The Heart's Cry: Psalm 120

Psalm 120

I am for peace;
    but when I speak,
    they are for war.

This Psalm is titled Deliverance from Slanderers in the above link, but I don't think that is a very good title. The Psalmist does indeed ask for deliverance from lying lips, but they also seem to seek deliverance in general from being a stranger in a strange land, and then ends the Psalm in what I think may be the real point of the whole thing, and perhaps even more than that. The Psalmist says that they are in a land surrounded by people who hate peace and that while they speak for peace the people speak for war. I can understand the Psalmists dilemma, when I was younger I was, for lack of a better term, a fan of war, I would argue that we as a country should go in to wherever and destroy whomever was threatening us with whatever they were threatening us with. Over the course of years I switched sides and would now argue that we shouldn't go to war, period, the end. When I was younger I spoke from the majority, now that I am a bit older I speak from the minority and so I can understand how the Psalmist may be feeling. But...

A little bit ago I typed the following "and then ends the Psalm in what I think may be the real point of the whole thing, and perhaps even more than that" and what I mean is that perhaps the whole point of not just the Psalm but of the Psalmist's predicament is that their voice needs to be heard in places like the one they dwell in. God needs voices in the wilderness, crying out the truth in the darkness, and unfortunately that necessarily requires for us to sometimes be in the darkness. Sometimes the very place we don't want to be in is the exact place that God wants us to be in, it is the place that can do both us and those around us the most good. The hang-up is that we often just want what is easiest for us, not best, in addition we often don't much care about the well-being of others. But God sees beyond the momentary, beyond the momentary hardship, beyond the momentary pain, beyond the momentary doubt, beyond the momentary fear, God sees us surviving all that we don't think we can survive, more than that God sees us thriving in the situations that we think we're stuck in.

+ How has God used you as a light in the darkness?

+ How might God be wanting to use you currently?