DUNCAN/Our help is in the name of the LORD

If you have your Bible, I’d invite you to turn with me to Psalm 124. David writes this psalm in a context where God has delivered him and his people in a mighty and evident way. David seems to be concerned that the victory that the Lord has given to His people might be mistaken for something that could be credited to their own strength, their own will, their own craftiness, their own endeavor. And in this song, he aims to point them to the fact that only the LORD has delivered them and for a very specific reason. He wants their awareness of the LORD’s intervention to lead them to gratitude. He wants the awareness of the greatness of the danger they were in to teach them not to trust in themselves but to trust in the LORD. 

Identifying the Deliverer  

The cantor, the presenter, the one who is leading this psalm, begins by saying, “If it had not been the LORD who was on our side,” and then he pauses and he says, “Sing it with me; sing it with me! If it had not been the LORD that was on our side — Sing it with me Israel! If it had not been the LORD who was on our side when those people rose up against us, we would have been undone.” He leads the people of God in pointing them to the fact that the LORD is their only hope. He is identifying their deliverer and he is doing this in order to amplify their gratitude.

In other words, David wants to amplify the gratitude of the people of God to God for the deliverance they’ve had from their enemies that wanted to wipe them off the face of the earth. And he wants to amplify that gratitude so that they associate God’s providence with His deliverance of them in the past. He’s not pointing to a future deliverance, he’s pointing to a present and past deliverance, a deliverance that they remember, and he is associating God’s activity on their behalf with that event of deliverance so that they can study it and see how God has intervened for them and fed their faith and their thankfulness. And so, he identifies the deliverer — “The LORD is our only hope.” David’s purpose is to make clear to the people of God that help could not come to them from any other quarter or in any other matter. The only way they could escape the danger they faced is through the intervention of the LORD. And he does that so that they may grow confident in the deliverance that only the LORD can bring.

Magnifying the Danger 

And then, if you look at verses 3 to 7, what he proceeds to do is to magnify the danger, precisely because the people of God would have been tempted to downplay the danger because of the greatness of the victory. You understand the logic. You thought it was going to be a tough game and you ended up winning by seventy. And you think, “Well we must have been a lot better than them!” And you don’t realize how near a thing that was, how differently it could have turned out — Just a few things here and a few things there and circumstances would have been very different. And David is saying, “Don’t think that this great victory indicates that we were not in great danger.” And he uses four images in verses 3 to 7 in order to magnify the danger. His point is to tell Israel that if it had not been for the LORD’s intervention Israel would have been undone, swallowed up, drowned, chewed up, and trapped. 

All of these pictures are designed to depict the peril that the people of God are in by virtue of their enemy’s designs against them and to magnify the danger. Satan prowls around like a roaring lion seeking to devour us. Over and over the Bible warns us of the danger that surrounds us. “We wrestle not with flesh and blood but with powers and principalities and evil in high places.” David is magnifying the danger. Precisely so, we will see that our hope, our help, the source of our aide is not in our self, it’s not in our craftiness, it’s not in our resources. It’s only in our God.

Declaring the Savior  

And then finally in verse 8, he declares to us the Deliverer. He shows us that the LORD is the one who is on our side. He is the one who does not give us up. He is the one who is our help. David is showing us where our trust ought to be placed. Our confidence is to be in the LORD. When he says, “The name of the LORD,” of course that is a way of referring to the LORD Himself, but the very phraseology, “The name of the LORD,” reminds us of some very significant and precious truths. He is not a generic power. He is not just God in general. He has told us what His name is so that when we face trouble, we can call on His name. And of course, this reminds us as well that the LORD has revealed Himself to us by His Word. He’s not left us wandering in the dark trying to figure out what kind of a God He is, what He loves, what He hates, what His powers are. He has told us who He is in His Word. He has disclosed His name, His nature, His attributes, and His loves in His Word so that when we need Him, we can call on Him by His name. The name of the LORD is our trust. 

As the psalmist declares God as our Savior, His name, as the one in whom our help is, we must remember that Jesus is the God who fights for us. It is not just a picture of the God of the Old Testament who fights for His people, but the New Testament itself depicts the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It is Jesus who fights for you. When you cry out under the assault of the world and the flesh and the devil, Jesus aims to put them under His feet and He will. Nothing will be left of that which opposes Him. Nothing will be left of that which opposes His people, so there is a face to the deliverer that the psalmist wants you to look to and trust in when you feel inundated and deluged, when you feel almost chewed up and swallowed whole, and when you feel trapped. It is the face of your Savior. He comes in His bloodstained garments from battles with His foes and yours and He is the Victor. David is telling us these things because the Christian life is a fight. It is a constant warfare and the battle belongs to the LORD.