Do you ever get frustrated because time and time again you make the same mistakes. If anything, this psalm should give some consolation. The story told by this song extends over at least five hundred years of the same mistakes over and over again. What this psalm also does is give us a language for the heart-cry to live differently. The people writing this psalm are singing it under the consequences of their actions. They are living under the oppression of foreign gods- gods they willingly followed. They wanted a world under the idols, and this is it. Recognizing this, they now cry out to go back to a world where God is their king.
It reminds me of the show Lost. One character, Jack, spends all of his time wanting to leave the island that he has crash-landed onto. And he wants to forget that the island ever happened. And four seasons into the show, he does. Yet as soon as he leaves, he discovers that he is going back to unhealthy patterns and the same life he lived before crashing- and that life isn't good. And so he re-devotes himself to going back to the island, believing that he can find the redemption he's looking for on the island. Often, it is when we live under the consequences of our actions that we realize we want something better. And Jesus delivers us from that into a new mission and a new purpose- the Kingdom of God. May we all live in that Kingdom today.
Amen
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