My Helps Come from the Lord

I invite you to turn with me in your Bibles tonight to Psalm 121. Psalm 121. As – if you’re a member of the church, you know; if you’re a visitor, we’ll let you know that we are in the evenings going through what we call pastoral favorites. So, our pastors are picking passages of scripture that are favorites of theirs, and Psalm 121 is one of my favorites. I’ve preached on this passage many times at funerals over the course of my ministry. I’ve read this passage numerous times when I’ve been visiting somebody on a pastoral visit. This is a psalm that occasionally our family, when our kids were growing up and we were going on a family vacation, we’d be backing the car out of the garage and kind of like, “Hey, we should read Psalm 121 – we’re going on a trip,” and so we’d read Psalm 121 together. This is also a psalm, at least the very first part of the psalm, was very common for churches to read together or to recite together at the beginning of a worship service. I lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from? And the congregation would say, “My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” So used in lots of different ways. And I hope that this psalm would be a great comfort to you tonight as we read it and study it. This is Psalm 121. Hear God’s word:

“I lift up my eyes to the hills.

Where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.

He will not let your foot be moved.

Indeed, he who keeps you will not slumber.

Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper.

The Lord is your shade on your right hand.

The sun will not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.

The Lord will keep you from all evil.

He will keep your life.

The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in

from this time forth and forevermore.”

Let’s pray and ask for God’s help as we study.

Father, this would be our simple prayer tonight that, Lord, as you are our helper, you would help us tonight to listen. You would help us tonight to hear what you’re saying to us. You would help us tonight as you yourself are revealed to us in this psalm. And you would help us tonight to take this psalm and to live by it and to be strengthened by it in the days to come. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Well, dear people of God, I imagine that nearly all of us here are familiar with John Bunyan’s classic work Pilgrim’s Progress. According to many sources, it is the second most published and circulated book of all time, second only to the Bible. And for a couple of centuries after it was written, it was a staple in many Protestant homes. Families would gather together, maybe around a meal, and they would eat their meal, and they would read the Bible together, and then they would read a portion from Pilgrim’s Progress. It was published in 1678. Of course, you know, it’s the fictional story of a man named Christian who was traveling throughout life from the city of destruction to the celestial city, to heaven. In fact, the original title of the book is The Pilgrim’s Progress From This World To That Which Is To Come. And the story captures the different experiences that Christian has on his journey. He travels, for example, through the Slough of Despond; he encounters Vanity Fair, where he is tempted by the world’s pleasures. He runs into Mr. Legality, who tells him all that he has to do in order to earn his way to heaven. And then the crucial experience that Christian has is when he comes to the cross, and he is able to lay down the burden that he has been carrying on his back throughout his life, and he finds forgiveness. Pilgrim’s Progress, of course, is meant to give us a picture of what the Christian life is like, of what our life is like, of the various chapters and scenes and experiences that we have as we, too, are heading on to glory.

Well, Psalm 121 does that very same thing. Some people have called this the traveler’s psalm. So, you know, when we were heading out on a trip, we’d read Psalm 121. Some people have called it a pilgrim psalm. And it pictures what an ancient traveler might go through on the way to the temple in Jerusalem, and in doing so, shows us what our journey to the new Jerusalem may be like. But it does even more than that. It also puts us face to face with the one who is our helper and keeper on that journey, the Lord himself. I like to think about Psalm 121 as a here to there psalm. Here we are, now tonight, but we’re going there, right? We’re going to glory. We’re heading to our heavenly home. And from here tonight to there – that’s what this psalm is about. Where does our help come from on this journey? How are we going to make it to glory? Who is the one who is going – who is sure to get us there? And the answer that the psalm gives us is simply this: it is the Lord. My help for this journey, from here to there, it comes from the Lord.

Three things I want you to notice with me tonight. The first is a confession. That’s where the psalm begins. It begins with a confession. We could, I think, call it a critical confession. You notice in the title of this psalm that this is a song of ascent. We’ve studied those in the last couple of years here at Christ Covenant Church, but I remind you that it is part of a package of psalms, a psalter within the Psalter. So, Psalms 120-134. And these were songs that were sung by the Israelites as they journeyed from their homes, ascending up the hills to Jerusalem to worship at the temple at the three appointed feasts, when all Israelites – at least the male Israelites – were to come to Jerusalem for the Passover, the Feast of Weeks, and the Feast of Booths. Well, Psalm 120 starts the Psalms of Ascent. It’s about leaving home. The psalmist is far from God, and he sets out to meet God in that psalm. And then when we turn over the page to Psalm 121, we have the actual journey that the pilgrims are on. The trip to the temple – it could be perilous. The path to Jerusalem wound through hills and mountains. The trip was often lonely. Roads to the hills were not busy highways, but narrow paths – perfect hideouts for thieves and robbers. The roads were dusty and dirty, uneven, making it easy for someone’s foot to slip. To fall off the path meant falling into a ravine to your death, perhaps. In a desert region like Palestine, the sun poured out heat during the day, and at night the journey could be cold. And in the midst of all of that, the psalmist begins with this confession. In the midst of all of this potential peril and trouble, the psalmist says, “Where does my help come from?” Who’s the one who’s helping me on this journey? Who’s the one who is guiding me? Who’s the one who’s walking beside me? Who’s the one who is assisting and lifting me up on this journey?

And he gives that clear confession. He says, “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” He is my helper. He is the one who is with me and near me. Friends, this is a centered confession. In other words, the psalm writer is taking the picture of life and he’s bringing the focus in. He’s calling our attention to God, centering our minds upon him. Because his answer for help – I want you to see here – is not a place, but it is a person. He begins and he says, “I lift up my eyes to the hills.” But he is quick to say to us tonight that it is not the hills that are my help. In fact, the hills could be part of the problem. The hills were ripe for getting robbed or beaten up. But the psalmist says, I’m not just looking to the hills, but I am looking to the one whose temple is on the hills. It is to the Lord. The psalmist in Psalm 48, verse 1, talks about the hills as well. He says, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God. His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth.” Why is God’s holy mountain the joy of all the earth? Because this is where the temple of God was. This is where God was residing. This is where God lived among his people. Calvin – John Calvin – in his commentary talks about the hills, and he says, “The thoughts of the godly are never so stayed upon the word of God as not to be carried away at the first impulse to some allurements, and especially when dangers disquiet us.” What Calvin is simply saying there is no matter how devoted we are to God, that all of us are tempted to look at the hills around us for comfort instead of to the Lord. We’re looking over to this hill, this hill of our wealth, the hill of our health, the hill of our skills, the hills of our job, our athletic abilities, our resume. Calvin says we’re looking around at all kinds of things other than God when, especially when, dangers disquiet us, when there’s trouble around us. And the psalmist, he centers us, doesn’t he? He brings it into focus – brings God into focus – when he says, “My help comes from the Lord.”

Five times in this psalm the Lord’s name is used. The Lord, the Lord, the Lord. It’s his covenant name. He is the faithful one. He is the one who keeps his promises to his people. The Lord – he is the God of steadfast love and mercy. He is the God who has said to us in his covenant, as he makes covenant with us, I will be your God, and you are my people. That’s where the psalmist turned to. And he also reminds us here that he is the one who has made the heavens and the earth. My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He is the one who simply by his word called the worlds into being, who out of nothing created all things. And you see what the psalmist is doing for us, how he is focusing our attention upon God – but God, with these particular names and attributes and characteristics, that on the one hand he is focusing our attention upon God as the one who is our loving God, the God who has entered relationship with us, the God who is always faithful to us, and at the very same time the God who is all powerful. A God who desires to do what is good for his people and a God who is able to bring it about. And the Psalmist says, to this God I lift up my eyes. To lift up our eyes is just a statement of faith, a statement of trust. That’s what we’re doing. When we lift up our eyes, we’re saying, “God, upon you, my hope is found.”

It is so easy to look in other directions, isn’t it, in the Christian life to look backwards in fear. You know, what is that thing that’s chasing you down, that you’re afraid of? To look forward in proud strength. I can do it. I’m moving ahead. Maybe to look down in despair, just looking at our circumstances and looking deep within and all the fear that is found there. But the look of a child of God is up. I lift up my eyes to you, Lord, to you. Spurgeon said, “The purposes of God, the divine attributes, the immutable promises, the covenant, the providence, predestination, and proved faithfulness of God – these are the hills to which we must lift our eyes. All these things that are found in God, it’s where we lift our eyes. A confession.

Secondly, a comfort. For the psalmist explains why the Lord, alone, is our helper. And notice that the psalmist, in verse 3, he shifts from himself to us, from talking about his help to our help. He will not let your foot be moved, he who keeps you, and so on. As the psalm moves along, the psalmist is preaching to us. The psalmist is applying the truth of God’s help to us as the psalm moves forward. There are three things, particularly, that I see in the psalm that he highlights. This comfort. First of all, he says he will not let our foot be moved. He will not let us slip. There are times in life, isn’t it true, where we might feel like we’re slipping and sliding. I don’t know if you caught that in Psalm 73 – the psalmist, as he begins the psalm in Psalm 73, and he’s looking around at the wicked and all of their prosperity. He says, “My foot had almost slipped” – trying to make sense of life, and it feels like I’m ice skating, right? More than I’m walking. Our footing sometimes feels uneasy. We’re going through life tripping and stumbling. You might think about some season in your life where it feels like you can hardly put one foot in front of the other. John Calvin said that God lets the saints stagger sometimes, but he will not let them fall. Sometimes we’re staggering. But God will not let us fall. In ancient times, to fall off the path meant death. God will not let us slip off the path of his sovereign plan. The path that leads home to our glorification. You may remember how Solomon puts it in writing the Proverbs. Proverbs 3:5-6, a well-known passage: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your path straight.”

Trust in God; acknowledge him; don’t lean on your own understanding. He will keep you on a straight path – not always an easy path, but a straight path. He will not let your foot be moved. And why can he do this? Because, as the psalm writer says here, he is the God that never slumbers and never sleeps. Never have to wake him up. You remember Elijah on Mount Carmel as he’s having the challenge, the duel, with the prophets of Baal, and they’re calling on their God and trying to get his attention. And Elijah says, you know, maybe you have to wake him up, right? Maybe your God is sleeping. Make a bunch of noise so that he’ll notice you. And the Psalm writer says that is never the case with God. In fact, in the Psalm of Ascent, you go on in the Psalms, in Psalm 127 it says, “He gives to his beloved sleep.” How can we go to sleep tonight? We can go to sleep because we know God won’t be sleeping. God won’t be slumbering. God won’t be off the job or missing out on what’s happening in our life. You can rest well tonight and live with comfort to know that God never slumbers or sleeps. I had at one time – Sheri and I were at our local mall back in Michigan, and our daughter Kalley was, I don’t know, three or four years old, something like that. We were at the play area at the mall, and she was playing on the toys, and I wasn’t on my phone – I don’t think I had a smartphone back then – but I was, you know, I was just watching kids playing, and here comes a woman with Kalley. She’s walking alongside of her, and she says she was way down the mall. And praise God, she took her back, and she was safe. You know that’ll never happen with God with you, falling asleep on the job like I was. He never slumbers. He never sleeps. He’ll never let your foot be moved.

Second comfort is he keeps us. And here the psalm becomes deeply personal. God is your keeper. God is your shade. He’s yours. He’s mine. Shade on our right hand. For ancient travelers, the sun was a threat. Go to Palestine sometime. Go to Israel, and the sun’s beating down. Scorching heat of the sun. The Lord is your shade. He’s a shade from the moon. Some ancients thought that the moon could make people delirious. Maybe it’s simply a reference here to the cold of night. God protects you in those circumstances as well. But just take that – sun and moon. Typical providences of God. Just things that happen to us every day that seem to threaten our well-being. Maybe it’s sickness, a relationship difficulty, discouragement, financial stress, dashed dreams. The psalmist reminds us that the Lord is our shade. It’s like what you find when you go to the beach in the summer. Some people put up those canopies, those big shades – block the sun and protect you. The psalmist in Psalm 91 puts the image a little different: he covers us with his feathers. Remember, under his wings we find refuge, shading us, protecting us, and he does all of this at our right hand, the psalm writer says, which is simply the truth that he is near. If only we could just remember that one truth when we’re going through troubling times. He is not far away. He’s close. He’s near. He is at our right hand. He’s there for us, like a parent is there for their child in the middle of the night when they call out, needing help, and the parent just speaks. Don’t even have to necessarily go into the room, just says something, and what does that voice say? Ah, mom and dad. Mommy and daddy, they’re here. They’re near. They’re never far away. And that’s what the psalmist is reminding us about God. He is close to us. He is our keeper. He is the one that will hold us fast.

And then this third comfort: he will keep us from all evil. It’s the most comprehensive statement of comfort. He will keep our life, it says here – everything about us, our very being, Keeping us from all evil doesn’t mean that bad things don’t happen to Christians. We, of course, know that’s not the case. But the psalmist wants us to know that they cannot destroy us. They cannot overwhelm God’s plan for our life, to shape us into the image of his son. There are many things that can hurt us, but they ultimately cannot harm us when God is our helper and keeper. Some translations take that word “keeper” and they translate it into “watch.” The Lord is your watcher, or the Lord watches over you. And those two words really are just very close together: watch and keep. The whole idea that the Lord watches over us in such a way as to keep us. The very things that we do with things that are precious to us. Maybe an heirloom. Maybe you got an autographed jersey from somebody, you got a wedding gift that your spouse gave to you – but something in your life that you say, “I’m watching over that so as to keep it, never letting it go, never letting anything cause it to slip out of my hands.” That’s what the psalm writer is saying to us about the Lord’s care for us. And notice how it ends. How will he keep us? Well, he keeps us in all of our ways, in our going out and our coming in. When we leave home in the morning till we come home at night, at every point in between. At the playground or at the office, on the field or in the factory, at home or at the hospital, in all of our ways, for all of our days, from this time forth and forevermore.

There’s a confession here. There’s a comfort. And friends, what all this ought to lead to is our confidence – our confidence in the Lord. It’s neat, I think, how this psalm has five pairings in it. For example, in verse 2, it talks about heaven and earth. Verse 6, it talks about day and night, the sun and the moon. Verse 8, our going out and our coming in, now and forevermore. And when you find pairings like this in the Bible, what the Bible is trying to say to you is it’s not just sun and moon, it’s everything in between. It’s not just now and forevermore, it’s everything in between. Simply saying that the helping and keeping care of God is complete. It is total. It’s comprehensive. There’s no moment when we are not kept by the Lord.

You know, Presbyterians, they grow up learning what the chief end of man is, right? To glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Dutch Reformed folks like me, we grew up learning what is your only comfort in life and death? That I am not my own, but I belong body and soul, everything in between, in life and death and everything in between, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. There’s confidence for us, you see, in life. Life is perilous. We have little Annie Smith from our church, and her family, going off to Memphis on Tuesday for bone marrow transplant. Life is hard. We think about what happened in this church, this Mormon church, this morning, in Michigan and other events like that. Life is hard. It is dangerous. Think about a church leader like Voddie Baucham this last week, 56 years old, dying unexpectedly of a medical emergency. And Kevin said to our pastors, “Man knows not his time.” Life is hard. The psalm writer, he’s going to go on in the Psalm of Ascents saying, “If the Lord had not been on our side, when people rose against us, they would have swallowed us up alive. When their anger was kindled against us, the flood would have swept us away. The torrent would have gone over us. Then over us would have gone the raging waters, enemies and floods,” Psalm 124 says. But that psalm, like this one, it ends where this one begins: “But our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” When you’re going through the perilous times, who is your helper, your faithful God, the one who has made all things, who is powerful?

Friends, what’s the journey for you like right now? For some of you, the journey may be long. What I mean by that, you’re young, and you say – the journey, from here to there, wow. It’s like this, probably. And it’s in those moments of life, in those younger years of life, we say, “I can do it. I’m strong. I’m powerful. What’s going to get in my way?” And this psalm would say, “Don’t be overwhelmed by that youthful folly. Who’s your helper, young person? Who’s your helper? Can you say tonight, “My helper is the Lord, who made heaven and earth”? You might be on the other end of life, and from here to there, it’s like this. Where’s your confidence? Is your confidence tonight in the Lord, who is the maker of heaven and earth? He will not let your foot slip. He will keep your life. Every bit he’s watching over. There’s confidence for us, you see, in life.

And there’s confidence, because of this psalm, in death. I think this psalm actually has a unique way of reminding us of this. And the last verse there – “the Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore” – and of course that word “forevermore” casts us into eternity. But friends, I also think the way the psalm writer puts it reminds us of what is true for Christians when they die. Going out and coming in. At birth, we come in. And we could say, well, at death, we go out. But this is just the opposite. It’s not coming in and going out. It’s going out and coming in. And of course, for the first readers of this psalm when they’re leaving their home to go to Jerusalem to the temple, they’re going out, and then they come back home, and they come in. But isn’t this what is also true for Christians when they die? We go out, right? We leave, we go out, but that’s not the end of the story. There is a going out, but for us as believers there’s also a coming in, because we’re going to enter the house of the Lord forever. What a beautiful description of what is true for us as Christians. And when that happens, the psalm says, he is going to keep us. His hand is going to be upon us when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. We don’t have to fear any evil, because you’re with us, Lord, and you’re going to hold me. Never slip out of your hands. You’re going to keep me. People of God, this psalm is true for us because of Christ. This psalm can be yours. Some – I think Charles Spurgeon said this – this psalm describes the keeper of Israel. How about the keeper of the church? I’m sure he believed that too. The keeper of the church. Because Jesus knew what it was to be helped and kept by the father. He was helped in life. In temptation, the word of God sustained him, and angels came to minister to him. In death, he could say, “Father, it is into your hands that I commit my spirit.” You’ll keep me. Three days later, the Father gloriously raised him. And it was on the evening before his crucifixion, as he was in the Upper Room and he prayed the high priestly prayer, he prayed this for his disciples. He says, “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me.” Because Christ was faithful, the Father keeps us, because we belong to Jesus. He is our helper, and he is our keeper.

Let me end, as I began, with Pilgrim’s Progress. So this is the last part of the story. As Christian reached heaven, he found that there was a river to cross over just before reaching heaven’s gate. Looked harrowing, looked deep. He asked, “Is it all of one depth?” “No” was the answer. You will find it deeper or shallower as you believe in the king of the palace. And as he was crossing over, he felt like he was sinking, that he might not reach the other side, that maybe his sins would not allow him to cross. He wondered, perhaps God might forsake me at the last minute. Until he heard these words, “Be of good cheer, for Jesus Christ makes you whole.” Until he caught a glimpse of Jesus who said to him, “When you pass through the rivers, I will be with you. And when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.” I will help you. I will keep you. And then Pilgrim’s Progress says this, “The enemy was still as a stone until Christian had gone over. Not even the evil one would have anything to say. The evil one won’t have anything to say when we reach the river at the end and the Lord takes us by the hand and he leads us through. Friends, when you lift up your eyes to the hills, what do you see? Tomorrow, this week, we don’t know what the Lord has in store for us. But when you lift up your eyes, not what do you see? Who do you see? Are you able to say, “My help comes from the Lord, who made the heavens and the earth – I’m safe, because he helps me and he keeps me”? Let’s pray together.

We do praise you, God, for who you are – the keeper of Israel, the keeper of the church, the keeper of your people. We praise you that you’re the one that keeps us in all of our ways for all of our days. May this be our confession. May this be our hope. May this be our strength. May this be our confidence that God, you are near, and you will always hold us and keep us to the very end and beyond, from here to there. We pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.