Psalm 137 — By The Rivers of Babylon Artwork

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Aneel Aranha is an author, preacher, and evangelist who has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people around the world. You can find a huge selection of his reflections, articles, sermons, songs and other resources on his website www.aneelaranha.com.

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Psalm 137 — By The Rivers of Babylon

October 12, 2023 • Aneel Aranha • Season 3 • Episode 137

0:00 | 4:14

Unpack the profound emotions in Psalm 137, from sadness and lament to anger and vengeance, and learn how to deal with them.

Psalm 137 — By The Rivers of Babylon — Aneel Aranha

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars
we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How can we sing the songs of the LORD
while in a foreign land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand forget its skill.
May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.
Remember, LORD, what the Edomites did
on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
“tear it down to its foundations!”
Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is the one who repays you
according to what you have done to us.
Happy is the one who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember the pop group Boney M, but I loved some of their songs. One of them was titled By the Rivers of Babylon. It became a huge hit, not just for its catchy tune but also because it touched on universal themes of displacement, longing, and the pain of remembering a lost home.

The song takes its lyrics almost verbatim from Psalm 137, which expresses the sorrow of the Israelites during their exile in Babylon. In 587 BC, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar laid siege to Jerusalem after Judah rebelled against Babylonian rule. The city was destroyed, Solomon's Temple was razed, and a significant portion of the Jewish population was deported to Babylon. They remained in exile for 50 years.

The opening lines of the psalm, "By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion," speak of their pain as they grapple with a lost identity and the harsh reality of living in a land that was not their own. Their harps hang on the poplars, silent and still, as they wonder how to accede to their captors' demands to sing songs of joy.

As always, there is a raw honesty in the psalm as the psalmist moves from sadness to anger and expresses his desire for vengeance. It's another reminder that our spiritual journey encompasses the full range of human emotions —the Bible doesn't sanitize any of it— and we need to vent them, but vent them correctly: to God.

Even in his anger and grief, the psalmist communicates with God, laying bare his deepest emotions and memories. And God, who understands how we feel, can empathize and help us navigate our feelings in a way that doesn't tempt us to implode or explode in actions that lead to sin.

We can take additional encouragement from these words from Scripture: "Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin. Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." (Hebrews 4:14-16).

God bless you.