Someone Else Built The Fortress

One threat to our security comes from feelings of depression and doubt. The person of faith is described in this psalm as “a rock-solid mountain . . . nothing can move it.” But I am moved. I am full of faith one day and empty with doubt the next. I wake up one morning full of vitality, rejoicing in the sun; the next day I am gray and dismal, faltering and moody. “Nothing can move it”?—nothing could be less true of me. I can be moved by nearly anything: sadness, joy, success, failure. I’m a thermometer and go up and down with the weather.

A couple of years ago a friend introduced me to the phrase “the saw-toothed history of Israel.” Israel was up one day and down the next. One day they were marching in triumph through the Red Sea, singing songs of victory, the next they were grumbling in the desert because they missed having Egyptian steak and potatoes for supper. One day they were marching around Jericho blowing trumpets and raising hearty hymns, and the next they were plunged into an orgy at some Canaanite fertility shrine. One day they are with Jesus in the upper room, listening in rapt attention to his commands and receiving his love, the next they are stomping around and cursing in the courtyard, denying they ever knew him.

But all the time, as we read that saw-toothed history, we realize something solid and steady: they are always God’s people. God is steadfastly with them, in mercy and judgment, insistently gracious. We get the feeling that everything is done in the sure, certain environment of the God who redeems his people. And as we learn that, we learn to live not by our feelings about God but by the facts of God. I refuse to believe my depressions; I choose to believe in God. If I break my leg I do not become less a person. My wife and children do not repudiate me. Neither when my faith fractures or my feelings bruise does God cast me off and reject me.

My feelings are important for many things. They are essential and valuable. They keep me aware of much that is true and real. But they tell me next to nothing about God or my relation to God. My security comes from who God is, not from how I feel. Discipleship is a decision to live by what I know about God, not by what I feel about him or myself or my neighbors. “As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the LORD is round about his people.” The image that announces the dependable, unchanging, safe, secure existence of God’s people comes from geology, not psychology.

Another source of uncertainty is our pain and suffering. Unpleasant things happen to us. We lose what we think we cannot live without. Pain comes to those we love, and we conclude that there is no justice. Why does God permit this? Anxiety seeps into our hearts. We have the precarious feeling of living under a Damoclean sword. When will the ax fall on me? If such a terrible thing could happen to my friend who is so good, how long until I get mine?

The psalmist knows all this. Sickness and death, despair and persecution. He is familiar with the rape and pillage of military invasion and the famine and earthquake of natural disaster. Psalm 125 was written by a person who did not have anesthetics in his hospital or aspirin in his medicine chest and whose government did not have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on national defense. Pain and suffering were most certainly part of his daily life. Why did they not destroy his confidence?

The answer is in these words: “The fist of the wicked / will never violate / What is due the righteous, / provoking wrongful violence.” The key word is violate: cancel GOD’s purposes that are being worked out. Israel had more than its share of oppression. The fist of the wicked was on Israel time and time again: Pharaoh, the Philistines, Tiglath-Pileser, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar. To an outsider it must have looked much of the time as if the wicked fist dominated the Israelites’ lives. From the inside the witness of faith said that it did not: “The fist of the wicked / will never violate / What is due the righteous, / provoking wrongful violence.”

If the evil fist is permanent, if there is no hope for salvation, even the most faithful and devout person will break and respond in “wrongful violence.” But God does not permit that to happen. Danger and oppression are never too much for faith. They were not too much for Job, they were not too much for Jeremiah, and they were not too much for Jesus. Evil is always temporary. “The worst does not last.”2 Nothing counter to God’s justice has any eternity to it. Paul’s witness was “No test or temptation that comes your way is beyond the course of what others have had to face. All you need to remember is that God will never let you down; he’ll never let you be pushed past your limit; he’ll always be there to help you come through it” (1 Cor 10:13). “He knows when to say, It is enough.”3

The third threat to the confidence promised to the Christian is the known possibility of defection. The general truth under which the Christian lives in this regard is “once saved always saved.” Once you are a Christian there is no getting out of it. It is a nonnegotiable contract. Once you have signed you cannot become a free agent again, no matter what the commissioner or the Supreme Court rules.

However true that is generally, and I think it is, there are exceptions. It would seem that if God will not force us to faith in the first place, he will not keep us against our will finally. Falling away is possible. We know of Judas. We know of Hymenaeus and Alexander, who “made shipwreck of their faith” (see 1 Tim 1:19-20). These are the ones described in the psalm as “the backsliders.”4 The way of discipleship gets difficult; they see an opening through the trees that promises a softer, easier path. Distracted and diverted, they slip off and never return.

If it is possible to defect, how do I know that I won’t—or even worse, that I haven’t? How do I know that I have not already lost faith, especially during times when I am depressed or have one calamity after another piled on me?

Such insinuated insecurities need to be confronted directly and plainly. It is not possible to drift unconsciously from faith to perdition. We wander like lost sheep, true; but God is a faithful shepherd who pursues us relentlessly. We have our ups and downs, zealously believing one day and gloomily doubting the next, but he is faithful. We break our promises, but he doesn’t break his. Discipleship is not a contract in which if we break our part of the agreement he is free to break his; it is a covenant in which he establishes the conditions and guarantees the results.

Certainly you may quit if you wish. You may say no to God. It’s a free faith. You may choose the crooked way. He will not keep you against your will. But it is not the kind of thing you fall into by chance or slip into by ignorance. Defection requires a deliberate, sustained and determined act of rejection.

All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us. The opening phrase of the psalm is “those who trust in GOD”—not those who trust in their performance, in their morals, in their righteousness, in their health, in their pastor, in their doctor, in their president, in their economy, in their nation—“those who trust in GOD.” Those who decide that God is for us and will make us whole eternally.

When I was a child I walked about a mile to school each day with my two best friends. Along a quarter of that distance there was a railway track. When we came to that stretch we always walked on the rails. Each of us wanted to make it all the way without falling off, but didn’t want the others to similarly succeed. We would throw things at each other to upset balance, or say things to divert attention, cry out that the train was coming or announce that there was a dead body in the ditch.

Some have supposed that that is what Christian living is, teetering and wobbling along a rail, taunted by the devil and his angels. With some skill and a lot of luck we might just make it to heaven, but it’s an uncertain business at best.

Psalm 125 says that is not the way it is at all. Being a Christian is like sitting in the middle of Jerusalem, fortified and secure. “First we are established and then entrenched; settled, and then sentinelled: made like a mount, and then protected as if by mountains.”5 And so the last sentence is “Peace over Israel!” A colloquial, but in the context accurate, translation would be “Relax.” We are secure. God is running the show. Neither our feelings of depression nor the facts of suffering nor the possibilities of defection are evidence that God has abandoned us. There is nothing more certain than that he will accomplish his salvation in our lives and perfect his will in our histories. Three times in his great Sermon, Jesus, knowing how easily we imagine the worst, repeats the reassuring command “Do not be anxious” (Mt 6:25, 31, 34 RSV). Our life with God is a sure thing.

When mountain climbers are in dangerous terrain, on the face of a cliff or the slopes of a glacier, they rope themselves together. Sometimes one of them slips and falls—backslides. But not everyone falls at once, and so those who are still on their feet are able to keep the backslider from falling away completely. And of course, in any group of climbers there is a veteran climber in the lead, identified for us in the letter to the Hebrews as “Jesus, who both began and finished this race we’re in” (Heb 12:2).

Traveling in the way of faith and climbing the ascent to Christ may be difficult, but it is not worrisome. The weather may be adverse, but it is never fatal. We may slip and stumble and fall, but the rope will hold us.