rivers that were in the Garden of Eden.

Of course, the topography of the world changed after the flood, but it is so interesting.

Why did the post-flood people name the rivers pre-flood in the Garden of Eden and give two of them the names of rivers that flew through flowed through Babylon?

I mean, it's just, it is the age-old dilemma here that they were born in paradise.

They should have been in paradise.

They lost paradise, exiled from the garden.

Adam and Eve, of course, are now growing up in a place, you know, growing up, they've got some centuries to go out there.

In a place where they weren't born.

They're not from the world.

They were from Eden and they lost it.

I'm sure they wept.

I'm sure they would have looked back and they found themselves thrust into a world of war, thrust into a world of lemmock and adultery and of brutalness and of murder.

Conflict after conflict.

Their children wouldn't grow up in the garden, their children would grow up in the world, opposed by the devil.

Attacked by fallen angels, pitched warfare, the likes of which our post-flood generation and world will never know.

We'll never experience the violence and appreciate just how brutal the world was before the flood.

Because God promised it would never happen again.

The most pitched warfare we have in our world, I'm sure, doesn't come close to what the world was like outside of the garden.

Abraham knew this battle.

He has to leave his homeland and he's shown the new place.

He's shown Jerusalem.

He's shown Zion.

But then he doesn't get to go there.

He has to journey, his descendants will journey.

Longing for the land that God had given them.

How are you supposed to worship?

This is why this psalm touches a raw nerve of Israel's faith.

This is a psalm that raises the question: how can we worship in a land that is intentionally designed to prohibit worship?

How do you worship God outside of the garden?

How do you worship God as a Jew outside of Israel?

How do you worship God in Babylon?

And you see just the pointlessness of it with the instruments hung in the trees.

You can't use them anymore.

You cannot worship God in a foreign land.

That takes you through the first part of verse 4, which leads us to the second point.

The impossibility of life without worship.

I mean, if the psalm ended there, it would just say, you can't worship God, go home.

Good luck.

Live how you want to live, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die.

But the problem is you can't not worship God also.

Verse 5, the psalmist says, If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.

That's a borrowed translation from the King James.

It's not even close to what the Hebrew is.

The Hebrew has nothing about skill or nothing about nothing.

It just says, if I forget Jerusalem, I want to forget my hand.

And it's it's a pun in the Hebrew.

He says, if I forget Jerusalem, and then he uses the word for wither, like a tree that withers and falls.

Maybe it's even a reference to the king who pointed at the prophet and his hand withered.

That's what he's saying.

If I forget Jerusalem, let my hand wither and fall off of me.

If I forget about the joys of Jerusalem, I'd rather not have a hand.

I'm forgetting myself, in other words.

The leaves turn and they fall to the ground.

And that's what is happening here to the psalmist.

If I forget Jerusalem, I will turn and I will fall to the ground.

I cannot live in a world where I cannot worship Zion.

Verse 6, let the tongue stick to the roof of my mouth.

I'd rather not speak.

It's the same wordplay.

His mouth is dried out.

He can't move his tongue anymore.

If he can't sing about Jerusalem, he doesn't want to sing at all.

I read a little bit about Babylon earlier.

Let me read a little bit from a book I just read last week.

It's called A Biography of Jerusalem, which is an incredible story.

Let me read you the first few paragraphs.

This is the longest quote I will have ever read in a sermon in my life, but it'll be worth it for you.

This is how the book begins.

The history of Jerusalem is the history of the world.

It's the chronicle of an often penurious provincial town of the Judean hills.

It was once regarded as the center of the world, and today that is more true than ever.

The city is the focus of the struggle between the Abrahamic religions, the shrine for increasingly popular Christian, Jewish, and Islamic fundamentalism, and the battlefield of clashing civilizations.

It is the front line between atheism and faith, which it has always been.

It is the focus of secular fascination, the object of giddy conspiracism and of internet mythmaking.

Jerusalem is the holy city, yet it has always been a den of superstition, charlatanism, and bigotry.

The desire and the prize of empires, listen to this, it is the desire and prize of empires, yet of no strategic value.

The cosmopolitan home of many sects, each of which believes the city belongs to them alone.

This is a place of such delicacy, it is described in Jewish literature in the feminine, always sensual, a living woman, always beautiful, but sometimes a harlot, sometimes a wounded princess whose lovers have forsaken her.

Jerusalem is the house of one God, the capital of two peoples, the temple of three religions, and the only city to exist twice, once on earth and once in heaven.

The religions of the world were born there, and they will end there on the day of judgment.

Jerusalem, sacred to the peoples of the book, is the city of the book.

The Bible, in many ways, is Jerusalem's own biography, and its readers, from the Jews and early Christians to the Muslim conquerors and the crusaders to today's American televangelist, have repeatedly altered her history to fit it into their worldview.

But because the Bible is a universal book, Jerusalem is a universal city.

Every great king is compared to David.

Every great city to Jerusalem, every future view of heaven to a new Jerusalem.

It is a city that belongs to no one, exists for everyone, but only in their imagination.

It's a city of tragedy as well as magic.

Every dreamer of Jerusalem, every visitor in all ages, from Jesus' apostles to Saladian soldiers, to Victorian pilgrims, to today's tourists and journalists, arrive with a vision of the authentic Jerusalem and then are bitterly disappointed by what they find.

An ever-changing city that has thrived and shrunk, been rebuilt and destroyed, and will be at least one more time.

That's the city that they are trying to remember.

It was theirs.

It was theirs.

And now it's gone.

The city that used to frame their life is now distorted in their memory and soon to be forgotten.

And they say, if I can't remember it, if I can't teach it to my kids, I don't know what to do.

Psalm 9, verse 11, Yahweh is enthroned in Jerusalem.

Psalms 9:11

Psalm 76, verse 2, Yahweh's dwelling place is in Zion.

Psalms 76:2

And that's why the psalmist ends this little passage right here at the end of verse 6 by saying, If I don't set Jerusalem above my highest joy, let me never speak again.

These are the two truths.

The impossibility of life without worship.

And the impossibility of worshiping outside of where God designed it to be.

And that's the world we live in.

And those two truths, by the way, cannot be reconciled by us.

That's why they're so jarring.

And they collide here in really brutal fashion in the rest of this Psalm.

Verse 7.

Remember, O Yahweh, against the Edomites.

The Edomites were relatives of the Jews.

They were their cousins.

And they're the ones that betrayed Israel in the battle against Babylon.

They're the ones that betrayed Israel and sold them out.

So the Israelites are in exile because the Edomites betrayed them, among many other reasons.

It was the Edomites that jeered at the Israelites on their way into exile.

The Edomites were cheering, it says in verse 7, cheering, lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations.

Their cousins are cheering, I hope this place burns as the Jews are led out of it.

O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed.

Blessed shall be he who repays you with what you have done to us.

Blessed will be the one who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks.

Now, that's a jarring verse.

It's prefaced by saying, That's what the Babylonians did to us.

They did that to us, so blessed be the one who repays them.

This is an eye for an eye, tooth for the tooth.

Lextelianus, if there ever was one.

They beat our babies to death, and so, Lord, avenge their death by blessing the ones who do that to them.

It will not be the Jews that do this to them, by the way.

This is a prophecy that is fulfilled.

God does answer this prayer, and he does bless the nation that does it, and it is not the Jews.

It bothers our sensibility to see these verses.

Let me quote Spursion at this point.

Spursion writes, Let those who find fault with the ending of Psalm 137 be only those who have never seen their own temple burned, their own city ruined, their own wives raped, their own children slain.

They might not perhaps be quite so velvet-mouthed if they had suffered after this fashion.

Spurgeon in his treasury of David.

Jeremiah 51.

I'm going to read a section from it.

Verse 24, Jeremiah 51, Jeremiah prophesying.

The words of Yahweh says, I will repay Babylon and all the inhabitants of Chaldea before your very eyes for the evil they've done in Zion, declares Yahweh.

Behold, I'm against you, Babylon.

You destroying mountain, declares Yahweh.

You destroyed the whole earth.

I will stretch out my hand against you, roll you down from your own mountain and burn you.

No stone will be taken from you for a corner, no stone from a foundation.

You will be a perpetual wasteland, declares Yahweh.

Set up a new standard on earth, blow the trumpet among the nations, prepare the nations to all go a war against Babylon.

I will send locusts, horses like bristling locusts.

Verse 28 of Isaiah 51.

Prepare the nations for war against her, the kings of the Medes with their governors and deputies, every land under their dominion.

The land trembles and writhes in pain.

For Yahweh's purposes against Babylon will stand.

They will make the land of Babylon a desolation with no more inhabitants.

The warriors of Babylon will cease fighting.

They will remain in their strongholds.

Their strength has failed.

They've become broken as women.

Their dwellings are on fire.

Their bars are broken.

One runner collides with another.

One messenger runs into another.

They all are hurrying to tell the king of Babylon his city will fall from every side.

The fords will be seized.

The marshes burn with fire.

The soldiers will be in panic.

Do you remember how Babylon did fall?

The Medes and the Persians snuck in through the canals, stopped it up, and all of the soldiers and messengers did collide, running to tell the king while he was having his feast.

The writing on the wall, mini, mini tackling farson, written on the wall, you have fallen.

All of this happened.

Babylon had been so brutal and had fallen to the Persians and the Medes in such an equally brutal way.

The revenges of Providence are slow, but they are sure indeed.

Jeremiah, by that way, by the way, wrote that prophecy.

Do you remember in Jeremiah what he did with that prophecy?

He gave it to four runners and told them to run into Babylon with the message, surround the king with it, read it, and then tie it to rocks and throw the rocks into the river in front of the king.

Which I think is hilarious.

Read about how you will fall in a brutally violent way, tie it to a rock and hurl it into the river in the middle of their city.

And in God's providence, that's how they fall through the river.

This is the introduction to the book of Ezra, that God will answer these prayers.

Babylon will fall, the Medes and the Persians will take it over, and they will command that Jerusalem be rebuilt.

The temple we be rebuilt, something the Babylonians would have found unfathomable will happen as a result of the blessing prayed at the end of Psalm 137.

I want to now answer the question in verse 4 earlier.

How shall we sing of the Lord's song in a foreign land?

And the answer is that it is possible to worship.

These two tensions are reconciled through verse 4, which is, I think it's the hinge the psalm is moving on here.

How can you sing of God's song in a foreign land?

And Daniel answers this question: you can sing of God's song in a foreign land?

Basically looking three directions.

You look back, you look forward, and you look up.

You look back to your past, you look forward to the God's promises of the future, and you look up to heaven.

That's how you sing of the psalm.

That's what Daniel did.

He looked back to the exile, back to the words of Jeremiah, forward to the fulfillment of prophecy and up to the angel that gave him his vision.

And this is our mandate as well.

How do you worship God in a world where you weren't designed to worship?

You look back, recognize that you are an exile, recognize that this world was not made for worshipers.

After the fall, the garden has been removed.

It's a hostile land, antagonistic to God.

You weren't designed to fit in.

You were designed to be a pilgrim.

You were designed to be an exile.

You look forward to the promise that one day Christ will reign on earth.

He will descend.

He will establish his kingdom.

And you look up towards heaven, knowing that that is where your dwelling place will be.

We are all born in exile.

We're all made for heaven, and we're all living on earth.

Your mind convinces you that you were made for more than this.

Your conscience convinces you that their eternity is real.

You have a natural fear of death, but you also know that you cannot live in this world forever.

We don't want to die, but we know we can't stay here.

We know this world wasn't made for worship, but we know that it is impossible to have any meaning in life without worship.

And then Christ shows us the way.

The Babylonians had made a practice of doing that for a hundred years at least, and so I'm sure it was repaid to them.

But it also dawns on me that God in his love for us is the only one who has ever volunteered his son to this.

That God in his love for us sends his son to the world.

For God so loved the world, he gave his only son, surrendering his son to die on the cross.

Know that these two truths come into reconciliation.

The impossibility of worship in this world, the impossibility of life without worship, they come into reconciliation through Jesus Christ, who was murdered, who was killed knowingly, given by his Father to this life, given by his father to the end, Jesus who comes willingly to earth, willingly to the cross, so that he would be killed for our sins.

He is the son that is killed, he is the son that is beaten to death, he's the son that is has his flesh pierced, he's the son that is whipped, he's the son that is mocked, he's the son that has the crown put on his head.

Mockers turned to him and said, You know, why don't you prophesy?

The same mockery they gave the Jews in exile, they give to Christ, why don't you prophesy if you're a prophet?

Why don't you get yourself down from the cross?

And knowing that he did that willingly, he went through the ridicule, he went through the physical suffering, he went through the physical pain, so we can have our sins forgiven.

This is why we can live in a foreign land.

We can be pilgrims knowing that Christ, He is our guide.

He is the one who brought the Israelites back from captivity, He is the one who guided them in the wilderness, and He is the one that guides us in our exile as well.

And He does that through His own death.

Lord, we're thankful that you died for sinners, the worst sinners.

You died for exiles, those who lost the lands because of their own sin.

And he did so so that we might live.

We recoil in horror at the imagery of children being killed, and we turn that horror upwards to heaven, where we see you who give your own son, Jesus born of a virgin, who came to earth to die.

Jesus born without a human father, only a heavenly one, and sent on a mission to death.

Jesus born into this world and at his baby shower greeted with gifts of funeral spices, knowing throughout his life this was the end that awaited him, knowing that he was the Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world, knowing that he's the prophet who would be betrayed like Jeremiah, the prophet who would be killed like Isaiah, the prophet who would be mocked and ridiculed like Hosea, the prophet who would be persecuted like Daniel, the prophet who would be killed, like the Jews sang about in this song.

He died for us so that we might live for him.

We give you thanks for the glories of the death and resurrection.

We know there's no way to worship without you.

We know there's no point of living without worship.

Give us hearts filled with worship, we ask in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Thank you for being with us today.

And now a parting word from Pastor Jesse.

If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website, emmanuelbible.church.

If you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C.

area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel.

I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service.

But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church.

Now may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly, serve the Lord faithfully, and share the gospel boldly.