The Songs of AscentSample

A Generation Who Remembers

Psalm 129

Psalm 129 imagines Israel speaking as an individual whose life stretches back to a childhood in Egyptian slavery: “They have greatly oppressed me from my youth…Plowmen have plowed my back and made their furrows long” (vv. 1, 3).

Oh, what a gift it would be if we could somehow carry with us and remember with our hearts the lessons our parents, grandparents, and grandparents’ grandparents learned—if we could look in the mirror and see their scars! Life doesn’t work like the psalmist’s creative writing. I have tried—in vain—to get my children to understand how blessed they are to have each other, to have both of their parents, and to be healthy. They’re too young to have seen loved ones whose health failed them, and no matter what I say with my words, I cannot convey what it was like to grow up in a broken home.

It’s not just them. I take my blessings for granted too. I have to remind myself that it was just a couple of generations ago that branches of my family tree were replanted in the New World. They came through Ellis Island only carrying what they could fit in a single trunk, struggled through poverty and the stigma of broken English, and somehow built a new life. I am the beneficiary of their courage, but I daily forget.

In Psalm 129, the psalmist envisions his people somehow living with their history on their backs, but we know that they, like us, forgot what their ancestors experienced. The generation who entered the promised land with Joshua stopped telling the stories of God’s great deliverance, and so “another generation grew up who knew neither the Lord nor what he had done for Israel” (Judges 2:10). They forgot God and did whatever evil thing seemed best, entering into repeated cycles of rebellion, consequences, deliverance, and complacency.

This is a pattern we know all too well. The human heart is stubborn, set to automatically and relentlessly wipe away the marks of anything but our sin patterns of choice. So we must return to the truth daily. We must actively remind ourselves of what God has done for our spiritual ancestors and us. We must continually enter into the story of redemption as if we have been personally living it since the beginning. We must live as though the furrows on the backs of the ancient Israelites coming out of Egypt are our own.

Why? Because it’s the truth. Whether we want to believe it or not, we were born into a story already in progress. It’s only an illusion that any of us has a clean slate. You may think that’s unfair, but be careful. It’s that same all-consuming story that allows us to receive salvation. Jesus died once for people throughout history, rescuing those who died in faith before he came and saving people down through the centuries who look back to the cross. The effects of sin are not bound by time, and thankfully, neither is the grace of God.

The psalmist finds faith in his own situation by remembering what the Lord did for his people so many years before: “He has cut me free from the cords of the wicked” (v. 4). You and I can find the same strength when we begin to see ourselves as belonging to the long and winding true story of redemption. What he did for them, he did for us.