- Read Psalm 126 from the ESV.
- Read my Psalm 126 poem from A New Song.
Have you ever had one of those “pinch me, I think I’m dreaming” moments? Rarely do those moments come when everything is going poorly for us. They come as a result of unexpected joy. This weekend, after I finished mowing the lawn, I sat down on a picnic table bench at the edge of the woods and listened to the sounds of nature. The sun was out illuminating the newly reborn leaves, the grass was trimmed neatly, sounds of birds filled the fresh air, and I felt at peace. It was almost as though that very moment was what I was created for — a moment to enjoy the beauty of nature.
The last time before this past weekend when I remember the same sense of feeling at peace was a sunny day in July about a year earlier when the sky was clear, the clouds crisp, and the temperature just right. As a moment it was nearly perfect, but just a few minutes later the darkest time of my life was about to begin. Sure, there was beauty in the world during the following ten months, but I was unable to see it as I was in a dark pit battling my own personal demons.
From reading the Old Testament, I would imagine the Israelites had a very similar experience. One day the sun was shining brightly as they were at work in their own fields and the next they were being carted off to a foreign land for years of servitude. The nation of Israel spent seventy years enslaved before I would image the sky once again brought them peace.
I also imagine Adam and Eve’s experience was quite similar. God placed them in the garden to tend it and keep it, giving them work and purpose. And, as difficult as it might be for some of us to believe, tending the ground was their purpose in life, it was fulfilling in ways we, living in a fallen world, can’t begin to comprehend. But for them, at the end of the day when they sat down to converse with the Lord and watch the sun set on the work they had done, it must have been the height of satisfaction and joy. But then came that nasty bit with a serpent and eating the forbidden fruit which led to the fall of man and millennia of humanity battling themselves and their own sinful nature.
One of my favorite moments in scripture is found in John 11 when Jesus says to Martha on the event of Lazarus’s death “Your brother will rise again.” Martha, ever being the good theologian that she was, responded by saying “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection the last day.” But Jesus meant something else entirely. He replied and said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” And then moments later Jesus bodily raised Martha’s brother Lazarus from the grave giving to him new life on this earth. Jesus did this to prove the truthfulness of his promise that he would resurrect us on the last day, but he also raised Lazarus to say that there is nothing in this life that can keep us dead. Life in Jesus is both eternal AND abundant.
We know from Revelation 21 that God will make all things new. No longer will we roam the earth alone in sin but God will make his abode with humanity and the former corruptible things will become incorruptible. There will be no more tears, no more death, no more mourning or pain, and no more sin. I don’t have the slightest capacity to comprehend what that will be like, nor do I imagine you do either. But I do know that we will most likely look at each other grinning and say something like, “pinch me, am I dreaming?” Then we will laugh and enter into the joy of the Lord.
This is exactly what we see when we read Psalm 126, a psalm written from the perspective of the Israelites after they have returned to their land following years of persecution. They could hardly believe their circumstances and were “like those who dreamed.” The psalmist could just as easily have said, “we said to each other, ‘pinch me’ because I can’t believe our good fortune now!” They had returned to the Promised Land and were now able to sow and reap goodness in it. Just as it was with Adam and Eve tending the garden so many years earlier, the Israelites were in the Promised Land living the life God had planned for them.
If you are like me having spent a good deal of time in your own dark place, or maybe you are still there, I hope you see that Jesus’s words to Martha are true for all of us, even today. God promises new life, not only at the end of time but now, in this life, for those who repent and turn back to God from the sin which led into their own personal land of exile. I know it’s difficult to imagine that there is hope when the dark days are still upon us, but it is while we are in those days that our faith must grow. We must trust that we, like Lazarus, will hear our Lord say the words “Come out” to us as we lie in the shroud of our own death. But that is just the beginning of new life here on earth. We must also trust that there will be fellow-believers standing at the edge of our tomb who have seen our resurrection and who are awaiting Jesus’s next command to them to “Unbind him, and let him go.” I imagine after Christ has raised us and freed us from the legacy of death’s rags, then we will, “pinch me. Am I dreaming?” But then, it won’t be a dream, it will be reality.
