Never slumbers

My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to be moved;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Shall neither slumber nor sleep.
The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade at your right hand. – Psalm 121.2-5

I love this psalm. It is one of my favourite to preach on. The psalm speaks of Israel returning to Jerusalem and looking up to the hills of Jerusalem. As they did they considered where their help really came from. It wasn’t Jerusalem – ‘my help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.’

Then follows a great description of who that Lord is.

The Maker of heaven and earth
The one who gives us stability
And the Keeper of Israel

Now I do understand that we cannot take every promise to Israel and claim them for the church, but here Israel only illustrates that God keeps His people, and the church is God’s people.

I could write for a while here about the various aspects of ‘the Keeper’ but I want to centre on the idea of our keeper’s vigilance.

Not only does our keeper not fall asleep, He won’t even slumber.

We all know what it is like to slumber. It is the same notion as what it means to doze off. Slumbering, or dozing off, is something that I am well practised at. I do pretty well in conversation, normally, but I am a notorious dozer when it comes to television.

Mary and I like to watch ‘Murder She Wrote’ when it was on television here. Well, I should say Mary like to watch and I like to try to watch. It seems like every single episode I would doze off just as the key event happened or at the end when Jessica was explaining it. I have so many times had to ask, ‘what happened, I missed it?’ Or sometimes I just do without and fake it.

This passage reminds us that God doesn’t doze off. He doesn’t miss anything. He doesn’t miss the key events. He never has to say ‘what did I miss?’ Nothing, ever, is going to catch Him off guard. He is our keeper.

No matter what is going on in our lives, or what has gone on in the past, or what is going to come in the future, catches God having a doze. Our keeper always keeps.