(Psalm 121) “I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; From where shall my help come? My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth. He will not allow your foot to slip; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel Will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; The Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun will not smite you by day, Nor the moon by night. The Lord will protect (keep) you from all evil; He will keep your soul. The Lord will guard (keep) your going out and your coming in From this time forth and forever.”
This past year has seen the whole world change and nothing will ever be quite the same again. Now in these uncertain times we need to know what God has said in his Word especially at this time when COVID-19 is rampaging through the nations of the world with its variants also coming one upon another. In Psalm 121 we have God’s promises to take care of His covenant people. Now let’s briefly look at this Psalm. Let’s begin.
“I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; From where shall my help come? My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth.”
It is at times of great anxiety, stress and hardship that we look upwards towards heaven with expectant faith, knowing on the basis of God’s unchanging Word that “God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1) As Job declared “When He is at work in the north, I cannot behold Him; when He turns to the south, I cannot see Him. Yet He knows the way I have taken; when He has tested me, I will come forth as gold” (Job 23:9-10).
Job did not understand how God was at work in the world at large or in the circumstances he was facing but knew that somehow God was doing a spiritual work deep down on the inside of his inner spirit and that when God had finished His sanctifying work that the end result in Job’s life would be as precious and as valuable and as lasting as gold, an inheritance imperishable and kept in heaven for Job.
Through our spiritual rebirth and having been sealed with the Holy Spirit we have “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, reserved in heaven for us” (1 Peter 1:4). One thing this virus is teaching us is that our lives are temporary in this world and that our real home is with the Lord, either when we fall asleep in the Messiah and are absent from the body but present with the Lord, or if we are still alive when He returns. Either way, we will all be rescued out of this present evil age at the rapture and resurrection when our Lord Jesus comes back to earth to establish His Millennial Kingdom of which we will be a part and co-reign with Him (Revelation 5:10).
Trials, tests and afflictions are preparing us not to be so attached to this world or to the things of this world but to hold them loosely. As the apostle Paul writes “For our light and momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal glory that is far beyond comparison. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18). Of course we also have the assurance that God will never let us be tested beyond what we can endure but through it enable us to be delivered from it or in it. God does not always deliver us out of a situation straight away but will give us the power to endure in it. This is only possible by the grace and power of the blessed Holy Spirit. Apart from His power operating deep down on the inside of us we cannot be spiritually sustained in our time of affliction.
God will always provide a way of escape designed by Him in such a way that we will be able to bear it, but we must also keep in mind that His ways are not always our ways or His thoughts our thoughts and that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways higher than our ways and His thoughts than our thoughts. (1 Corinthians 10:13) (Isaiah 55:8-9). If He created the heavens and the earth and knows how everything functions in the minutest detail then He most certainly knows all about us and the situations we face every day! And then we read…
“He will not allow your foot to slip; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel Will neither slumber nor sleep”.
At one time the disciples were in a boat that was in a very severe storm they could not handle even as seasoned fisherman, they were alarmed and thought they would all drown. The Lord Jesus was also in that boat asleep near the helm as they assumed and the disciples were somewhat indignant and perplexed as to how come He could be sleeping at this time when it seemed their impending doom was imminent. Their foot was slipping and that big time!
Now in the Greek text of the New Testament the word for “asleep” has the idea that both of His eyes were not completely closed but that one was slightly open watching the disciples every movement to see what they would do. Actually He was fully alert! When it looked like they were all about to go down with the ship the Lord Jesus got up and stood up in the boat and said to the storm “Be muzzled,” much like you would muzzle a wild barking dog to stop it barking and snapping its teeth. Immediately the storm ceased and all was perfectly calm, not only on the sea, but also deep down on the inside of the disciples. As it is written; “Weeping may last for the night, But a shout of joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). Indeed, He who watches over Israel and us who have been spiritually grafted into Israel neither slumbers or sleeps but keeps and watches over His New covenant people who have placed their trust in Him for their full salvation. God is never early and never late but always on time! Now let’s continue…
“The Lord is your keeper; The Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun will not smite you by day, Nor the moon by night. The Lord will protect (keep) you from all evil; He will keep your soul. The Lord will guard (keep) your going out and your coming in From this time forth and forever.”
Now we are told that “the sun will not smite you by day.” The Lord is not only our keeper but also our shade when the scorching rays of the sun of affliction are beating down on us relentlessly. At such times the Lord is our shade and in His shade we can safely rest even when the hot rays of the sun of affliction are at their peak. We can dwell in the shelter of the Most High as we rest in the shadow of the Almighty and declare by faith that He is our refuge and our fortress and our God in whom we trust (Psalm 91:1-2).
We are also told in Psalm 91 that He will save us from the fowler’s snare (Satan’s traps) and the deadly pestilence being primarily the power of sin but also a safeguard against pestilence. COVID-19 is a pestilence. Like a mother hen covers her chicks with her wings to shade and protect them, so the Lord remembers our frame and that we are frail as dust and so under His wings we find refuge. In that place we will come to know that His faithfulness will be our shield and our defensive wall which will keep Satan out of our affairs as we continue to rest in God’s power to keep us (Psalm 91:3-4).
Now turning back to Psalm 121 we are also told that “the moon will not smite you by night”. The moon gives us light but not sufficient light to keep us from wandering from the path or falling into a ditch in the road. The light of the moon can be deceptive and one can easily lose their direction at night especially in a forested mountainous area. Spiritually applied, we are protected from the terror of night, being when Satan sneaks up on us and seeks to fill our subconscious thoughts with a sense of foreboding, as well as the arrow that flies by day. Satan’s fiery darts are always aimed at the shield of faith (Ephesians 6:16).
Satan spins his spiritually deceptive web in the darkness of the unseen spiritual realm in the atmosphere just above the earth’s surface (Job 1:7; 2:2) (Ephesians 2:2). He is always acting with malevolent intent towards us who walk in the light and under the shadow of the Almighty. We need to be aware of his strategies (2 Corinthians 2:11). We must come to terms with the fact that we are at war with Satan on a daily basis. The Gifts of the Spirit are God’s divine power and our spiritual armour and weapons we need to pull down spiritual strongholds in our lives and in the lives of others. (2 Corinthians 10:4).
Whether it is the heat of outright persecution or the moon of subtle spiritual deception we are also told three things that the Lord will do for us.
Firstly, He will keep or protect us from all evil generated by the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and from the pride of life and most of all shield us from the devil’s wicked schemes and deliver us in troubling situations.
Secondly, He will keep our souls. The soul is what we really are deep down on the inside and this includes our mind, our emotions and our will. These are the targets of the evil one and his wicked principalities in the unseen spiritual realm. Satan cannot touch our spirit man because we who are joined to the Lord by the Holy Spirit are one spirit with Him and sealed with the Holy Spirit for the day of redemption (1 Corinthians 6:17) (Ephesians 1:13).
Thirdly, we are told that the Lord will guard, garrison or keep our comings and goings forevermore. It has been said that it is not how we start but how we finish that counts. The Lord Jesus is the author and perfector (finisher) of our faith and what He starts He intends to finish (Hebrews 12:2). As the apostle John writes “Beloved, we are now children of God, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when the Messiah appears, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as the Messiah is pure” (1 John 3:2-23).
When the Messiah our Lord Jesus told the disciples to get into the boat and to go to the other side of the lake He fully intended to arrive safely on the other shore. When the storm of affliction arose, undoubtedly at the hand of the wicked one fully intent on drowning them all, the disciples feared for their lives but the Lord Jesus saved the day! Later in their ministry, after the Lord Jesus had gone back to heaven, the disciples came to fully realise that the Lord Jesus was in them by his Holy Spirit and that no matter what they faced in this life, and they faced much, He would never leave them or desert them even to the end of the age. Even in the thickest of battle when faced with the storms of persecution and adversity by the evil one they continued to totally depend on the Lord and in His power prevailed over everything Satan threw their way!
In every circumstance and situation we will ever face in this present life we have the assurance from the unchanging Word of the Living God that He who never slumbers or sleeps will watch over us, keep our souls and guard (keep) our going out and our coming in from this time forth and forever.
