Don't Hang Up Your Harps (Part 2)

The Psalmist did three things in these first few verses of Psalm 137:

(1) He first uttered a curse against himself if he forgot Jerusalem.

(2) Secondly, he cursed the Edomites, their cousins, for their joy in seeing Jerusalem destroyed.

(3) Lastly, he cursed Babylon in a brutal way of wishing their children would be "dashed against the stones."

After he got all of this out of his system, he might have felt better and been more able to handle his situation.  I can understand how he felt, because as others have said, “I’ve been there myself.” Yet, it really does no good to put cursings above blessings.  God put us in this world to be a blessing to the rest of the world, therefore we should be praying for our enemies and not cursing them.  When cursings replace blessings we have already hung up the harp and lost our song.  

-The first thing to remember is to not curse ourselves. 

We are poor, weak, human beings and we are going to fail. The Bible says, “There is none righteous no not one.”  We are already failures.  Part of the Psalmist’s lament comes from his own inadequacy in this particular situation.  He sought to be adequate by at least refusing to sing the Lord’s song in a strange land, and by hanging up his harp, thereby refusing to give the Babylonians any entertainment.  That was perhaps the only thing he could control, and he did control that.  Should we, however, withhold our talents and our blessings from others just because we can?  Let us not curse ourselves in our attempt to gain a small victory when we have lost the larger victory.  Bitter and painful are the consequences of failure; but worse still are the consequences of hanging up the harp.            

- We must not curse the Edomites or Babylonians.  

The Edomites were directly related to Judea and Israel, but they hated Israel.  When Judea fell, when Jerusalem was defeated, when the Temple was utterly destroyed, the Edomites were there as a mob cheering on the conquering Babylonians.  The Edomites were cursing Jerusalem, and so the psalmist cursed the Edomites.        Furthermore the Babylonians were exceedingly vicious in their destruction of Jerusalem.  Nebuchadnezzar wanted to show these disloyal Jerusalemites that they could not get by with their refusal to pay tribute to the most powerful kingdom in the world of that day.

Think about it-The City of God destroyed and the Temple desecrated and devastated. So I am not at all surprised at the behavior of the Psalmist.  What he didn’t reason with was this was the will of God. The Psalmist wasn’t worried about humility, nor was he very accepting of the will of God.  So, He hung up his harp.  He blamed the Edomites and the Babylonians for Judea’s fate.  It's sad but true that a man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else. 

Yet we know, do we not, how the psalmist felt?  Are we not proud Americans, who love our country with every fiber of our being?  After 911 we saw the vulnerability of our nation. We have also seen racism and terror grip our hearts and lives since that fatal day as well as thousands of our loved ones killed or wounded in their fight against pure evil in foreign lands for our freedoms. We could have rolled over and played dead so to speak in many situations, but the spirit of patriotism raised up and said,
"No, don't give up. Keep on pressing on."

How many times have you wanted to hang up your heart and blame God for others or the mess you are in? Beloved, remember that "even in the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil."  It's not time to give up, but square up our spiritual shoulders and rebuke the enemy who seeks to destroy our nation. It might be your song that changes your/our situation. Don't ever feel you're alone in times of difficulty. Lift up your head for your redemption draweth nigh!