Called to be Missional: Psalm 137 and the Shalom of God

The one thing Babylon lacked is the one thing God’s people were called to bring to the city: the shalom of God.  The sad reality is that Israel loved Jerusalem more than they loved Yahweh and those who Yahweh created in His image.   Songs often serve as a window into the heart; Psalm 137 serves as a window into the hearts of an exiled Israel called to seek the shalom of Babylon,

The one thing Babylon lacked is the one thing God’s people were called to bring to the city: the shalom of God.  The sad reality is that Israel loved Jerusalem more than they loved Yahweh and those who Yahweh created in His image.   Songs often serve as a window into the heart; Psalm 137 serves as a window into the hearts of an exiled Israel called to seek the shalom of Babylon,

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion.  On the willows there we hung up our lyres.   For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, "Sing us one of the songs of Zion!"  

How shall we sing the LORD'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 LORD, 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 he be 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!

As exiled people known by the Babylonians as Yahweh worshipers, the Babylonians wanted to hear one of their “songs of Zion.”  In other words, they wanted to hear Israel’s stories concerning Yahweh, but Israel wanted nothing to do with whatever work God was doing within the Babylonians.  Why?  Because they were not in Jerusalem; the last thing they wanted to do was sing their songs about Yahweh to the Babylonians. 

The reason why Israel could not sing their songs to Babylon is because their highest joy was not Yahweh, but Jerusalem.  Verse 4 is very telling: “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in foreign land?”  According to Jeremiah 29:7 they were commanded to just that—sing the Lord’s songs in a land not their own.  In fact, in verse 6, the psalmist cries out, “If I do not remember Jerusalem and make that city the able of my eye, let me be incapable of singing Yahweh’s songs.”  Do you see what is going on here?  Jerusalem became an idol that Israel loved more than her God.

Finally, Israel’s idolatry leads to the ultimate expression of violence: the murder of infants.  The psalmist is so against Babylon that if he was to sing it would not be about Yahweh but about the person who grabbed the Babylonian infants by the ankles and swung that little child like a baseball bat against the rocks.   This is the ultimate expression of hatred for a people.  In essence, the response of God’s people towards Jeremiahs 29:7 was, “I hate the Babylonians because they took away my city; I will tell you what I long for… I long for their violent destruction!”

As the Church, we have been sent into a world hostile towards the Christian message.  Christ has called us out of the world to send us into the world on a mission… God’s mission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.  And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:18-19).   We are sent into the world as Christ’s ambassadors called to proclaim God’s terms of peace to a world hostile towards Him and ravaged by the curse of sin.  The mission of the Church is not new, but is something the Church has been called to do since Her birth. 

Throughout the New Testament, we are called strangers and exiles in this world because we are citizens of God’s household now.  As citizens of God’s kingdom we understand that, “we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).  We seek a city that is to come because God promises to make all things new, but as we wait for that city we are called to seek the shalom of whatever city we find ourselves in understanding that God’s shalom is only possible because of Jesus’ substitutionary death on the cross in our place and His resurrection from the grave. 

Never does or did Jesus desire His bride to seek to keep God’s shalom to Herself.  We have been called to take it in the form of the Gospel to every tribe, nation, and tongue.  If you remember, Jesus told His Church moments before He ascended into heaven, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).