O God ... please help us
against our enemies,
for all human help is useless.
With God’s help we will
do mighty things ...
Psalm 60:11-12
For Christmas, we gave my sister-in-law, a teacher, a t-shirt. It said ...
Don’t eat Grandma
Don’t eat, Grandma
Then in small print underneath it said:
Commas save lives.
Get it?
Do you know this famous verse: “I will lift up my eyes to the hills — From whence cometh my help”.
What punctuation would you put at the end of this sentence?
Old translations sometimes end the sentence with a period, implying perhaps that our help comes from the peaceful hills themselves. (In fact, I served a church with this peaceful mountain image etched on some its windows.)
Modern translations render it with a question mark at the end. When I am in trouble, does my upward gaze settle on the hills. No! My hope doesn’t come from mountains. More often, hilly passes conceal robbers and tall mountains obscure the advance of enemy columns.
When my family lived in the mountains, a beautiful day could devolve instantly into a violent thunderstorm as black clouds would swarm suddenly over the 10,000-foot peaks. When “I lift up my eyes to the hills” does “my help ... cometh ... from” there??? No! Unknown trouble often lurk in the hills! (And be sure to notice that I added the question marks like I think the passage demands.)
So should “I lift up my eyes to the hills”? Does “my help ... cometh ... from” there??? No! Verse 2 of Psalm 121 declares our real hope: “My help comes from the Lord.”
Our verse for today appropriately echoes this truth: God ... please help us against our enemies, for all human [and mountainous] help is useless.”
In our world today, we don’t often rely on mountains nor geology nor weather for help, hope, or salvation.
· But we do rely on technology. We can fix our own problems.
· We rely on money. With enough of it, we can solve our problems.
· We rely on governments and armies and police departments. And generally they do a good job. But if you’ve ever been in a natural disaster — and I have — you suddenly realize that all the things you thought you could count on are “useless.”
· Human efforts can often manage the day-to-day. We can rely on ourselves and others through the simple and average. But what happens when the stakes are raised? What happens when there’s a power bigger than us? What happens when “all human help is useless”?
Hopefully we realize that It is only and ultimately with “God’s help we will
do mighty things.”
Hopefully we will learn to cry, “O God ... please help us against our enemies.”
In Christ’s Love,
a guy who practices crying
for God’s help in the day-to-day
and because of that
I’m confident and ready
when the bigger trials come
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