DUNCAN/Apart from the Lord our lives are pointless, restless, and fruitless
If you have your Bible, I’d invite you to turn with me to Psalm 127. You will see that this is a psalm of Solomon’s. This psalm tells us that apart from trust in the Lord, our lives are pointless, restless, and fruitless. Specifically, this psalm presents three basic activities of life that are relevant to people in all times and in all cultures. Those three activities are: building a house, protecting a city, and rearing a family. And in those three spheres, Solomon charges us to trust God, to depend upon God, and to recognize that all our efforts will be in vain unless the Lord blesses.
Our Creating and Conserving, Our Building and Protecting are Pointless and Restless Without the Lord
The first thing is this — Look at verse 1. Our creating and conserving, our building and protecting, our work and our security, all these things are pointless, and we will find no rest in them without the Lord. It means you can throw yourself into it and in the end, you’ll look yourself in the mirror one morning and you’ll say, “What was the point of all that?” Solomon is telling you here that when we build and when we seek security, they are either the Lord’s doing, or they are ultimately pointless. And secondly, the psalmist tells us here that unless our trust is in the Lord we will never have rest. Look at verse 2. “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for He gives to His beloved sleep.” Isn’t that a beautiful picture there? A contrast — Somebody who gets up early and stays up late and yet their sleep is filled with fear and there is never any sense of rest, there is no abatement of anxiety; there is an ever-present worry. And in contrast, the one who trusts in the Lord receives from the Lord sleep, rest, and refreshment. Do you know the rest that is being held out to you by God in this psalm?
William Plumer, the great Old Testament commentator and the author of a marvelous commentary on the Psalms, asked this searching question: How many millions sleep and wake up like atheists? That is, do we go to bed and wake up in our worries as if God did not exist? Do we think that we can worry ourselves to security? Worry ourselves to fruitful labor as if God did not exist? Or do we work and then trust Him to establish the work of our hands? You remember Moses’ prayer? “Prosper thou the work of our hands.” It’s an indication that Moses is depending on God to supply the prospering of our labor. The first thing we learn in this psalm is that our creating and our conserving, our building and our protecting, our labor and our search for security are all pointless and restless without the Lord.
Our Families Are Gifts From God, But Our Parenting and Aspirations Must be Entrusted to God
But there’s a second lesson to be learned. Look at verses 3 to 5. “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.” God’s original universal healthcare and eldercare plan was children so that when you get old and decrepit there’s some young people around that like you and care about you to take care of you. And the psalmist is celebrating that. Now if that picture looks a little bit different from your own experience of family life let me remind you that the way that God gives this gift doesn’t always look like the cover of the Saturday Evening Post with a Normal Rockwell family around the dinner table. More often than not, the way that God gives this gift looks like something out of a William Faulkner family reunion when there’re more skeletons in the closet than you can get back in!
I love what Derek Kidner says. “It is not untypical of God’s gifts that first they are liabilities or at least responsibilities before they become obvious assets. The greater their promise, the more likely that these sons will be a handful before they’re a quiver full.” Does that encourage you, mothers? Testing and trial will come before blessing and reward. That’s how God works. So if you’re not living around that Normal Rockwell table but you trust in the Lord and you lean not on your own understanding, He is working His purpose out and in the end He will vindicate Himself to you and you will, like Job, say, “I had heard of You but now I see You and You are good.”
A Warning and Encouragement to Leave With
With all this said, this psalm contains a warning. Solomon wrote it, and he tells us that we shouldn’t build without trusting the Lord and we shouldn’t protect without trusting the Lord and we shouldn’t rear families without trusting the Lord. Well, like much of Solomon’s wisdom, the lessons of this psalm that he wrote himself, relevant as they were to his own situation, were lost on him. In 1 Kings 9 we are told that his building became reckless. In 1 Kings 11 we are told that his kingdom became a ruin. Solomon! The wisest man that ever lived made a wreck of his life and didn’t listen to the counsel that he himself wrote. Is that not a warning for us? You’re only as wise as your next decision.
But there is good news that comes from this. How do we trust the Lord in our building and in our vocation? How do we trust the Lord for our security? How do we trust the Lord in the rearing of our families? By union with Christ. When the Holy Spirit enables us to repent and believe, He does that by uniting us to Christ. So, in the New Testament, over and over, Paul will identify himself and other Christians by saying that we are “in Christ.” When we’re in fellowship with Christ, we are in communion with Christ. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your ways straight.” You’ll only be able to do that if you depend upon Christ. We’re wired by the Fall to want to do it ourselves and we can’t even depend on Him apart from His empowering us to do so. We need God’s help to depend upon His help. May God grant that heart of dependence and trust to all of you and to all of you, rest.
The Rev. Dr. J. Ligon Duncan III is the Chancellor/CEO of Reformed Theological Seminary and the John E. Richards Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology. He is also currently serving as President of RTS Jackson.