If . . . Then.

What Happens If the Lord Is Not on Our Side?

If . . . then.

— Psalm 124

There are two little words in Psalm 124 that caught my attention.

If. Then.

The Psalm begins with the condition: “If the Lord had not been on our side.” Then it says it again, as though the congregation itself is supposed to pick up the thought: “Let Israel now say: If the Lord had not been on our side.”

If.

Everything that follows depends upon that.

I've been thinking lately about shalom, the peace of God that is whole, complete and properly aligned. Yesterday Isaiah gave us three simple instructions: Listen. Look. Lift. Before we run out to make everything right, turn toward God.

Psalm 124 goes farther. It asks us to contemplate what would happen if God weren't there at all.

And the answer isn't pleasant.

If the Lord had not been on our side, then our enemies would have swallowed us alive. The waters would have overwhelmed us. The torrent would have gone over us. We would have become prey between somebody else's teeth.

There isn't much room here for self-sufficiency.

That reminds me of another expression from Scripture that can sound strange to modern ears: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” I've come to hear poor there in its most unsettling sense. The poor don't have enough. They cannot simply reach into their own resources and produce whatever they need.

Spiritually, neither can I.

I like to imagine that I have accumulated enough wisdom, experience, education and skill to handle whatever comes along. Perhaps if I'm sufficiently careful, financially responsible, healthy, knowledgeable and socially adept, I can keep the machinery operating indefinitely.

But I can't.

Neither can you.

Something eventually gets us.

That's not pessimism. It's mortality. Every person who has ever accumulated enough wealth to feel secure eventually died. Every great athlete eventually lost the physical ability that made him extraordinary. Every brilliant mind eventually confronted something it could not solve. Every civilization eventually discovered that it was not permanent.

Eventually even the earth consumes us. “Dust you are, and to dust you shall return.”

We're goners.

That's what makes the if so important.

If the Lord had not been on our side.

The Psalm isn't really telling me that sufficiently religious people will escape every enemy, illness, flood or disaster. The people who first sang it still died. So have generations of faithful people since.

Rather, it destroys the illusion that ultimately I can save myself.

I can't.

And perhaps that is why people who don't believe in God intrigue me when the subject of death arises. We share exactly the same predicament. Whatever else we believe, none of us has discovered a technique for escaping mortality. We can postpone death, avoid unnecessary risks, improve medicine and increase life expectancy, but eventually we reach the same wall.

The Christian claim is not that we've figured out how to climb it.

It's that God has.

And suddenly the structure of Psalm 124 begins sounding very different.

If everything ultimately depends upon me, then I'm lost.

If everything ultimately depends upon my strength, then I'm lost. If it depends upon my intelligence, money, health, family, government, church, technology or good fortune, then sooner or later the waters go over my head.

But if the Lord is on my side—

Then the story isn't finished when the waters rise.

The Psalm eventually gives us another image. A bird has been caught in a snare, and somehow the snare breaks.

“The snare is broken, and we have escaped.”

I like that.

The bird didn't become stronger than the trap. It didn't develop a clever escape plan. Something happened to the snare.

And it was free.

Maybe that's where shalom begins too. Not with confidence that I finally have everything under control, but with the freedom of admitting that I never did.

My help is not in myself.

“Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

We're goners.

Except—

if.