Psalm 124
“If the Lord had not been on our side…” begins the psalm for today. Well, that’s a scary proposition! Yet every heathen religion is based on the idea that there is a god who is not for us, a god who is angry with us, a god who must be appeased in order to accept us. Unfortunately, these heathen ideas have even permeated Christianity, where Jesus (the Son of God) is often depicted as the One who decided to stand between us and God (the Father), who was angry and unwilling to forgive us.
That’s an unfortunate misunderstanding of what it means for Christ to be a mediator. But the Old Testament makes no such divisions between the Father, Son, and Spirit. In this psalm, for instance, it simply says, “If the Lord had not been on our side…” (vs 1)
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So, this psalm echoes what Paul writes in Romans 8—that God Himself is for us! And if He is for us, nothing can be against us—not the people who attack us, not the flood that wants to engulf us, not the raging waters that would sweep us away. In God, we are ultimately safe and secure, having escaped from the snare like a bird escapes from a trap.
You see, one of the other erroneous propositions that traditional Christianity has sometimes put forward is that living our lives with God means that we will avoid evil, pain, and suffering. That’s not true. We will ultimately avoid being destroyed by sin if we remain connected to God, but that doesn’t mean that we will be immune to its painful effects on this Earth. In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus Himself prayed, “Deliver us from evil.” (Matt 6:13)
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That very verse implies that, even as followers of Christ, we will encounter evil in this life, but since God is for us, the floods will not engulf us and the raging waters will not sweep us away. In this world, there is no avoiding evil, but God is the difference between failure and success, the difference between life and death. If God were not for us, we’d have no chance. But praise the Lord, He is always for us, and if we stick with Him, He will bring us through the storm safe and sound.