“Help from the Hills?” – FBC Morning Light (9/26/2024)

What a good Thursday morning to you. Today we're reading in the Psalms again, will be for the rest of this week. Psalms 120 and 21, Psalm 123 and Psalm 125. I want to focus on Psalm 121 today. You know, recently my wife and I were at a conference and vacation time out in California, Southern California.

We flew into San Diego and spent a few days up in in Palm Desert, in the heat of the desert, and then the conference was in Riverside, California. Now, when we were we flew out there, and as we flew, every once in a while I'd look out the window of the plane and from, you know, Chicago, O 'Hare, through Iowa, Nebraska, and so forth you're flying over these, maybe Kansas, I don't I don't even know offhand what states we were flying over in that region, but everything's just really flat.

Then you get to the Rockies, the Rocky Mountains, and then the topography gets to be interesting for the rest of the trip. Then when we got to California, flying into San Diego, you fly over some mountains, and then driving from San Diego up to Palm Desert, you get to this one section where you're looking up, and you have to drive through this mountain and through the mountain roads with the switchbacks and all the rest that kind of stuff, and you got to go 30 miles an hour, and it's just pretty intense, and you get down in the desert, and you get down in the desert, and to the west and to the east, you just see mountains.

I love the mountains. I love looking up at the mountains, and I love climbing and hiking in the mountains, and so forth. We did that one particular day, but I almost always, when I'm in a setting like that, I'm reminded of Psalm 121, because it begins with, in this way, I will lift up my eyes unto the hills.

From whence comes my help. Where's my help come from? I lift up my eyes unto the hills, and it reminds me where my help comes from. Now, what's the connection here between the hills and the help? Well, in the time that the psalmist wrote this, it was often the high places and the hills where altars to various gods were set up.

The thinking was that you get up on a high place, up on a hill, and you're closer to heaven, you've got closer access to the gods, and the psalmist is saying, is my help coming from up there, the altars to the gods?

Where does my help come from? He says, my help comes from the Lord. If you know Christ as your Savior, and you're following in fear the God of the Bible, you don't have to look to the hills for help. Hills representing the gods of this world, the gods of our own making.

You don't have to look to them, and you must not look to them. Well, where can you look? To the Lord. Why can you look to him? He goes on to say, because he made heaven and earth. His point is that he's the all-powerful one.

He goes on in the psalm to recount several ways in which this God, who is the all-powerful one, the creator of all things, is a very personal God, because he says he will not allow your foot to be moved.

He will protect you. He never sleeps. He doesn't slumber. He is always watching over you. He is your keeper, that is, your protector. He is your guardian. He's your shade at your right hand. He is your protector, is the emphasis there.

He will protect you from the heat of the sun and the cold of the night, the emphasis being simply the idea of protection. And he says in verse 7, the Lord shall preserve you from all evil or all calamity.

He shall preserve your soul. You say, well, you know, we experience calamity, Christians experience calamity. Well, the emphasis of that preserving you from all calamity is the second part of the verse.

He will preserve your soul. So even though, yes, God's people do experience calamitous occasions and events in their lives, and sometimes perish in those calamities, the Lord preserves the soul of his own.

And he says, the Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore. Yes, we can look to the Lord for our help, because he is our great, faithful, all-powerful preserver of life and vitality and health and strength and our eternal soul.

Let's praise him who is our help. We thank you today, Father, that we don't need to look to the hills for help. We can simply look to you. I pray that we would be faithful to do so. You have encouraged us to always come to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in our times of need.

May we trust in you, our faithful help. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, well, listen, have a good rest of your Thursday. I trust the Lord will bless you in it. Good day.