Psalm 127: The Lord’s Beloved

In the Psalms, we learn to praise, to lament, to express our awe and wonder at God's greatness. The Psalms contain God's Word to us, teaching us how to respond to Him. Join us today for Renewing Your Mind as we learn to love the Psalms. The book of Psalms is a treasure. Its beautiful poetry gives us language to express our emotions to God. But many Psalms also point us to Christ.

Today, Dr. Robert Godfrey shows us how Psalm 127 looks ahead to Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel. We come now to the fifth book of the Psalter, where all is revealed and all is resolved, or at least all is recapitulated. It's a wonderful book that intrigued me for a long time, and I feel at last I've got something on hold on what's going on in the fifth book of the Psalter. We've had the kingdom and the king in books 1 and 2. We've had the crisis of the king and kingdom in book 3.

Then we've had something of a resolution and comfort in book 4. And now it's as if the editor of the Psalter – we haven't really talked about the editor, we don't know much about the editor – but somebody put all these Psalms together in their final form, and I believe has a real intention of how they're laid out. And the editor in this book 5 of the Psalter begins by saying, God restores His people and His king. And we see that in Psalm 105, a wonderful psalm of the restoration of the people. Then we have a series of Psalms about the king, both in his continuing struggles and in his glory.

Psalm 110 is in that section talking about great David's greater son, clearly an expectation of the coming of Christ. And then in Psalm 113, I believe, we have a kind of recapitulation of Israel's history. So Psalms 113 through 118 have been called the Egyptian halal. They're the Psalms that Jews to this day sing at the Passover meal.

And so these are the Psalms that reflect on God's deliverance out of Egypt. And then we come to Psalm 119. And what most people notice about Psalm 119 is that it's long.

My daughter, when we'd read the Bible at the table, if I ever said, what psalm would you like to read, she was quick. The one thing she really knew is we should read Psalm 117 because that's the shortest psalm in the Psalter. But beyond Psalm 119 being the longest psalm in the Psalter, it's a great reflection, a great celebration, a great delight in the law of God. And what should that remind us of, that coming out of Egypt, Israel comes to Sinai where the law is given. So we have a reflection, I think, of the giving of the law in Psalm 119. Then we come to what are known as the Psalms of ascents, the songs of ascents. That is the songs related to Israel's obligation annually to go up to Jerusalem three times to worship. And these are pilgrim psalms, and they're psalms of delight in being in Jerusalem, and they're psalms of blessing from the house of the Lord. So Psalm 120 through 134 are the songs of ascents in Jerusalem.

So we've moved from Egypt to Sinai into the land of promise and the great capital city. And then Psalms 135 through 137 return to the struggle of Israel and indeed the exile of Israel in Psalm 137. And then we come to Psalms 138 through 145, which are all Davidic psalms. There have been Davidic psalms earlier in Book 5, but these psalms are all Davidic psalms talking about the restoration of the king and the kingdom restored, the crisis of Book 3 resolved. Now, if you're sharp, you know there are more than 145 psalms in the Psalter. There are five more, and what do we make of that?

Well, we'll come back to that next time. But for this time, I want us to look together at one of the songs of ascent or ascents better, number 127. As I said, these psalms seem related to Israel fulfilling its obligation to go up to Jerusalem three times a year to worship. You know, that was a big demand on Israel by the Lord.

Even though Israel wasn't a very big country, traveling to Jerusalem three times a year, leaving family, farm, work behind, traveling what may well have been several days for families that live further away, this was a demand. And yet, the Lord in these songs of ascents is showing what a blessing it was for the nation to come together and recognize they were one people of God, to gather around the king to recognize God had given them one king, to gather at the temple to be blessed through the priests of God, to know there was one God and one blessing. This is a dramatic, crucial moment in the identity of Israel, in the experience of Israel, and one of the psalms that really celebrates this for the people of God and expresses the truth of their life with God and with one another is Psalm 127. We could have looked at any number of these psalms with great blessing, but I find it intriguing on a couple of levels, and one of them you should be able to guess by now. This is the central psalm of the songs of ascents. I'm sort of joining one note on that point, so there is a centrality here, and not entirely surprisingly, part of that centrality is underscored by the author of this psalm. The author of this psalm is Solomon. Solomon is given credit for just two psalms in the Psalter, Psalm 72 at the end of Book 2, talking about the universal reign of the king and the kingdom, and now here this psalm of blessing in Jerusalem. And there's a kind of appropriateness that Solomon would be at the center of things because although Solomon had his failings, shall we say, in a certain sense, Solomon's reign expressed until the coming of Jesus the greatest glory of the Davidic kingship.

He ruled over the whole nation. He ruled in great wealth and splendor, and so there's a kind of representation of the splendor and glory of Christ in some of the earthly glory of Solomon, and that's reflected in, I think, his writing, Psalm 72, and writing here, Psalm 127. And this is a reflection on Solomon's part at his most faithful that whatever the strength and the glory, the wealth and the success of God's king, it really all comes from God. So this is a fairly familiar psalm. It's a very beautiful psalm, unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for the Lord gives to His beloved sleep.

It's a beautiful picture, not a call to laziness, not a call to inactivity, but a call to recognize all of our labors will amount to nothing if the Lord is not working for us and in us and with us. And that's what's being celebrated here. It's being celebrated in relation to the house.

Now here, maybe it's intentionally ambiguous. The house could be the family, the home, and it probably does mean that in part. But the house could also refer to the palace of the king, and it can also refer to the temple as the house of God.

So there are a lot of things going on here. As you come into Jerusalem, there are the homes of the people, there's the house of the king, and there's the house of God. And all of these things are built by God's people, but none of it will stand unless the Lord is in it. And then the psalmist turns to reflect on the city as a whole. Remember we had talked earlier a little bit about Psalm 48, you know, go around her palaces, mark her defense as well. It's a celebration of the walls and the citadels and the towers of Jerusalem, how strong Jerusalem is. And here again, there is a strong city with a strong watch, but the work of the watchman all is in vain if the Lord doesn't watch.

And the people of the city, people of the nation have to work hard. They rise up early, they go to bed late, and their labors are done sometimes with anxiety. I'm sure none of you have ever experienced that, never had anxious moments in your lives.

But here the psalmist recognizes that people work with anxiety. You think of a largely agricultural community, there's the anxiety of the weather. Will the rains come? Will they come too early? Will they come too late? Will they come too strong?

Will they come too weak? As a Californian, I know all about worrying about rain not coming. And that's what's in mind here, that you can work really, really hard as a farmer and some years have no fruit to your labors whatsoever. And it leads to anxiety. But the psalmist is confessing that they can rest in the Lord, they can have confidence in the Lord, they can find the Lord their blessing. And it's interesting to me that the center of this psalm is that phrase, for He gives to His beloved sleep. The Lord gives us many things, but one of the things He does is give us rest, give us that blessedness that sleep can symbolize in our lives, refreshment, renewal, maybe escape. But in any case, what a great blessing from the Lord it is to sleep. Some translators have suggested that this might be translated, for He gives to His beloved even when they sleep.

And that's really nice, but I don't think it's right. I think the translation is correct here, that He gives His beloved sleep. And then He goes on to develop this image of the life of the people together. They build a house together, they build a city together, they work together, and they experience from the Lord the blessing of a family. Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. This was critical in the life of Israel, that life would go on, that the family would go on, that as they waited for Messiah the family would continue, that the family would not die out. Farmers were in desperate need of children to work on the farm.

It wasn't all just kind of romantic, you know, and sentimental. Children were absolutely necessary to help with the work of the farm and then to care for the parents in old age. And so, children being a heritage, as I say, is not just a sentimental observation, but it's an essential blessing in life. And we forget that until very recently, child mortality rates were huge.

My study is in the 17th century, but it really is not radically different from what happened centuries and centuries earlier. But many families would have 10, 12, 15 children, and maybe only two of them survived to adulthood, maybe not even that many. And very often in those days, I remember one historian at least argued that the average length of a marriage was 12 years. And the reason was so many women died in childbirth. And there's some very interesting poems from the 17th century of women getting pregnant, and their main reaction was fear.

Will I survive this pregnancy? Because either they died of bleeding to death after the delivery, or they contracted some kind of infection. If the doctor came, it was worse because he never washed his hands until late in the 19th century. And so, the combination of bleeding and infection meant lots of women died in childbirth, and it was part of the reason that the whole of marriage life was somewhat more contractual than sentimental. A farmer whose wife died, leaving him with two or three small children, often remarried within days because he couldn't both farm and keep the children alive alone.

And it wasn't at all a lack of regard necessarily for his first wife. It was an absolute necessity to keep the children alive. And so, when we read these Psalms, we mustn't overly sentimentalize them. They really meant it when they said that children are a heritage from the Lord. They're part of the very essence of survival amongst the people. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one's youth.

They come to your defense. They're essential to the ongoing character of life. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them.

He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate. This house they're building, this city they're building has to be defended, and children as a reward are part of the defense. So, this is a picture of God's blessing on Israel, blessing on their homes, blessing on their families, blessing on their work, blessing on their capital, both for its political significance and for its spiritual significance. And it's really a celebration of Solomon perhaps from his house, looking out at God's house whom Solomon built, and rejoicing in what the Lord has accomplished.

And I think there's some really interesting little tidbit here, which is fascinating. The central psalm has a central verse, for he gives his beloved sleep, and the Lord renamed Solomon. I don't know if you remember that. David named him Solomon, which seems to be derived from the Hebrew word shalom, meaning peace, and Solomon perhaps means something like peaceful. And, of course, that's appropriate because, remember, David wasn't allowed to build the temple of the Lord because he was a man of violence. And so, Solomon's kingdom was to be sort of characterized by peacefulness, and so Solomon is given a name that seems to echo that notion of sleep. But the Lord looked at Solomon at one point and renamed him. And we find that in 2 Samuel 12.25, and the name given to Solomon by the Lord is Jedidiah. Sometimes in the old days, Jedidiah was even used as a child's name in America.

Not so much anymore. I don't meet too many Jedidiahs anymore. But you know what Jedidiah means in Hebrew? It means beloved of the Lord. So, I think Solomon has a little self-reference here in the middle of this psalm.

The Lord gives to His beloved, to His Jedidiah, sleep. And so, Solomon is drawing attention to the general blessing that the Lord gives to all of His people, but I think Solomon puts himself kind of at the center of this psalm. And I think it's another marker for us that kingship is crucial to the Psalter, that God wants His people always to be thinking in terms of their king and his representative function for them. In the ancient world, it was generally true that the fortunes of a people rose and fell with their king.

If the king was defeated, the people were defeated. And God is saying in effect, it seems to me, that this is particularly true of His people because His king has importance for the whole history of redemption. And the kingship stands to try to represent what God will ultimately do in accomplishing the redemption of His people in His king. And so, when Solomon draws attention to himself, it's not purely self-centered, but it's to draw attention to the one who will be beloved of God.

This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased, the Father says of Jesus. And of course, we know that Solomon for some of his life was faithful to the Lord, but we also know that Solomon in old age ran into trouble. And it's kind of interesting to compare what the Lord directed a king to be in Deuteronomy chapter 7, remember we're all studying Deuteronomy, to remember what the Lord said a king ought to be in Deuteronomy, to compare that with what actually becomes of Solomon. Deuteronomy says the king is not to be a foreigner, but Solomon married many foreign wives and got himself in a lot of trouble with idolatry because of the foreign wives. Deuteronomy says the king is not to have many horses, but Solomon had many horses. I'm not sure exactly why the Lord laid down that law.

Perhaps it was so that the king couldn't put his confidence in the legs of a horse instead of in the Lord. But in any case, Solomon violated that law. Deuteronomy 17 said the king was not to have many wives. Solomon had many, many wives.

Now, is that a technical violation of the law? If you're just not allowed many wives, if you have many, many, I think that is a violation of the law and maybe not technical. Specifically, Deuteronomy said the king should not have many wives lest his heart turn away from the Lord. And we're told specifically in 1 Kings 11 that Solomon's heart was turned away from the Lord by these foreign wives.

The king was told not to have much silver or gold, but Solomon had much wealth. All of this is to say Solomon failed to be the kind of king that listened to every word that proceeded from the mouth of God. And, once again, even in his failure, he's pointing forward to the king that Israel ultimately needs, the king that ultimately comes only in the person of Jesus Christ. And it's why, of course, then the two gospels, Matthew and Luke, spend time demonstrating that Jesus is descended from David. This is crucial for the history of redemption, that Jesus doesn't just come out of nowhere, but He is precisely the fulfillment, the true fulfillment, the sincere fulfillment of everything that had been pointed to and anticipated in all that had been said about the king. So, it's really Jesus who builds the house. It's really Jesus who blesses the family.

It's really Jesus who watches over the city. It's really Jesus who blesses His people with prosperity and protection, so that these Psalms, at every point, are really connected with Jesus. Now, there are groups of people who only sing Psalms, and one of the common criticisms brought against such people is, but you don't have Jesus in the Psalms. And, it's interesting to me that Luther, for example, who was not an exclusive Psalm singer, but Luther said, no book in the Bible speaks so fully of the death and resurrection of Jesus as the salt. It's also interesting to me, someone pointed out to me years ago, do you think Handel's Messiah is about Jesus?

It seems to me that's a fairly easy case to make. In fact, it's hard to think of a piece of music more gloriously and grandly about Jesus and helping us more fully understand Jesus, and yet the word Jesus is not present in the Messiah. But, you could hardly say it's Christless. So, the Psalter is at every point full of Jesus.

Jesus is the God who loves us and protects us, and Jesus is the King who represents us and brings us to the Father. And so, it's just a glorious blessing at every point. And so, as we close, this Psalm brings us great comfort, for He gives His beloved sleep. That is, He gives Solomon sleep, He gives Jesus sleep, and He gives us sleep in the beloved. It's a wonderful thing.

It is a wonderful thing. Every Psalm contains a glorious blessing for us. We are featuring highlights of Dr. Robert Godfrey's series, Learning to Love the Psalms, and we're glad you've joined us for Renewing Your Mind on this Wednesday. Dr. Godfrey is a Ligonier teaching fellow and the chairman of our board here at Ligonier Ministries. This series reveals the unique beauty we find in the Psalms, and I think you'll discover that Dr. Godfrey's love of this treasured book is contagious. We'll send you the full series. There are 12 lessons on two DVDs when you contact us today with a donation of any amount. And once you've completed your request, we'll add the digital study guide of the series to your online learning library.

You can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343, or you can go online to renewingyourmind.org. Dr. Godfrey sent down with us recently to explain how we should study the Psalms. The best way to study the Psalms, as Psalm 1, verse 2 tells us right at the beginning, is to meditate on the Psalms. Poems don't release their richness by one single quick reading. So we have to read and reread.

The Hebrew word meditate really means mutter or repeat out loud to yourself. And as one goes over and over those Psalms, looking for themes, looking for linguistic patterns, looking for literary shape, more and more depth is found and more and more blessing I believe is received. And we'll look at the Psalms again tomorrow.

We hope you'll join us for that. Our look at the Psalms this week underlines our goal here at Renewing Your Mind to help equip you to understand what you believe, why you believe it, how to live it, and how to share it. And we do that through daily messages that reveal the glory of God against the backdrop of culture, philosophy, apologetics, ethics, and church history. You'll find an archive of past Renewing Your Mind programs, plus articles, videos, and daily Bible studies when you download our free app.

Just search for Ligonier in your app store. Tomorrow we'll concentrate on the last few Psalms in the Psalter. Dr. Godfrey will show us that the entire book points to these final chapters. So we hope you'll join us Thursday for Renewing Your Mind. God bless.