Blessed assurance

I lift up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth… Psalm 121

There are passages in the Bible which call, not for detailed analysis, but simply to be soaked up and absorbed, to be enjoyed, even revelled in. Psalm 121 is one such. It offers us what an old hymn called “blessed assurance”, a simple reminder that God made us, God loves us, and God promises to protect and keep us. I want to take it verse by verse (there are only eight), with the prayer that it will speak to each of us exactly as the Spirit sees fit.

I lift up my eyes to the mountains – where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth (verses 1-2).

Only a fool, and an arrogant one at that, imagines that he or she doesn’t need help in their journey through life. We come into this world as helpless babies, and we leave it as helpless adults, and though our need of help may seem to be very slight in days of strength and vitality, it is there non-stop all the same – help from other people, above all help from God. To try and deny that fact is arrogance and folly.

Why does the psalmist “lift up his eyes to the mountains”? High mountains can be majestic and beautiful; but they can also be threatening, the haunt of robbers or the lair of an enemy army. Is the writer anxious about an unseen danger?

My guess is that he sees them as a metaphor for the majesty of God himself: “If God can create these, what is there that he can’t do!” And, of course, a city encircled by mountains is more secure than one unprotected by any natural barriers.

I had a friend once who was born in Scotland but spent most of her life in Lincolnshire – a county which is notoriously flat. I don’t think she had any serious regrets about her move, but “Och, I do miss the mountains!” she used to say. I’m sure she thought of them not just as natural features but as reminders of the glory and mystery of God.

Is it time some of us stopped, lifted up our eyes and allowed “God’s grandeur” (to borrow a phrase from a poem by G M Hopkins) to strike us afresh?

He will not let your foot slip – he who watches over you will not slumber; indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep (verses 3-4).

Some weeks ago, walking with friends across a particularly muddy field, my feet lost their grip and down I slithered on my backside: not injured, but conscious of an alarming loss of control (not to mention dignity).

We sometimes speak of “losing our way” in life, and there are a million-and-one ways of doing that. They often come down to losing touch with God, to failing to trust and obey him. This verse assures us that that need not happen, because he “neither slumbers nor sleeps”; as our heavenly Father he is always watching over those who belong to him, his “Israel”. He is never “off duty” (in spite of Psalm 44:23!).

Do any of us reading this today feel that our feet are slipping? Is it time for a period of self-examination, a time to bring ourselves back under the protective gaze of God?

The Lord watches over you – the Lord is your shade at your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, not the moon by night (verses 5-6).

As so often, we need to recognise poetic figures of speech when we meet them in the Bible. True, in the world of the Bible the sun could quite literally be a killer – a truth we today are very conscious of, with harsh realities such as sunstroke and skin cancer. True also, we today don’t expect to be “harmed” by the moon at night: the psalmist here is, surely, putting into exaggerated speech the wonderfully reassuring truth that once we are secure in God’s love then we are secure for evermore.

The apostle Paul expands upon the same truth in Romans 8:35-39: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or nakedness or famine or sword?... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors…” Nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

The Bible as a whole obviously doesn’t deny that bad things happen to God’s people. But what it insists is that even in such circumstances we remain secure.

The Lord will keep you from all harm - he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and for evermore (verses 7-8).

I love that little turn of phrase, “your coming and going”. It seems to conjure up the sheer ordinary busyness of day-to-day life: getting up and brushing my teeth; heading to the bus-stop to get to work; popping into the shops; picking up the children from school or nursery; watching television or going to the leisure centre…

It covers daily life – but it also extends to the eternal future: “both now and for evermore”. To focus purely on this earthly life is ridiculously short-sighted. We are heading for a day when even the glory of the most majestic mountains will be nothing compared with what we will experience.

Do you believe this?

Lord God, thank you for watching over me in all the joys and sorrows of this earthly life. And thank you even more for the prospect of greater glories still to come. Amen.