Psalms 137:4

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

The Lord’s song in a strange land

The temple music had a reputation even among the heathen peoples of Central Asia; and it seemed natural that the sacred words and music, which had for ages set forth the worship of the one true God, should furnish a more refined amusement for the cultivated pagans who had trodden down the sanctuary and had enslaved God’s people. But the heart of captive Israel beat true to what was due to the honour of God, and to the memories of their ancient worship. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” Nay, this request of the heathen oppressor that the captives should sing the Lord’s song for his aesthetic gratification nerves the psalmist to a sterner mood. He cannot forget how, in those dark hours, a race of kinsmen by blood had cheered on the heathen foe in his work of destruction. Already he sees the approaching capture of the city by Darius Hystaspis. Her young children are dashed against the stones by the Persian invader. But, meanwhile, if the psalmist is asked to prostitute his gift by singing the old temple songs merely to amuse the heathen, there are many reasons which make compliance impossible. “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

I. The Lord’s song.

1. It meant for Israel all that was precious to the soul; but for the Babylonians it meant merely entertainment, merely a newly incited curiosity, merely a new sensation in the world of art. There was nothing common to Israel and Babylon in their way of looking at it.

2. Any ancient hymn of king or prophet which had passed into the service of the sanctuary bore that name. There is one prayer with which no other prayer may compare, and which alone in Christendom bears the name of the Lord’s Prayer. But there is, at least on earth, no one psalm or hymn which bears the name of “the Lord’s song.” Whatever may be the case with the new song of the everlasting future, the religious hymnology of earth is, and always has been, almost infinitely varied in its expression; and yet at bottom it is one--one in its motive, one in its spirit and its effort, one in its surrounding moral atmosphere.

3. What is it but the ascent of the soul towards the infinite and the eternal, the upward bounding of the understanding, the expansion of the affections, the effort of faith, and hope, and love, to utter themselves somehow in praise? Although the words, the languages, the rhythms, the melodies, should be most dissimilar, this--this, the true song of the Lord; springing out of the very heart of the people of revelation, and embodying its creed in poems of the most different ages and characters--this it was which could not be uttered for the mere gratification of pagan Babylon--could not, at least, without profanity.

4. If it had only been the old poetry of the Hebrews--only their ancient music--they might, perhaps, have consented to render it before a Babylonian audience. But, for the Jews, language was a much more sacred tiring, speaking generally, than, I fear, it is to us. The Jews did not conceive of language as a something which might be stripped off thought, like bark from the surface of a tree. For them, thought and language always went together.

5. It sounded through the corridors of the soul before it took shape in language, and resounded beneath the vaults of the temple; and this--this sense of its reality, made it impossible for a good Jew to prostitute it for the benefit of a pagan audience who might think of it as a new sensation in art.

6. Poetry, music, painting, architecture, all have their place in the sanctuary of God. And what has once been given to Him is His--His irrevocably--His for ever. Poetry or music which has been dedicated to Him, and which has lifted souls up to Him for many a generation, cannot be divested of its purpose, and made the amusement of the unbelieving, without wounding Him to whom it was given by the faith and love of the gifted dead.

II. In a strange land.

1. This was apparent, first of all, in the difference of the language. Although the Baby-Ionian tongue had affinities with the Hebrew, it was practically for the Jews a foreign language. We know how it affects us, when we first go abroad, to hear another than our mother tongue being talked all around us. It produces, at least at first, a sense of isolation; and this must have been deepened in the ease of the Jews by the fact that they certainly did not go to Babylon for their own satisfaction. In time, no doubt, the captive Jews learned much of the language of their conquerors, and, in fact, brought it back with them to Palestine; but at first it was a barrier between them; and this would, of itself, have made them unwilling to sing the Lord’s song in their own ancient Hebrew to strangers who could not follow it. The language of religion is, and must be, unintelligible to those who do not share the faith and the feelings which prompt it. “The natural man perceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.” And the sense that this is the case often makes a Christian, when in general society, retire into himself, lest he should break his Master’s precept against giving that which is holy unto the dogs, and casting the pearls of heaven before swine. If the soul is to sing the Lord’s song with the lips as well as with the heart, it must be among those who can speak its own language.

2. Babylon was the land of material wealth; it was the great world-city of the ago. It had its attractions, no doubt, but it was not the place in which to sing “the Lord’s song.” That song proclaimed in its very earliest notes--witness the one psalm of Moses, “Domine, refugium”--it proclaimed the insignificance of this human life at the best--the poverty, the perishableness of all that belongs to time. The soul of man is, after all, finite; and when the soul is filled with this world there is no room for the next. We could not ourselves well sing the “Gloria in excelsis” in the Stock Exchange or in a West End club; and the Jews felt that Babylon was not the place for singing the song of the Lord which had been the joy and the glory of their ancient sanctuary.

3. Babylon was a land in which life was overshadowed by a vast idolatry. Now, how could the old psalms of Israel, instinct with the memories of David’s life and of Solomon’s glory, and of the solemnities of the now destroyed temple, be sung in such an atmosphere as this? If sacred associations were to have any value--if sacred words were to mean anything, could they be prostituted to the amusement of a race which was devoted to a hideous and cruel superstition? No. Captive Israel might sing the songs of the captivity, such as was this very psalm itself. It might sing these in secret assemblies of the faithful; but to render the old temple hymns before a heathen crowd of idolaters--this, this was impossible. Is not the Christian soul often carried captive, nowadays, into the Babylon of unbelief or of half belief? Is not the place in our thoughts which is due to God often tenanted by abstractions, which are just as senseless as the idols of Babylon--creations, it is true, of our thoughts, instead of being creations of our fingers? “Nature,” “force,” “law,” and what not--generalizations of our own minds as we look out upon the universe around us--these are, too often, placed upon the throne of the one infinite, eternal, self-existing Being.

4. There hung over all the magnificence of Babylon a dense atmosphere of sin, which made it impossible for the servant of God to sing his song--to do more than complain: “How long, O Lord? How long?” And the regenerate soul may be carried captive, some of us must know, too well, into this Babylon of deadly sin. It may be carried captive; it may at once make its escape and return. Happy are they with whom it fares thus. But, supposing that the soul is detained in Babylon--supposing that habits of evil are formed, and that the enfeebled will is held down by bolts and bars which it cannot break--then how is it “to sing the Lord’s song”? How is it to mount upon the wings of desire and hope to the throne of the All-Holy, whose laws it the while sets steadily at defiance? How can we sing the praises of our Maker, if we have not reason to be thankful to Him for the gift of an undying existence?--or the praises of our Redeemer, if our hearts do not tell us that we have been washed with His blood, and have not defiled our garments?--or of our Sanctifier, if we know that we have grieved Him, and that He has taken Himself from us? Better far--I had almost allowed myself to say--better far sing the songs of Babylon itself, than burn out the last surviving tenderness of the conscience by a service which cannot be but as odious to God as it is degrading to ourselves.

5. We may well, indeed, feel, all of us, that this life is an exile from our true home, and that, while we live it, we cannot, at our best, sing aright the song of the redeemed. The new song of the four awful creatures, and of the four and twenty elders before the throne of the Lamb--the new song which go man could learn bug the hundred and forty and four thousand which were redeemed from the earth--the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, which is sung for ever and ever by them that have gotten the victory over the beast, and that stand on the sea of glass having the harps of God--what is all this but a description of the psalmody of the blessed, with the volume and with the perfections of which nothing that is heard on earth can compare? (Canon Liddon.)

The difficulty of singing the Lord’s song in a strange land

1. I cannot doubt that we have felt it at times despondingly. I cannot sing the Lord’s song. Difficult as I find it to pray--difficult to confess sin, difficult to ask for grace, it is still more difficult, I find, to praise; to perform that highest, that most unselfish of all offices of devotion, which is the telling forth, in the hearing of others, in the presence (we believe) of the communion of saints, dead as well as living, what God is, in act and in counsel, in power, wisdom, and love, in creation, redemption, and grace, in His Son our Lord Jesus Christ, and in His Spirit the Lord and Giver of life.

(1) The very life which we live here in the body is a life of sight and sense. If we wish to realize heaven, to meditate upon eternity, to hold converse with Jesus Christ, to ask something of God, it has all to be done by strenuous resolution; by drawing down, as it were, the blinds of the mind against the sights and sounds of our street, and opening the windows of the soul to let in the light of another world. All this is difficult. And without this we cannot worship.

(2) The feelings of the present life are often adverse to praise. The exiles in Babylon could not sing because they were in heaviness. God’s hand was heavy upon them. Now the feelings of many of us are in like manner adverse to the Lord’s song. Some of us are in great sorrow. We have lost a friend--we are in anxiety about one who is all to us--we know not which way to turn for to-morrow’s bread or for this day’s comfort. How can we sing the Lord’s song? And there is another kind of sorrow, still more fatal, if possible, to the lively exercise of adoration--unforgiven sin.

(3) There is a land yet more strange and foreign to the Lord’s song even than the land of unforgiven guilt--and that is the land of unforsaken sin.

2. But there is a land, could we but reach it, where praise is, as it were, indigenous. In heaven praise bursts forth spontaneously from all the blessed--it is their voice--they cannot speak but in praise. But how shall we sing it? May not heaven be a strange land to us, though it is the native land of the Lord’s song? The Lord’s song will sound for ever in heaven; but shall we be there to sing it? It takes a lifetime to make heaven our own land. O how many things go to this! Heaven means--we have no other definition of it--where God is. Then, if heaven is to be our land, it must be by our knowing God--God in Christ. We must know Him in His holiness as the God of purer eyes than to behold iniquity. We must know Him in His love. We must know Him in His power as the Resurrection and the Life, able to re-create in His own image those who have most utterly lost and sullied it. Then we shall be no strangers in the land that is very far off, because it is the land where we shall see the King in His beauty, and praise Him for ever with joyful lips. (Dean Vaughan.)

The Lord’s song in a strange land

Babylon stands for the kingdom of this world; Jerusalem for the kingdom of God, which is above. We are sitting by the waters of Babylon while on this earth, where nothing continueth in one stay, we watch all things eddying and drifting by us, slowly or quickly carried away down the stream of time. Of course we can but too easily learn to acquiesce in our exile, content with Babylon, and forgetting Jerusalem; and then this psalm has nothing to say to us but to condemn us for not being able to make its words our own. And often in some shape does the question flash into his mind, “How shall I sing the Lord’s song in this strange land?” Many, indeed, of the songs of Zion are sung by us with but little effort. Those that tell God of our past sins, and present weaknesses, and that cry sadly but hopefully for pardon and help through Christ, readily, I say, do they come forth from every heart that knows its own history. But the Lord’s song in its highest sense, the song which sings unto the Lord only of the Lord Himself, and forgetting man loses itself in giving glory and praise unto Christ, does a melody of this kind never seem as much out of place in our heaviness as it once seemed by the waters of Babylon? When a man is down of heart about himself, or those whom he cares for, when things have been going amiss with him in mind, body, or estate, through the week just past, and he is anxious indeed as to what another week will bring forth, then here on Sunday morning it may seem somewhat inopportune and out of place for him to have to say to others even as they say to him, “O come, let us sing unto the Lord,” etc. Not a few of us here now have, I doubt not, some secret care or sorrow pressing sore upon us, and yet we ought to have been singing, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” etc. And does it not, I say, cost us a struggle in this our heaviness to put our hearts into such words of joy? Does not this earth sometimes seem a strange land, indeed, in which to sing the Lord’s songs? And yet these songs of the Lord are really among the strongest helps and aids to our comfort. The more I am feeling some evil of this land of my captivity, the more thankfully let me, while I may, make my escape from it by fixing my heart upon my Saviour. (John Gray, M. A.)

Sin takes all the music out of our hearts

Music suggests perfect harmony of character. To have a musical instrument that will adequately express musical thought in sound and harmony requires very care-fully-selected woods as to acoustic properties for its construction. John Albert, who has been called “the Stradivarius of America,” died the other day at the age of ninety years. His great success in making violins, that won him fame through the world, was as much due to the care with which he selected the woods from which they were made as to his skill as a workman. So much depended on the proper woods that Albert sought them sometimes at the risk of his life. Once he lay for weeks between life and death, the victim of an accident while he was on the hunt for a certain wood in an almost impassable forest. Ole Bull, the great violinist, pronounced him one of the great violin makers of the world because he possessed the greatest knowledge of the acoustic properties of woods of any man living at that time. Surely if a violin maker must pay such great heed to the character of the wood out of which he constructs a violin, in order that he may make it a perfect interpreter of musical thought to human ears, we should not wonder at the care of God in seeking to so purify and cleanse our hearts that they shall be resonant, and responsive to the slightest touch of the Holy Spirit, and thus be able to interpret the melodies of heaven. (L. A. Banks, D. D.)