Kept by the Maker of the Mountains

There are a number of mountains there. Mount Ngungun was the smallest one. It was a bit of fitness, but it wasn't really any technical expertise needed. You just hike up, walk up it. Even the kids, we've done that one before, Mount Ngungun, haven't we?

Yep. That's been good fun. We've also done Mount Tibrogargan. Well, not the kids, but myself and some Mishan's done it before with some other young adults. The highest mountain in the range is Mount Beerwah, and you climb up some stairs, you walk up some stairs to the base, and at the base of that mountain, there's this sort of cliff face, and that's probably the most technically difficult part.

There are a number of footings, and you can climb your way up, but it's a little bit scary because it's so steep and if you fall, you could do some damage. Most people don't struggle to make their way up, but it's coming down when most people get a little frightened. Now one day, my wife Michelle and I, but before we were married, before we were even dating, when we were just friends, we went with a whole bunch of young adults from our church and about, I don't know, about 15 of us climbed up Mount Beerwah. And then as we came back down, a number of us were back down at the base, we were watching people scale this cliff face, and my beloved wife Mishan was coming down and she was starting to freak out. She was starting to get pretty scared, shaking.

One of the other young adult guys was saying, okay, yeah, put your foot here and trying to guide her, and at one stage she got so frightened and she started to slip and she put herself against the mountain face and everything, just to, you know, maximise contact and just friction, you know, dragging down the mountain, but the rest of us back here were actually laughing. Now that sounds terrible, but she was only half a metre away from the ground by this point and we were saying, Mishan, you can just jump off the mountain. It's okay. Now mountains can be treacherous places, whether it's in our mind or not. They can be difficult and scary places.

I gave my, my wife gave me permission to share that story. She doesn't take herself too seriously. She's a lovely lovely woman. Mountains can be treacherous places, and as we know from Psalm 121, it starts off by saying, I lift up my eyes to the hills, or in Hebrew, that can mean mountains. It's what we call a psalm of ascent, a song of ascent.

It's one of these 15 songs of ascent that are in the book of Psalms, and these songs of ascent, most scholars would say that they were used by Jewish pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. You see, the Old Testament actually commanded the Israelites to go to Jerusalem three times a year for different worship festivals. They'd have to travel in from all different parts of the country, and those journeys could be treacherous. But as they approached Jerusalem itself, the city itself, I'm not sure if you're aware, but it's quite a mountainous region. That's why it opens up with I lift up my eyes to the hills. It seems like this psalmist, this traveller, he's singing the Psalms of Ascent on his way to Jerusalem, and he sees this hill and he sings this Psalm saying, who's going to help me get through this?

But this psalm isn't just about a literal pilgrimage to Jerusalem, it's also a metaphor for the spiritual journey that we are all on as God's people. In the journey of life, you are going to face some dangerous situations. You are going to feel like sometimes that a slip will lead to certain death, or you're going to be parched for water in the journey and wondering where you're going to get your next drink. And the question in those moments is where do you turn? Where does your help come from?

Now if you're here and you're spiritually seeking, you're not sure you want to take on the label Christian, but you're searching, we're so glad that you're here, and I want you to really consider that question, where does your help come from? If there's a recession and your finances are in jeopardy, or maybe your job is being threatened, or maybe a relational crisis, or your marriage is struggling, where do you find security? Where do you find assurance? Is it money in the bank? Do you often check your internet banking app to see how much you have, or your superannuation balance?

Is it your current health? Do you feel strong and healthy, you feel like you can handle life? Maybe it's your relationships around you. Now, I don't mean to be negative, but those things can be taken away in a moment. The global financial crisis, it took lots of people's fortunes away.

Death comes to us all. Sickness can waste away a healthy body very quickly. And so I want you to really consider God this morning because in this Psalm, He offers you a help that cannot be taken away by the things in this world. And the same for you. If you're a Christian, you might think, the automatic answer is, of course, I trust in God.

He's where my help comes from. But I want you to examine your own heart. Examine your own life. What happens if you have a difficult day at work? Maybe your boss is saying you might get made redundant, or you might be, you know, coming up to be fired, and your finances are going to be in jeopardy.

Where do you go? Do you go straight to the refrigerator for a beer? Do you go straight to Instagram and just scroll through and just sort of distract yourself? Like, where do you go to find comfort and assurance? It might be easy to say we should go to God, but where do you actually go?

Because God offers us something so much better in this psalm today. In Psalm 121, He offers a help to you in Jesus that can never be taken from you. So we're going to open up the psalm together, and there are four stanzas in this psalm, kind of like four sets of stairs in a staircase. There are eight verses, and each group of two is another set of stairs in a staircase, which keeps climbing until it reaches a crescendo in the final two verses. And so we're going to break down the psalm by going through those four sets of stairs.

And the first set of stairs, we hear about the helper who created the hills. The helper who created the hills. So the psalmist begins and says, I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? Like I said, the hills, the mountains can be a treacherous place.

If you were an Israelite travelling through, they didn't have law enforcement and police officers on the roads. There could be robbers. There could be wild beasts. Sometimes in the ancient world, they associated mountains with temples and pagan deities, and they might have worried that there were pagans and evil spiritual forces up in those, associated with those places perhaps. Either way, they were lifting up their eyes and saying, there's some difficult terrain.

I've got to travel. Where is my help going to come from? And the psalmist, he encourages himself. He says, my help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. First of all, he calls God the Lord.

When that is capitalised in your English translation, that is translating the original Hebrew word Yahweh. It's the word God used to describe Himself to Moses at the burning bush. It means I am who I am, that God is the self-existent God. He is like a flame that never dies out. He always is, and He always will be.

And He is the God who has entered into a covenant, or this beautiful promise, with Israel, with God's people. He's a personal, covenant, promise-keeping God. This is who the psalmist lifts his eyes to. I lift up my eyes to the hills, from where does my help come? My help comes from Yahweh, who made heaven and earth.

I love that contrast there. He's looking at the hills and the mountains, but he says, but his God created the hills and the mountains. He made heaven. He made earth. He's made it all.

God created the mountains he has to walk through. God is absolutely sovereign over every difficulty on the journey. God even ordains the trials that we will face. And this is where the pilgrim turns for comfort, not to a God who is kind but impotent and weak, not to a God who just allows things, but a God who is ruling over and determining everything that will happen. The made heaven and earth language is actually fairly famous language.

It comes up in the Apostles' Creed, the maker of heaven and earth. It also comes up in the Heidelberg Catechism, which is a historic summary of Christian faith in question and answer format. And in question 26, it says this: What do you believe when you say, I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth? Here's its answer: That the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who of nothing made heaven and earth with all that is in them, who likewise upholds and governs the same by His eternal counsel and providence, that's a word that means God's guiding all things towards His good ends, it's for the sake of Christ His Son, my God and my Father, in whom I so trust as to have no doubt that He will provide me with all things necessary for body and soul, and further, that whatever evil He sends upon me in this valley of tears, He will turn to my good, for He is able to do it, being almighty God and willing also, being a faithful Father. That's a beautiful answer, and it shows the confidence that we can have in the God who made heaven and earth, who is sovereign over all things, who guides all things towards His good ends.

God is sovereign over the hills and the mountains and the challenges that you and I face. Have you ever considered that whatever hill or mountain is in front of you right now, whether it's your marriage that you're wrestling with and you're like, it's not going as well as it could be, maybe it's your kids, whatever it might be, have you ever considered that maybe God put that hill there? That maybe God has guided this into your life to help you grow or to help you deal with something that needed to be dealt with a long time ago. God is the one who's created the hills and the mountains. It's not that those things are necessarily good things.

Cancer's not a good thing. But God uses all the bad things, guides it all together for His good and perfect ends. Even terrible things like quadriplegia. I think about Joni Eareckson Tada, she's a quadriplegic, she's a lady who was a strong Christian, she had a wonderful life ahead of her, she was full of life, and until a horrible accident she was paralysed, became a quadriplegic. And that was a really difficult wrestle, but over time she began to talk about this accident as something of God's grace.

She's written things like, nothing is a surprise to God, nothing is a setback to His plans, nothing can thwart His purposes, and nothing is beyond His control. And she came to write, my weakness, that is my quadriplegia, is my greatest asset because it forces me into the arms of Christ every single morning when I get up. Incredible words. Joni discovered that even terrible things like quadriplegia are under God's sovereign hand, and she discovered that God turned something horrible into an asset. I'm not calling it a good thing, but God can use even bad things for His good purposes.

Our God is the helper who created the hills. He uses the hills to form us into Christ's image. He uses the hills, even the ones we possibly cannot understand, we cannot possibly see a greater purpose behind them. He uses even them together with everything else in our lives to achieve His good and perfect ends. He's like an artist weaving together this tapestry, and the dark strands, while not good, they eventually serve to make the brighter ones even more beautiful and stand out even more gloriously.

In this first set of stairs in the Psalm, as we climb up the first two, we learn that God is the helper who created the hills. Now another voice enters the Psalm. So notice in the first couple of verses, it's in the first person, who will help me? My God is this God, but then from verses three to eight, it changes to second person. It's like this person comes along the side of the pilgrim, maybe an older, more experienced traveller, and begins to say that here's who your God is.

Your God will never sleep. Your God will never slumber, and so on. And so we're going to be hearing from that elder pilgrim, that more experienced traveller now as he speaks to this younger one on the road to Jerusalem. Let's look at the second set of stairs as the older pilgrim tells us about the watchman who never sleeps. The watchman who never sleeps.

So he comes alongside him and says, he will not let your foot be moved. He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. When you're in the mountains, especially when you're travelling together with your family, with your elderly, with your kids, you can be really scared for your safety. And when you have to take some time to sleep on your journey, you can worry about the dangers that lurk in the darkness.

But the elder is saying to this younger pilgrim here, he's saying, nothing bad will happen to you apart from God's sovereign authority. He won't even permit it. And he talks about how Yahweh, the Lord, will keep you. The Hebrew word behind keep is the word shamar. It means to keep or to guard or to watch, and you notice that word keep in the ESV keeps coming up again and again.

It comes up six times. It's the central theme in this psalm. This psalm is all about the shamar of God, the power of God to protect and to keep and to watch over us. And Yahweh here, the God of Israel, our God, is pictured here as a watchman. Back then, in those ancient times, they would often post watchmen on the outskirts of the city, and they would take different watches of the night, they'd split it into three four-hour blocks, so it'd be like 6PM to 10PM, 10PM to 2AM, and 2AM to 6AM, and so there are different watchers of the night where they would be out there watching to see if there were predators, watching to see if there were people coming to attack at night, and the challenge was night after night after night when nothing was happening, not to grow weary, not to grow sleepy and to doze off on the watch.

And the elder pilgrim is saying to the younger guy here, he's saying, God is like a watchman who never sleeps. He never grows weary. He never grows drowsy. He'll never fall asleep while He is watching over your every step. The Lord, he who keeps you will not slumber, behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

There was a person who once asked Alexander the Great, the Greek general, how can you sleep so soundly at night when there are all these enemies who want to take your life? And Alexander the Great says, well, Parmenio, my faithful general keeps watch over me. So Alexander the Great could sleep soundly. But how much more as God's people, who have the living God watching over you night after night, day after day, can find peace in His shamar, in His care for you. But God is not only the watchman.

There's even more to the shamar of God than His watchful eye. Let's ascend the third set of stairs together and keep building this wonderful song, this melody. So we've seen that God is the helper who created the hills. He's the watchman who never sleeps, and now we're told that He is the protector who stays by your side. Verses five to six, we read, the Lord is your keeper.

The Lord is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. Now travelling in the hot sun, we should have an idea of how difficult that can be as Queenslanders. We've got a very scorching hot sun in this part of the earth, but imagine having to go like these Israelites did to worship in a faraway town, to travel hundreds of kilometres by foot under the hot sun, you don't have sunscreen, there's no air con, you've just got the clothes that you have to try and cover yourself. You'd be at risk of sunstroke, dehydration, all sorts of things.

The sun can be perilous, but the elder is coming along and saying that the Lord is your shade. He is your shade on your right hand. The sun can't even so much as touch your skin if He does not permit it. He is your ever-present protector right by your side. John Paton was a nineteenth century Scottish missionary, and he took great comfort in these teachings about the sovereignty of God and the providence of God, that God was a shade at his right hand, that God guarded his every step.

He spent decades ministering to the cannibalistic tribes of the New Hebrides, what we now call Vanuatu, and on one occasion, he found himself completely encircled by a hostile mob, actually many occasions, but I'm going to read to you about one occasion, and this mob, they were encouraging each other to strike the first blow against him. There were different reasons why they wanted to kill him at times. They had superstitious reasons, so if, like, I'll make up a fake example, if a tsunami hit the island because John Paton was there, they might think, well, maybe it's because he's here and the gods are angry with us, and so we need to kill him. So anyway, the mob came, and they were going to kill him, and it seemed like certain death, and here's what he wrote in his autobiography about this circumstance that he escaped.

He said, they encircled us in a deadly ring, and one kept urging another to strike the first blow or fire the first shot. My heart rose up to the Lord Jesus. I saw Him watching all the scene. My peace came back to me like a wave from God. I realised that I was immortal till my Master's work with me was done.

The assurance came to me as if a voice out of heaven had spoken that not a musket would be fired to wound us, not a club prevailed to strike us, not a spear leave the hand in which it was held vibrating to be thrown, not an arrow leave the bow, or a killing stone the fingers without permission of Jesus Christ, whose is all power in heaven and on earth. John Paton knew God to be his protector right by his side, even when it seemed like certain death. But you know, there's something odd in these verses, verses five to six. I understand why God is needed for shade from the sun, but why does he need to be a shade from the moon? The moon has basically no UV radiation.

It's not hot. Like, why does he need to be a shade from the moonlight? Well, it's actually referring to God's protection from evil spiritual powers. You see, ancient Israelites believed that too much moonlight was bad for you. It could be bad for your health or expose you to evil powers.

You see remnants of this belief even in our own English language. So the word lunatic comes from the Latin luna, which means moon. The idea was that too much moonlight could drive you crazy, and so they had this belief or this understanding that the moon was associated with sometimes evil powers or just getting driven crazy and nuts, and so the elder is saying that the moonlight, whether that represents evil power or not, will not so much as strike you under God's protection. The Lord is your shade on your right hand. He stays close to you.

He shields you from the scorching heat and from the dangers of the darkness. In the final steps of the psalm, the elder gives a stunning picture of the scope of God's protection. In the previous steps, he has said that Yahweh won't sleep on the job. He is watching your every step. Yahweh will stick so close to you so that not even the sun or the moon can strike you apart from His will.

And now in the final couple of steps, he builds into this crescendo. He says that Yahweh will protect you from all evil wherever you are, forever. So we've seen the helper who created the hills, we've seen the watchman who never sleeps, the protector who stays by your side, and now we're told about the God who will bring you home. The God who will bring you home. In verses seven to eight, the psalmist says, the Lord will keep you from all evil.

He will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. It's a stunning, comprehensive picture of God's protection over His people. As people under the new covenant, this new relationship we have with God through Jesus, we don't go to and from literal Jerusalem anymore. We're on a journey with one direction, the new Jerusalem, the new heaven and new earth, the city of Zion, the city of the new Jerusalem.

And this promise says to us that God will bring us all the way home to the city of Zion in all of our travels through this life. Now I know some of you might have been wrestling with tension throughout this sermon thinking, okay, I'm hearing about God's protection, but I feel like sometimes I've stumbled and fallen, and God hasn't protected me from that. Sometimes the sun has struck me and I've been scorched. I've been burnt in this life. How can you really say that God is going to protect you from every bad thing?

Is that what you're saying, Ben? Well, first of all, context helps. The psalm doesn't stand by itself. I said earlier that Psalm 121 is a psalm of ascent. It's a part of a group of 15 psalms, and scholars have noted that they seem to be in groups of three.

The first one expresses the trouble, the second expresses the confidence in God, and the third centres on the temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, which is where their destination is as they travel to Jerusalem. So really, we should be reading these psalms within their groups of three. Psalm 121 is the second in the group. It's the confidence psalm. It's very confident, isn't it?

But before that comes Psalm 120, which finishes with these words. It says, too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war. See, the last psalm dealt with the trouble. Psalm 121 is not denying that there will be trouble in this life.

Psalm 120 deals with the trouble. Psalm 121 is giving us the confidence. Now, if we take into account the context, we're protected from flattening out the psalm to say that God promises we will never experience difficulty or pain. The trouble was expressed in Psalm 120. Eugene Peterson has written a whole book on the Psalms of Ascent, and he says that Psalm 121 teaches us that no injury, no illness, no accident, no distress will have evil power over us.

That is, will be able to separate us from God's purposes in us. It's not that no injury will happen, no illness will happen, but it will not have evil ultimate eternal power over us. So what then are we to expect as followers of Jesus? Well, Eugene writes, the Christian life is not a quiet escape to a garden where we can walk and talk uninterruptedly with our Lord, nor a fantasy trip to a heavenly city where we can compare blue ribbons and gold medals with others who have made it to the winner's circle. The Christian life is going to God.

In going to God, Christians travel the same ground that everyone else walks on, breathe the same air, drink the same water, shop in the same stores, read the same newspapers, are citizens under the same governments, pay the same prices for groceries and fuel, fear the same dangers, are subject to the same pressures, get the same distresses, are buried in the same ground. Christianity is not a ticket out of the difficulties of this world. The difference is that each step we walk, Eugene writes, each breath we breathe, we know we are preserved by God. We know we are accompanied by God. We know we are ruled by God, and therefore, no matter what doubts we endure or what accidents we experience, the Lord will preserve us from evil.

He will keep our life. Christianity is not a ticket out of the difficulties of this world. We continue to exist with everyone else in the difficulties of this world, but we have a God who is watching over us and keeping us until we get all the way home. Now you might say, okay, even if I accept the context that this is not promising a pain-free life, I'm still not sure I can trust these words. It still seems too good to be true.

Well, the answer for this tension is found in Jesus. You see, Jesus was part of a faithful Israelite family, so He grew up travelling to and from Jerusalem for the different worship festivals. We read examples of this in places like Luke 2, where it says, now His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover. Jesus was familiar with travelling to and from. He probably sang these Psalms of Ascent like a faithful Israelite child would.

He knew this Psalm. He knew Psalm 121. It was part of His yearly pilgrimages to Jerusalem. He would have sung it, but in His thirties, Jesus set His face toward Jerusalem one last time. He was there in Jerusalem for the Passover feast like He always was, but this time it was different.

Darkness was surrounding the celebration. And after He ate with His disciples, He went out to a garden to pray, knowing He was about to endure unspeakable horrors on behalf of God's rebellious people. And do you remember what Jesus asked of His three closest friends in that moment? He said, Matthew 26, my soul is very sorrowful, even to death. Remain here and watch with me.

He wanted His closest friends to watch over Him in prayer, to be praying for Him in that time. He wanted people that would not slumber or sleep on the job. But what did they do? They fell asleep time and time again. Jesus, in His darkest hour, was in Jerusalem for the Passover feast, and His friends could not even stay awake to watch over Him in prayer.

Jesus is the one who traversed the darkest valley, who has scaled the most dangerous cliffs, and all the while, as He approached the cross, He had no comforter. He had no friend. He had no watchman tirelessly guarding Him, because the Father gave Him over to judgement. The Father allowed Jesus to serve our sentence for our sin. Jesus is our place-taker.

The Father allowed Jesus' foot to slip and fall into utter damnation at the cross. The Father did not shelter Him from the powers of evil that circled greedily around Him. Why? So that the Lord can keep your going out and coming in from this time forth and forevermore. You see, Jesus broke the curse from over us and defeated the powers of evil against us by taking our place at the cross.

He guarantees our passage through the mountains and the valleys all the way to the new creation. Galatians 3 says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. And Jesus voluntarily chose to become that cursed man, the one who took all the curses of the covenant for the rebellions of God's people. He became a curse to free us from the curse we were under rightfully and to bless us. Do you understand?

Jesus did that for you and for me. He gave up the promises of Psalm 121 to go to the cross so that He could secure the promises of Psalm 121 for you forever. If your faith is in Jesus, you are not promised an easy life, but you are promised that nothing will separate you from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. No tribulation you endure, no distress you experience, no destitution, nothing at all can separate you from God's love in Christ Jesus. Because God forsook the Son, you will never be forsaken as His child.

You may go through dark valleys that feel like God's face is hidden, but He will never forsake you. He will be like a shelter right by your side, closer than anything else, and He will never let you be separated from Him. Life is a treacherous journey, but the maker of heaven and earth will keep you all the way. Psalm 121 urges us to look to our God for help. This is a song to give you confidence when the mountains seem too great.

This is a song to give you assurance when the darkness feels too real. You will never ever be forsaken by Jesus. He already got the end of that stick because He chose to. The maker of heaven and earth will keep you all the way home. Let's pray together.

Now to Him who is able to keep us from stumbling and to present us blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy, to the only God, our Saviour, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen.