People can usually be divided into one of two groups. Either they are optimists or pessimists. The glass is either half empty or half full. They either see all of the clouds, or they will notice the sun peeking from behind the clouds. I, myself, tend to lean towards pessimism, and I have to be careful with myself or else I can easily become a “Negative Nellie”. In our psalm reading today, despite anything that has happened in the psalmist’s past, he chooses to be positive. Though a short psalm, it is a very uplifting one. Let’s look it over.
The setting of this short psalm is likely following the Jewish people’s captivity in Babylon, written after they began to return to their Promised Land (Ezra 1), or following some other captivity. Some scholars have suggested that it possibly could refer to when God delivered Jerusalem from conquest by Sennacherib, the Assyrian emperor who had defeated and overrun the northern kingdom of Israel (II Kings 19:20-35). Whatever the background for this psalm is, the author and his friends are a joyous and praise-filled group.
As the psalm opens, our psalmist is proclaiming that the people’s release from captivity is like a dream come true (vs. 1-3). They are laughing and singing for joy. Some people only like to focus on the nightmares, not the good dreams. Sure, they are being set free, but rather than rejoice over that, they prefer to harp on the bad time they had while in captivity. They lost their nice home. They had to work in a job they didn’t like over in Babylon. The food was strange. They didn’t know the language. On and on they go. They don’t see the good dream, the things to rejoice over. They can only see the nightmare.
Unfortunately, this is also the case with some Christians. They can only look on the dark side of everything. They dwell more on their trials than on what God has done for them. A spiritually healthy Christian will dwell on the honor of God, and how He has brought them out of a pit, and set them upon a rock higher than them (Psalm 61:2). We do have afflictions in life, but God delivers us out of them. The deeper our troubles , the louder our thanks to God should be. As believers and followers of the Lord Jesus, our focus should be like these people in verse 3, focusing on what great things the Lord has done for us. There is never a day that we cannot find many blessings that the Lord gives us, beginning with the greatest one, when the Lord Jesus set us free from the captivity of sin and Satan, and brought us salvation.
The psalmist then speaks of our sowing in tears, but reaping in joy (vs. 5-6). The past sins of the people had brought about their captivity, which were years of tears for them. However, when they turned their hearts around, returning to the Lord, they could reap His joy. We also find hardships in life, along with pain and trouble. Some of them are caused by our own actions, and some that just come upon us because we live in a fallen world. For those who know and love God, our tears are seeds that will one day bloom into joy. Our tears can be seeds that will grow into a harvest of joy, because God is able to bring good out of tragedy.
Verses 5 and 6 can also have another way of looking at them. The Lord Jesus referred to the Word of God as being seed in His parable of The Sower (Matthew 13:3-23). Many, many times we bring the Word of God to our lost friends and relatives, and others, yet they resist and refuse to listen or accept Jesus as their personal Savior. This brings us heartache, sorrow, and tears. Yet we should never give up witnessing and praying for them, as one day our witnessing may bear fruit and bring in a harvest. The more we witness and pray in tears, the more we will return bringing our sheaves (the souls of the newly saved) with us.
God does great things in our lives, and we should be open and aware of them, acknowledging them with praise and thankfulness. His power not only releases us from sin’s captive hold, but brings us back to Him. Be patient. God’s great harvest of joy is coming!
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