The Songs of AscentSample

There’s No Place Like Home

Psalm 120

You can’t go home again. Going back to your hometown often means seeing with your own eyes just how much things have changed over the years. It’s not that everything is unrecognizable. Instead, it’s that not much is quite how you remember it. Even as time erodes what we once knew, there’s something beautiful about returning to a most familiar place, a place that holds our affection. It’s in our DNA. We were made for our true home. We were made for life in God’s presence.

In the ancient world, there were places on the map where God’s presence dwelled for a time—Eden, Sinai, and Shiloh, to name a few, but it was Jerusalem where God’s presence had a house. Solomon built the temple there, and the glory of God filled that place. For that reason, Jerusalem became central to the life and worship of Israel.

Every year, for the major festivals in the fall and spring, the faithful among God’s people would travel to Jerusalem to worship the Lord. Over time, a specific group of psalms became the mixtape for the journey. Psalms 120 through 134 are known as the songs of ascent, likely named so because the final leg of the journey on the traditional route to Jerusalem takes pilgrims on a steep hike.

Psalm 120, which begins this collection, finds the psalmist lamenting just how far he lives from Jerusalem: “Woe to me that I dwell in Meshek, that I live among the tents of Kedar!” (v. 5). The odd thing about the two places he mentions—Meshek and Kedar—is that they’re nowhere near one another. Meshek is in modern-day Turkey, to the northwest of the promised land, while the nomadic tribe of Kedar lived in the southeast of Canaan. It seems the psalmist has chosen these two places not because of their proximity but because of their cultural similarities. Both groups of people “hate peace” (v. 6). Pilgrims heading to Jerusalem for a festival might not be from Meshek or Kedar specifically, but they would be able to relate to the psalmist’s woes. There’s no place like home.

There is peace in God’s presence—overwhelming, inexhaustible, and unending. Peace is the way of the kingdom. See Matthew 5:9 and Isaiah 53:5.

In the Hebrew Old Testament, the word most commonly translated as “peace” is anything but common. Shalom is wholeness and contentment, security and prosperity, health and soundness. In this world, true shalom is hard to come by; it’s easy to feel far away from home. In Christ, there’s no need to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. God makes his home within us through his Holy Spirit. That is why, when talking about the gift of the Spirit, Jesus told his disciples, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you” (John 14:27). The shalom of God’s presence is ours, whether we live among the tents of Kedar or somewhere on the Upper West Side, but we must choose to embrace it.

Like those travelers who chose to make the trek to Jerusalem, you and I must make a conscious decision to practice the peace of God’s presence, embrace the lifestyle of our true home, and live as citizens of the kingdom wherever we are. There’s no place like home. Let’s live like it.