Psalm 137, but before we turn there, we want to read a couple of other passages. We want to read from Isaiah chapter 13 and then some verses from Revelation chapter 18 and 19. Psalm 137 is what's called an imprecatory psalm. That is, it's a psalm with prayers for God's curse to rest upon the wicked. Those are very difficult psalms for us New Testament Christians living in the lap of luxury to know what to do with. And I first started thinking about this psalm after the brutal terrorist attack by Hamas in Israel, but I'm not preaching on this to wade into Middle Eastern politics. And it's also beautiful, actually, to notice the place of Psalm 137 in this altar. Psalm 136 talks about God's redemption, and Psalm 138 about even the kings of earth hearing God's word. So always look also not just at the psalm, but at what comes before and after. So the psalm is remembering how Babylon destroyed Jerusalem and its people and what Babylon did, especially to the women and children of the Jews. And so in Isaiah 13, we find the Lord announcing what He's going to do to Babylon because of what they have done. Isaiah 13, starting with verse 11, "'And I will punish the world for their evil and the wicked for their iniquity, and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. I will make a man more precious than fine gold, even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place in the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger, and it shall be as the chased roe." That means a deer. and as a sheep that no man takes up, they shall every man turn to his own people and flee everyone into his own land. Everyone that is found shall be thrust through and everyone that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes. Their houses shall be spoiled or plundered and their wives ravished. Behold, I will stir up the meads against them which shall not regard silver, and as for gold, they shall not delight in it. Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces, and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb. Their eyes shall not spare children. And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms and the beauty of the Chaldean's excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah." And then let's turn to the book of Revelation. Revelation 18 is about God's judgment on Babylon, and Babylon stands for this world's pomp and pride and arrogant rebellion. And so we'll read here the first eight verses, and then we'll skip ahead to verse 20. So Revelation 18, and after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven having great power, and the earth was lightened with his glory. And he cried mightily with a strong voice saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen. It has become the habitation of devils and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication. And the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her. And the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven saying, come out of her, my people, that she be not partakers of her sins and that she receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven and God has remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you. And double unto her, double according to her works. In the cup which she has filled, fill to her double. how much she has glorified herself and lived deliciously or luxuriously, so much torment and sorrow give her. For she saith in her heart, I said a queen, and am no widow and shall see no sorrow. Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death and mourning and famine, and she shall be utterly burned with fire. For strong is the Lord God who judges her." And then we skip ahead to verse 20, and we'll keep reading until the sixth verse of chapter 19, the Hallelujah Chorus, which is, of course, very familiar to us in December, but we need to see what context that chorus has. Rejoice over her, thou heaven, and ye holy apostles and prophets, for God has avenged you on her. And a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and cast it into the sea, saying, Thus with violence shall that great city Babylon be thrown down and shall be found no more at all. And the voice of harpers and musicians and of pipers and trumpeters shall be heard no more at all in thee. And no craftsman of whatsoever craft he be shall be found any more in thee. And the sound of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee. and the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee, and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee. For thy merchants were the great men of the earth, for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived, and in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints and of all that were slain upon the earth. And after these things I heard a great voice of much people in heaven saying, Alleluia, salvation and glory and honor and power unto the Lord our God. For true and righteous are his judgments, for he has judged the great whore which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and has avenged the blood of his servants at her hand. And again they said, Hallelujah, and her smoke rose up forever and ever." And the four and twenty elders and the four beasts fell down and worshipped God that sat on the throne, saying, Amen, Alleluia. And a voice came out of the throne, saying, Praise our God, all ye his servants, and ye that fear him, both small and great. And I heard, as it were, the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thundering, saying, Alleluia. For the Lord God, omnipotent, Then let's turn to Psalm 137. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept. When we remembered Zion, Remember, Zion is the name for Jerusalem. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof, for there they that carried us away captive required of us a song, and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget Thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember Thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy. Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem who said, Raise it, raise it, even to the foundation thereof. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, Blessed shall he be that rewards thee as thou has served us. Blessed shall he be that takes and dashes thy little ones against the stone." You notice that the King James here says happy, but in the Hebrew, it actually says blessed. And there's quite a difference between those two things, as we'll see. As we prepare to hear the After the preaching of God's word, we'll sing Psalm 137 as arranged in Psalter 379. Beloved congregation of the Lord, I'm sure many of you have also been troubled at the brutality in Israel and in Ukraine and the suffering of the weak, of the children, whether Israeli children or Palestinian children or Ukrainian children. It's a painful reminder of things like the Holocaust and the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. And it's just as disturbing and heartbreaking to read of demonstrations denying these things have ever happened, whether in World War II or just in the last couple of years, of people on the streets of Toronto celebrating and giving presents to their children and declaring a holiday because of what was done to Israeli children. in this country. But then we read Psalm 137, and it makes us squirm. One commentator says this psalm ends, and I quote, on a note of vulgar abuse and hate. And another says the first six verses are very beautiful, and then the psalmist's harp goes badly out of tune in the last three verses. And another says, this is completely incompatible with the New Testament and the Savior who prays, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Even Spurgeon can't quite make up his mind what to do with his psalm. On the one hand, he rebukes those who don't like such prayers by saying this, and I quote, Let those find fault with it who have never seen their temple burned, their city ruined, their wives ravished, and their children slain. They might not perhaps be quite so velvet-mouthed if they had suffered like this." But on the other hand, when Spurgeon gets to verse 9, he says, this is an Old Testament prayer. This is not a gospel prayer for Christians. What do we do with Psalm 137? You know, some moderate Muslims squirm about what Hamas has done. They don't want to condemn Hamas because the Muslim's always right. And others reluctantly say, yeah, well, it was wrong, but Israel… Is that how we're supposed to squirm at Psalm 137? With no nice way out. Don't want to condemn Scripture. But on the other hand, are we really supposed to praise this part of it? What a position for pro-life Christians to be in, to have Psalm 137, verse 8 and 9 in your Bible. So I ask, is the God of Psalm 137 worth praising and worshiping? Is he worth listening to? Let us prayerfully listen and find out. And here we meet, and our theme is, the Lord who remembers his people's anguish. We see the lament he records, the loyalty he awakens, and the justice he fulfills. So the Lord who remembers his people's anguish. First, then, the lament that he records. In Psalm 137, God reveals himself as the God who remembers who understands, who hears and knows the troubles and heartaches of his people." And someone may want to say, yeah, but God's not the one talking in this psalm. It's the psalmist who speaks to God. How can God reveal himself and what we say to him? Well, as the God who inspired the psalmist to include this in your Bible, God is listening here. And that is where the good news of this text begins. The Lord is the God who meets you exactly where you are at. He doesn't leave you where you're at, but the first thing he does is sit down next to you, as it were, and put an arm around you and say, now you pour out your heart and spill it out. The way it's in there, don't clean it up, just say it. And he doesn't interrupt you and say, nope, don't say it that way, say it this way. He hears all you have to say. And that kind of God of sympathy and compassion is worth listening to when he speaks to, is he not? He records our most agonizing cries of the heart. He makes it clear. He remembers and hears what we experience in a violent, hostile, ugly, brutal world. In fact, God takes compassion and understanding so far and so seriously that he even sent his own son to be the sympathetic high priest who is touched with the feelings of all our weaknesses. I'm sure you know what it's like sometimes to pour out your heart to another person, and that person gets uncomfortable and doesn't know what to do with you, because we as people don't always have an answer to each other's need and heartache. But God's not like that. Sometimes you speak to a know-it-all who immediately wants to correct you and straighten you out rather than first just hear and understand. Paul Tripp calls this lobbing truth over the wall into someone's life like a hand grenade. But the God of Psalm 137 is not like that either. This psalm has stanzas just like all songs do, and you could say stanza one in this psalm is the first four verses where God records for us the lament of his people. Here's his unbelieving remnant caught up in the judgment of the ungodly majority. The entire nation was excommunicated from the promised land. They were sent back to Babylon where Abraham came from. Far from the promised land, far from the one city in the world where God could be known among his people and rightly worshipped. Do you realize how much trauma these survivors had been through? We caught just a glimpse of it in the videos Hamas released of hostages being kidnapped and mistreated. The believing Israelites of Psalm 137 were like Holocaust survivors of World War II or survivors of kidnapping. in Gaza. We would say today they had PTSD. They remembered horrific things. They remembered being carried away and plundered, according to verse 3, and wasted is actually a good way to describe it. Their whole country and everything they had and were was turned into wasteland. Just read the book of Lamentations. The torture, the rape, the brutality, and the slaughter were truly fearful. What the Babylonians did to children and pregnant mothers is horrific. In fact, most armies in world history treated women like that because otherwise you're leaving babies to become men who will fight you. That was their sick and warped logic. And we're shocked in the 21st century because we think humanity has evolved and by being socially progressive and secular, we're better than that. We wouldn't do such things. Never mind abortion. Let's just pretend that doesn't happen. We will never, as the human race, evolve beyond this kind of brutality without the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And to make matters worse, the Babylonians add insult to injury. They want a surviving Levite temple singer to perform a temple song, a Zion song, like the one you just sang, Psalter 134. Imagine one of these burly Babylonian soldiers strolling past with his Marduk tattoo on his bicep. Marduk was the chief idol of Babylon, you see, and in those days wars were always a clash of gods, not just of armies. So if you lost a war, your god was considered the public loser who couldn't even protect his own people. And so this thug with his Marduk Tattoo could say, well, you sing to me a Zion song about towers and walls that protect God's people from their enemies, and about your children needing to be told that God will keep his city from being destroyed. And he could say, well, I was there. We knocked down all your walls and all your towers. It's dust and ashes. But go ahead, sing us one of those nice songs about how this would never happen. Some God you serve. You see? The cruelty of this mockery? And that's why the psalmist is in agony in verse 4 and he says, how am I supposed to sing the song of the living God in a strange land outside the land of His promise? I can't. Everything God ever made promises about, His city, the royal house of David, His temple, it's all destroyed. It's gone. What is there to sing about? A song of praise? I've sat with enough broken and devastated people to know that there are moments when a song of praise doesn't work. There are moments in the life of faith when an upbeat psalter like Psalm 48 feels like ashes in your mouth, when singing great is thy faithfulness feels like torture. And I know because I have had such moments myself. And yet even in the weakness and the short-sightedness of such moments, the Lord does not say to his people, well, if you just had enough faith, you would sing the praise anyway. No, he's not that kind of God. In great compassion, God gives them something they can sing in a moment like that. He inspires the psalmist to record a lament. What's lament? It's an outpouring of grief before the Lord. God welcomes that and sometimes we Dutch Reformed people need to know this because I've had this as pastor so often the moment someone shows tears and emotions they immediately apologize to me as if they've somehow done me wrong by showing emotion. You don't need to do that. The Lord welcomes lament. The psalmist says the tears of God's people are stored in his bottle. God notices. God welcomes your grief by pouring it out before the Lord. You are worshiping and glorifying the Lord because you honor the God who heals the brokenhearted and who gathers the outcasts, and you honor the sympathy and compassion of the Lord when you pour it out before him, thinking that he will gladly hear it from you. So when you find yourself grieving infertility and singleness and widowhood and cancer and sudden death and brokenness in a family circle, God doesn't ask you to pretend and fake it till you make it. He welcomes your grief. He says, to use another psalm, pour out your heart before him at all times, you people. God is a refuge for us. God says, I'll even make it easy for you. I'll record a psalm in your Psalter where I teach you to do that so that you don't have to feel like your faith failed or you're dishonoring me. So sing it and pray it. You see what a relief it is that the God of Psalm 137 is your God. You don't need to be embarrassed by him. But there's more to this lament. It's a deeply personal lament. Their children were brutalized. But this is a God-centered lament. The psalmist grieves the enemies of God are mocking the living God. They destroyed Jerusalem. They don't understand that in Daniel 1 it says the Lord wasn't defeated. He gave this city into the hands of Nebuchadnezzar. But the Babylonians think they did it, that God was defeated, and that God is the loser, that God is finished. And this grieves the psalmist that people could say something like this about the living God and his God. He is depressed for the sake of God. Do you ever get depressed for God's sake and for the sake of his own glory? Aren't we far more disturbed when we think, well, I'm not getting the appreciation, the affirmation, the recognition that I deserve and that I'm worthy of. My problem hasn't been solved yet. I haven't had the success I should have had." Is that what bothers you most? That people don't treat you the way you think you deserve to be treated? How often do you get pained when the glory of God is violated in the world and in the church? You pray, Hallowed be thy name, don't you? Are you grieved when it is not hallowed in this world? when it is not treated as holy. Before you criticize the spiritual level of Psalm 137, maybe you better ask yourself, am I even on that level myself or is it above me, not beneath me? The church in North America is also in a kind of Babylonian captivity. Gone are the times when most Canadians went to church. And in our culture, we even mock sacred things. In our university and media, you can say anything about Christianity. You can make up every kind of lie and conspiracy theory there is and it's fine. But you're not allowed to say Hamas people are terrorists because that's Islamophobia. And when Handel's Hallelujah Chorus gets used in advertising, when lyrics that are about the throne ship of Christ are used to sell products, or when great hymn tunes are used as advertising jingles. That is evil. That very music that when you hear the Messiah's song brings you to your feet at the glory of Jesus Christ, it's used now in the worship of money and what it can buy? Do you ever grieve? What this world does with the name of Jesus Christ and the people of Christ and the word of salvation that God has given. That Jesus name and God's name are trashed like any other. You can curse in any form of combination of the names of God and of Christ, but you better not say the word Allah with anything other than reverence. The Human Rights Commission can fine you for offending someone else. You don't even need proof. All someone has to do is say, I feel offended. and the regular principles of law and justice don't even apply. But when God is insulted and his glory is violated, no one in this culture cares. They think it's funny. But it's not just in the world. There are churches who refuse to use a word like sin. A false prophet and a heretic like Joel Osteen in Texas can fill a building with 20,000 to 25,000 people every Sunday. He never preaches the gospel and he never preaches about sin. There are pastors who, if they mention words like sin once from the pulpit, I talked to one not too long ago, he said, if I mention sin and repentance once, I could expect six angry phone calls the next day saying, we don't need to hear that because we're believers. I've also met pastors who, if they mention the grace and goodness and kindness of Christ, and the gospel will get angry emails and phone calls. There are churches who send their staff to casinos and to Hollywood to learn how to, and I quote, put on the best show in town. One advertises itself like this, you will find here no Bible thumping, no fire and brimstone, just practical witty messages. Sounds like a cartoon, not like the gospel. God is not there. No one is called to conversion because that's not user-friendly. Don't mention the H word, hell, because that's bullying. What about God? Well, just bring him in the end in passing. Don't get heavy. Don't come to say that he saves us from sin. Say he comes to save us from loneliness and unhappiness. Does it ever grieve you, to quote the prophet Isaiah, that truth has been killed in the streets? That churches call evil good and good evil and fly the flags of a celebration of perversion and sin? Do you ever grieve before the Lord how His church, sent into the world to reflect His light and glory, instead spreads darkness, not light? that the church can be a place of, not of truth, grace, and love, but of ungodly anger and falsehood and bitterness. Don't you dare condemn the author of Psalm 137 if you are far below that level, and if the glory of God doesn't burn in your soul like it does in the soul of the psalmist. Yeah, but what about verse 9? We'll get there. But first, you better listen to the man who sobs out the first verses of this psalm. That's not all we learn about the living God here. We also see in the second stanza, verses 5 to 6, the loyalty that the Lord awakens. Why is Israel in Babylon? They forsook the Lord for a thousand years. They ignored his prophets for generations. He gave them very specific warnings and very specific laws, and they ignored them all. They sinned as if God has no right as king to tell them right from wrong or to judge them. And so God gives them over to righteous judgment to put an end to such sin. And the psalmist is not complaining about that. He's not saying, well, I'm one of the believing people. I don't deserve to get dragged off to Babylon in chains and to lose half my family when the Babylonians slaughtered the people around me. It's not fair. He doesn't say that. Instead, in verses 5 to 6, you find an intense loyalty to a city that doesn't even exist anymore, humanly speaking. To Jerusalem, where if he would go there, it would only be dust and ruins and ashes. He's not going to strum his harp for the mockery of these sneering Babylonians, but he's determined not to forget Jerusalem, to remember the dust of the city of God at all costs. Why is he so emphatic? Because after the initial trauma, Babylon wasn't all that bad a place to live. The survivors were given farms and land. Some of them did very well financially. In fact, so much so that after 70 years when the exiles were allowed to go back, far more stayed in Babylon than came back to Jerusalem. Maybe the psalmist feels the seduction of Babylon and thinks, my faith in the God of the covenant is in danger in this place because of its luxury and its materialism and its plenty. It can be so appealing to get ahead in business, to get liked, and if you'll just start living like the Babylonians and bow down to their customs and on Facebook say happy Ramadan or happy Hanukkah, not because you're going, but it's just good PR, it's just good business, other than the fact that you're celebrating idolatry and telling people have fun when you commit idolatry. If you'll just bow down to the idols of modernity and the sexual revolution and say, you know what, we've been reading the Bible wrong for thousands of years. The modern way of life is biblical after all, so the promiscuity and the perversion and the swearing and the violence in music and movies and the rebellion and the lowering of the one true living God to the level of the idols of our times is just quietly swept under the carpet. And oh, such idolaters will still talk about God. but it's the god of their own making. He's got to get in line behind the gods of pornography and money and entertainment. And such a god is as much an idol as Baal and Moloch ever were. The psalmist doesn't want to go down that road away from God. Why is he so obsessed with Jerusalem? Why is he so suspicious of Babylon? Because these two places stand for the only two ways in which humanity is before God. The city of God and the city of man. Jerusalem is the city of God, the graphic picture of God living among his people. ahead of time, of God being their God right here on planet earth, of God being their God in a place you could touch and see, a place whose streets you could walk and visit, a place where God was known among His people. And now it's a heap of ruins. And yet if you read Psalm 137, the psalmist doesn't see Jerusalem as a dead city. Why? Because the real Jerusalem hasn't been ruined. The earthly copy has been temporarily wiped out, but the real Jerusalem with God on the throne is still there. You could call the Old Testament earthly Jerusalem, the suburbs of heaven. Why? Because the New Testament speaks of another Jerusalem. The Apostle Paul calls it, in Galatians, the Jerusalem above, which is the mother of all God's people. The book of Revelation describes the new Jerusalem, the heavenly Jerusalem. Hebrews 12 says that when the church worships by faith, we come to that Mount Zion. We're not just in Burgessville this morning, but we have come to Mount Zion. The earthly Zion or Jerusalem was a picture and promise of the heavenly Jerusalem. And when Jesus Christ returns, he will bring the heavenly Jerusalem and it will become a place on the new earth. Heaven is living in the new Jerusalem on the new earth. So you see, if you have any spiritual life in you at all, Jerusalem is central to your life. The earthly Jerusalem just pictured that in this present world. It was the city where Jesus Christ was crucified to blaze a trail to God through his blood and atonement. It was the city where Jesus Christ rose from the grave and ascended into heaven. It's the place where Jesus Christ will come down when he comes back from heaven. You see, for a New Testament Christian also, your entire life circles around Jerusalem. That's why the psalmist says in verse 6, Jerusalem is a greater priority to me than my greatest joys and blessings and pleasures in this world. The well-being of the dwelling place and church of God. But what takes the place of the earthly Jerusalem now then? What are the suburbs of heaven in this present world for us? It's the local church. Hear, write, worship can happen. Hear the gospel and word of God are proclaimed. Hear the glory of Christ and the name of God are declared." You recognize a good, true, living, vital spiritual Christian by an unflinching loyalty to the Church of Jesus Christ, even when it's messed up and seems broken and shattered. Sinclair Ferguson has an excellent book called Devoted to the Church, and the point is, If you're devoted to the Savior and Lord of the church, then you've got to be devoted to the church too. So that you sing like this with a psalmist, God's own city, God's own city, who can all thy glory tell? That's Jerusalem. What's Babylon then? Well, Babylon represents the city of earthly pride and abusive power, of cruelty, of sin, of spiritual idolatry and spiritual prostitution against the living God. Read the book of Revelation. The whole thing is the battle of two cities, the city of God and the Babylon of this world, the inhabiting place of demons and of sin of every kind. the symbol of rebellious humanity, and the celebration and practice of wickedness. This is why when Christ comes back, heaven cannot be brought to earth unless Babylon, the great whore, is first exterminated from this world. The New Jerusalem and Babylon cannot exist on planet earth at the same time. The New Jerusalem can only come down here when Babylon is no more. I ask you, what is your citizenship? Where do you feel most at home? Where is your life? Heaven or Babylon? You can't have it both ways. Your priority, your lifestyle, your choices tells you which city you are loyal to. In fact, the psalmist takes this so seriously that he even pronounces a curse upon himself. if he doesn't consider God and his Jerusalem his greatest priority and joy. He says, I'd rather someone cut off my right hand. I'd rather not have the ability to talk at all than to speak a word against Jerusalem or to love Babylon. This is a solemn vow of devotion to God and his people in of all places, the earthly Babylon, the city of evil, the city of human pomp and pride, of Nebuchadnezzar in his brutality and his arrogance. The psalmist says the earthly Zion in ruins deserves much more loyalty than Babylon in its pomp and pride. That's why the writer of Psalm 102 says, for thy servants pity even her dust. You know, curses like this are not a small thing. They're not just words. I grew up in Nigeria on the mission field. A driver had been stealing from the mission there for several years in very clever ways that nobody could quite catch him. And finally, they caught him. The proof was overwhelming, and he still denied it. He took an oath. He took a curse upon himself. He said, may God strike me dead if I'm lying and if I did it. My uncle even pleaded with him not to provoke God like this. But he refused to repent, and within a week he was dead. He died in his sleep. Oaths and curses are sacred and weighty. These are not word games. And are we not to commit to loyalty to God's church with the same degree of commitment? What do you think membership vows in a local church are? They are oaths of loyalty to God's own city and to agree even to the extreme remedy of church discipline if you stray into sin and start living for Babylon rather than Jerusalem. But how are we ever going to live up to such oaths when we live in Babylon? Isn't Israel's failure to do so the reason they're in Babylon? They were Jerusalem sinners. For this we need God's oath. God who swears that Jesus Christ will be priest-king forever. Of Christ who, as our Lord's Supper form says, takes our curse, that he might fill us with his blessing. Of Christ who suffers in Zion to save Jerusalem sinners. And now this God, having redeemed his people by his blood, gives his people something to sing and pray in all seasons of life. And while the psalmist could not sing Psalm 48 in that moment, he could now sing a new kind of Zion song. He could sing Psalm 137. We have other psalms to complete the picture. When Zion in her lowest state was brought from bondage by the Lord, in ecstasy we sang for joy, by grace and wondrous love restored. And we can sing something like Psalm 84, as we did to start the service. Though tried their tears like showers shall fill the springs of peace. And all the way to Zion their strength shall still increase. God keeps piling on songs for his people to learn. Climaxing in the book of Revelation in the song of Moses and of the Lamb, unto him who loved us and washed us from our sins, in his own blood be glory forever. You see the God of Psalm 137 is not an embarrassment. He is worthy of your worship. And all of this builds up in verses 7 to 9, our third point, the justice the Lord fulfills. Look at verse 7. It's about Edom. Do you know what the Edomites did? They were the cheerleaders celebrating what Babylon did to Israel. They were like the people parading in Toronto and around the world with signs praising Hamas's atrocity to children and saying things like, from the river to the sea, kill every Jew. Edomites even caught escaping survivors that somehow had managed to get away from the Babylon armies. They brought them back to the Babylonians, and they laughed and cheered as those survivors were tortured and killed and put in chains to be dragged to Babylon. They thought it was funny. What isn't believing Israelites supposed to do with Edom? Well, God sent the prophet Obadiah to pronounce his own curse on Edom. And so when the psalmist says, Remember, O Lord, what Edom said in it. Remember doesn't mean think about it. Remember means do something about it. God answers in Obadiah, I will do something about it. And Babylon in verse 8 will also be leveled, in verse 8 of this psalm, will be leveled for what they did to God's people. God will repay them. God will make sure that what they did to others happens exactly to them. That's justice. Yeah, but can we pray like that today? Shouldn't we pray for the repentance and the conversion of Edom then and of Hamas now, and of Israel? the state, for that matter, because the nation of Israel is one of the most wicked, ungodly, progressive nations in the world. Shouldn't we pray? Of course. You can pray more than one kind of prayer, you know. When it comes to the prayer toolbox, God puts all kinds of prayers in it, and we should pray them all. Unless you want to be wiser than God and say you don't need them all. You see, where does God get his people except from the devil's landfill? from the devil's cheerleaders. You should praise the Lord at this or you could not be a Jerusalem Christian yourself." But not all God's enemies will turn to the Lord. So what should God do with defiant rebels? Well, God prepares hell and judgment for everyone who rejects his word of grace and defies his glory. How else can this world be cleansed from sinners? Yeah, well, that's not New Testament Christianity. My Jesus would never do such a thing. Really, are you so biblically illiterate and ignorant that you don't even notice what your New Testament and your Jesus said and did? What did Jesus say to the women wailing as he was walking to the cross? Weep for yourselves and for your children for the judgment that is about to come upon you for what you have done to me. Luke 19, in fact, he even uses the same root word as is found in Psalm 137 to say Jerusalem will be leveled to the ground with her children for rejecting their own salvation. I read for you part of Revelation 18, and I did it on purpose so that you would hear the hallelujah chorus in verse chapter 19 in connection with where God put it. God will hurl Babylon, this entire rebellious, wicked world, like a huge stone into the sea, to sink out of sight forever. And God even says in Revelation 19 that you should rejoice over this. The Bride of Christ in heaven sings the Hallelujah Chorus as the answer to God's judgment on Babylon. And people in heaven can't do wrong things. Have you sung the hallelujah course all your life and never noticed what you were saying hallelujah about? Judgment is not something to apologize for. Do you not read the headlines and say, such evil must be dealt with? Do you not read the newsletter of Voice of the Martyrs and see what is done to horrifically persecution against Christians is on the rise around the world? Or what is done to God's image bearers in Israel and elsewhere. Does not such sin cry out for justice from the living God? And where else are you going to go to get it than the God who does justice for his people and glorifies his name through Jesus Christ, the judge of the living and the dead, the God who shows his glory by saving great sinners and by judging great sinners? When you pray like this and sound like this, that is faith in the kingship of the living God. You see, this God of Psalm 137 is worth singing the Hallelujah Chorus to. Psalm 137 is the Hallelujah Chorus sung amid the shocking evil and trauma of this world, asking that God would do what he said. And Revelation 19 is simply Psalm 137 sung after the fact of God's answer and judgment and praising God for His final intervention in Christ and expelling unredeemed sin and sinners from His world. Yeah, but verse 9, I know it's shocking stuff. But the psalmist did not dig this out of his own heart as an act of vulgar abuse or rage. This is not hate. He is not calling anyone on earth to do this to Babylonian children. He's not saying, let's have a lynching party and let's go whack Babylonian children and be happy about it. That's not what he's saying at all. The psalmist is quoting God's own word back to him and saying, do as thou hast said." I read for you Isaiah 13, which was written before the exile and before Psalm 137. And there in Isaiah 13, God declares his curse over Jerusalem, or over Babylon, including exact payback for what they did to Jerusalem and its citizens and children. In Old Testament punishment, the punishment must fit the crime. God's justice is not one-size-fits-all justice. It is very precise. God promised this would happen to the children of Babylon. And so the psalmist isn't making it up, and he isn't having a temper tantrum. The psalmist is saying, Lord, do as thou hast said. Fulfill thy own word. God gave the singer a word to cling to. when devastated by horrific abuse and trauma, God avenges sin. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The New Testament says, it should make you tremble with awe that His justice is that precise. You don't have to take vengeance when you can pray and sing, Hallelujah, the Lord God, omnipotent, reigns. New Testament Christians can pray imprecatory prayers and sing imprecatory psalms without violating the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's why one man has written a book on these psalms called The War Psalms of the Prince of Peace. In fact, you do so every time you sing the Hallelujah Chorus, every time it brings you to your feet. And so yes, we may pray such prayers at times, even as we also pray other prayers for the repentance and salvation and healing of Hamas and of modern Israel. You may want to ask, but then how then are these endless cycles of violence ever going to end? If Babylon is judged for what they did to Israel, and then the Persians are judged for what they did to Babylon, and then it goes on and on and on. Humanity can't end it. God has to end it. And here I remind you of the correction to the translation. The key word in verses 8 and 9 is not happy, but blessed. Blessed means to have God's favor and approval upon you. And here we may say of Jesus Christ, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord to judge the nations in his righteousness and save his people. The Lord's suffering servant Christ went to hell on the cross to save his people. He comes back as the conquering king, as the lion who imposes precise lasting judgment, who speaks God's final words so that sin and evil are banished from this world forever, never to return. This is why we sing the Hallelujah Chorus. And in the meantime, we may cry out to God and sing Psalm 137 and lament and devote ourselves to his church and cause as our greatest joy and call on him to bring judgment and wrath in his time. Let me give you an example of someone who prayed an imprecatory prayer the right way. In 1964, Simba communist rebels took over the Congo and some soldiers came to a church service in a place called Bunia. They were carrying their AK-47s. And one of them stood up in the service to praise his atheist leader and tell him they should all become communists and atheists. And then he sat down. How do you have a church service after that? If one of the men would stand up and pray, he'd probably get shot. So the pastor asked a lady named Mrs. Fatina Populus Callas to lead the congregation in prayer before the service would start. And she prayed like this in front of these gun-toting terrorists. Lord, we ask you to help us in our hour of great need. You know evil men are in our area. Many are thieves and murderers who beat and kill our people for no reason. Lord, judge these evil men. Bring down your wrath on these evil men. Put the fear of God into them. Save us from such people. And bring us peace and freedom once more, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. And she sat down. The Simba rebels were stunned and didn't know what to do, so they stayed sitting down. The pastor got up, led the service, preached the gospel, and the rebels left quietly. Such prayers can and should be made in Jesus' name and sung to Jesus' praise. So now I ask you, having heard Psalm 137, what is out of tune? The psalmist's harp or your heart? Our lack of such prayers does not prove we're good New Testament Christians, but it proves that we've been infected with the spineless sappiness of our culture. It's not a sign we have good manners, but that we are indifferent to the glory of God. And in so doing, we do not show how refined and spiritual we are, but how little we know of the hot holiness and the glowing, warm compassion and the justice of our God for his people. So you should take psalms like this on your lips, in prayer and in praise. It is the cry of a people the Lord has cast down but not forsaken. And before Him you can pour out your heart and open your wounds and find your hurts healed. You can expect compassion, hope, and justice. Do you see now why we have to be singing psalms and not write our own worship choruses? We need God to write our worship songs because we would never write a psalm like this in our culture and time and place or sing it if God hadn't written and said, I want you to sing it. And so we would miss out on the spiritual instruction and the blessing of knowing the living God as he reveals himself in Psalm 137, the God over which to whom we may say, Hallelujah, for the Lord God omnipotent reigns. Amen.