Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Does God Dash Kids Against Rocks? | The Writings | Psalm 137

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

Do you have nostalgia? How are you prone to forget home? Does God want to dash kids against rocks? In today's episode, Jeff shares how Psalm 137 makes sense in its context and encourages us to long for our just and peaceful home. Read the Bible with us in 2025! This year, we’re exploring the Historical Books—Joshua, Judges, 1 & 2 Samuel, and 1 & 2 Kings. Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Psalm 137

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jeff Parrott. Nostalgia. We tend to think of nostalgia in relatively innocent terms today. We're nostalgic for a particular decade of music, for 90s fashion, for that season of life when we were just a little bit younger. But in the history of medicine, nostalgia was far less innocuous and far more insidious. Going back to the 17th century, when patients experienced nostalgia, they would be treated with

strange methods like leeches, stomach pumping, fear exposure, even public shaming. Up until 1918, it was even listed as a cause of death on death certificates. What made nostalgia such a powerful force in people's lives? The word nostalgia comes from two Greek words put together, Nostos, which means homecoming, and algos, which means pain. So to have nostalgia is to experience the pain of missing home. It's a deep homesickness. Historically, this diagnosis of nostalgia was often given to soldiers away at war

or immigrants who moved away to a distant country. But if we simply relegate the notion of nostalgia as a sickness, this deep homesickness, to someplace in the distant past, well, we'd be mistaken. It turns out that all of us live with a kind of homesickness. We're all longing to be home. We long to be safe and seen and soothed and secure. For some of us, those desires may be connected to a physical place with a street address, our house, or home,

but this sense of home isn't necessarily about a particular location. It's about a relational reality. It's about a connection where we're seen and known and loved. I like the way that writer Jen Pollock-Michelle describes this sense of home in her book Keeping Place. She writes this, Home represents humanity's most visceral ache and our oldest desire.

We long to be at home with God, with other people, and even with ourselves. But here's the tension of our nostalgia. We're longing for home, but we're living in exile. That's a brutal fact for us today and for God's people living in the historical situation of exile, away from home in the promised land. In Psalm 137, we see the Bible address our nostalgia. And while this Psalm confronts the brutal fact of our homesickness,

it also gives us the beautiful truth of what God is doing about it. Now, a quick side note on this episode, I realize that we're going way beyond 10 minutes today, but we're doing that because this Psalm in particular contains one of the most seemingly offensive verses in the Bible to our modern ears. And instead of glossing over it to have a nice, tidy 10-minute episode, we're going to tackle it head on. Buckle up, take some extra steps on the trail, or drive the long way home, because today we're going to go for it with Psalm 137. Now, as we approach God's word together, let's pause and ask for His grace to move through our time. Heavenly Father, thank you for the gift of life and breath, and thank you for your word. We bring before you our joys and our sorrows, our anxiety, and our excitement, our calendars, and our contingencies.

God, would you meet us in this space? Jesus, help us abide in you as we engage with your truth. Holy Spirit, we ask you to move in and through this time. in Psalm 137. As we read these words, let these words read us and restore us in Jesus' name. Amen. Now, Psalm 137 was recorded sometime during or shortly after the exile of God's people in Babylon, while their pain of being away from home in the promised land lingered. Because of their own injustice and idolatry and compromise with evil, they found themselves displaced with the pain of homesickness. You get a sense of this homesickness out of the gate in verse one.

We read this, By the waters of Babylon, there we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. This deep sadness, it gets amplified in verses 2 through 3, where the captors of God's people taunt them to sing songs about their home in Jerusalem while they're there in exile. And that sadness leads to a huge question in verse 4. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign line? land. How can we possibly do that while we're away from home? How can we sing about home where we

belong, about being home with God, when we're here in exile? Home feels like such a distant memory, and we're plagued with the sickness of nostalgia. This theme of longing to be back home, it continues into verses 5 through 6 as the Psalm switches to the first person perspective. We read this. 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. These words sung and heard by God's people are meant to stir their affections for home, to stir their hearts and minds for how the world is meant to be, and for who they're meant to be. It's a way of saying, don't forget home. I feel the

pain of being away from it. But I don't want to forget it. I don't want to forget where I belong. In response to this transition to the first person perspective, let's do some self-examination of our particular lives, of our particular stories. Let's get into the first person together. How am I prone to forget home? Remember, home in the biblical sense isn't simply a physical location. It is a relational reality. Home is being seen and known and loved by God and by other people. So how am I missing that? How am I missing God? Maybe for you, this holiday season in particular is an especially tender time of missing this

sense of home. This may be the one time of year when you feel especially displaced, far from being safe and seen and sued and secure. God, we acknowledge the ways that we feel homesick for you, the ways we long to connect with you and with other people. We bring our pain before you. Free us to name these parts of our lives and receive the presence of your love,

wherever we are now. Psalm 137 continues with an appeal for God to respond to our nostalgia, to move in the midst of our homesickness. Verse 7 begins with these three powerful words, Remember, O Lord. Remember, oh Lord. We've talked about this in previous,

episodes, the biblical sense of God remembering isn't about cognitive recall, as if God has a memory loss problem. When God remembers, it's about his relational movement toward the object of his remembering. So when God remembers, it's a relational move toward his people. Not before they find their way out of exile or find their way out of homesickness. This move toward his people happens while there in it. God remembers. God moves toward us. Now that is a beautiful truth in this Psalm, but it's one that's often obscured by the last two verses. These last two verses, especially verse 9 here at the end, contains some of the most challenging words within the Bible for our modern ears. This isn't a verse that you'll read on a coffee mug anytime soon. It's not one that

you're going to memorize at Vacation Bible School, most likely. It would be a very important. It would convenient to end our time in Psalm 137 right here at verse 8. Just ignore this ending. But let's be honest, playing dodgeball against hard Bible verses, it wouldn't be faithful. And it turns out to not be any fun either. So instead of dodging verse 9, let's dive into it. Here we go, starting with verse 8 for some contexts. O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you've done to us. Blessed shall he be, who takes your little ones

and dashes them against the rock. Now, we're likely to be offended by these verses, especially verse 9, and many biblical scholars are, but we should be slow to respond to this with a sense of disgust, because we need to slow down and thoughtfully ask who exactly are these little ones of Babylon,

being dashed against the rock? What does that really mean? But before we can answer that question, we have to first consider how the Bible uses Babylon as a powerful metaphor of a tragic reality. If we zoom out on the story of the Bible overall, Babylon features early on in the story of the Bible in Genesis 11 at the Tower of Babel, where humanity rebels against God. There's a strong linguistic connection between Babel and Babylon there. So Babylon is a real historical place in the Bible.

Yet, as the story of the Bible develops, it's also an image, a horrific picture of how our world isn't the way it's supposed to be. Babylon becomes a symbol of the anti-Juselum, anti-creation. Babylon is the opposite of home. So as a metaphor, Babylon is far bigger and far worse than the literal empire that oppressed God's people. It represents the powers of sin and death and evil opposed to the reign and presence of God. So now that we know a little bit more about what Babylon signifies, we can better interpret what the little ones are here in verse 9. These little ones portray the powers and individuals and systems that perpetuate the

dehumanizing domination of sin and death and evil. So what's going on here, this is not a call for God's people to carry out personal vengeance or violence against human beings that would violate biblical ethics. It is a call for God to respond to evil with his justice. This is a call for God to bring us back home. Now, let's land the plane of that concept here just a little bit. So if you find yourself angered by the injustice of tragedies like violence, sex trafficking, racism, then this verse speaks to that anger.

God's angry with those things. If you find yourself longing for a different kind of world where there's no oppression, no slander, no starvation, no genocide, then this verse is speaking into your longing for home. See, all of us are longing for home, but our world and our very lives couldn't be more homesick. And that's really the kicker here. The problem of Babylon isn't just out there in the world in some vague, generic sense.

It's a problem within our own hearts, too. Many of the earliest theologians in church history described the little ones of Babylon at a personal level. These little ones are the seemingly small, evil desires that arise in our lives and lead to the dehumanization of other people and ourselves. So the problem of Babylon, the problem of exile, is not just out there in the world, but it's in our own lives. And that source of evil and injustice doesn't belong in God's world. For this to truly be home, those things have to be removed. That's why at the end of the biblical story in Revelation 18, verse 21 through 24, we read about the ultimate destruction of Babylon. One day this evil will be fully eliminated in light of God's victory.

And that victory, it comes about in a way that seems absolutely counterintuitive to us. To rid the world of Babylon, to free us from exile. God himself was exiled on our behalf. When Jesus died on a Roman cross, he satisfied the ultimate justice of God against Babylon. And at the same time, he showed the... ultimate love of God for his homesick people, for his homesick creation. That is how our hearts are healed from exile, because Jesus entered into it for us, and rose again to a new life that brings us home with God.

Because of Jesus, the story of reality, the story of the gospel, it's like a homecoming story, but it is not a story of us somehow earning or finding our way home. It's really a story of home coming to us. In our longing, in our pain, in our homesickness, the living God of steadfast love pursues us through the cross and through the empty tomb. In this season of Advent, we remember our deepest longing for home. We name the nostalgia. We confront the brutal facts of exile.

But in this time, we also remember that God remembers. God remembers his promises. He remembers his people. He moves toward us. We remember that the story of the gospel is the story of a homecoming. But it's not a story of us making our way home. It's a story of home coming to us and Jesus. God, we bring you our pain, our longings, and our homesickness.

We thank you for the cross of Jesus, where your justice and your love, love, meet to heal our world and our hearts. We praise you that we are living in the story of a homecoming, that home is coming to us. God, would you help us believe it? Help us live like it's true. In Jesus' name. Amen.