By the Rivers of Babylon

Read Psalm 137 in full before proceeding; it is only nine verses. Sit with both its beauty and its horror: the weeping exiles who cannot sing, and the fierce closing cry against Babylon. As you read, ask where the longing for home is really pointing. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

How can we sing a song to the LORD in a foreign land?
Psalm 137:4

We come to the second of the imprecatory psalms, and the most famous (and most shocking) of them all. Psalm 137 holds within its nine verses some of the most beautiful and sorrowful lines in all of Scripture, and the single most terrible line in the whole Bible. It begins with weeping exiles by a foreign river, hanging up their harps, too heartbroken to sing; and it ends with a cry of blessing on whoever would smash Babylon’s babies against the rocks. We will not flinch from either part. We promised, last session, that we would not skip these psalms or be embarrassed by them, and this is the one that tests the promise.

The setting is the great catastrophe of the Old Testament. Babylon had come up against Jerusalem, broken her walls, burned the temple, and carried the people away into exile, torn from the land, from the house of God, from everything that made them who they were. And now they sit by the canals of Babylon, far from home, and weep. It is the grief of the refugee, the deportee, the survivor: the grief of those who have lost not just their comfort but their whole world, and who must live out their days among the very people who destroyed it.

Out of that grief comes the question at the heart of the psalm: How can we sing a song to the LORD in a foreign land? (v. 4). How do you worship when everything is gone? How do you sing the songs of Zion in the rubble of your life, with your captors jeering at you to perform? And then, out of the same grief, comes the fury, a cry for the fall of Babylon so raw that many a reader has shut the book at it. We will ask honestly how such anguished rage found its way into a worship song; we will not pretend the last verse is anything other than terrible; and we will see that it is the cry of people who had watched their own children slaughtered, handing their unbearable wound to God rather than taking it into their own hands.

But the psalm will not finally leave us either in the grief or in the rage. For the exile’s longing for Jerusalem (if I forget you, O Jerusalem … if I do not remember you, and do not give Jerusalem priority over whatever gives me the most joy) is, when we follow it to its end, a longing for a city that no Babylon can ever destroy. And the cry for justice against Babylon is answered, not by an endless cycle of repayment, but at a cross where the curse was borne and a throne from which Babylon the great will fall. The reading instruction asked where the longing for home is really pointing. That is the question this session means to answer.

So we will weep by the rivers of Babylon, and learn that grief too deep to sing is no failure of faith. We will refuse, with the exile, to forget Zion. We will hand the rage at injustice to God, as the last session taught us. And we will lift our eyes past the lost earthly city to the true and lasting Zion, the home Christ has gone to prepare, to which He leads His exiles, and where the tears wept by every river of Babylon will be wiped away forever.

By the rivers of Babylon we sit down and weep when we remember Zion. On the poplars in her midst we hang our harps (vv. 1–2). It is one of the most haunting images in all of Scripture, and it deserves to be felt before it is explained. Picture them: the people of God, far from home, sitting by the irrigation canals of a flat and foreign land, weeping, not for a passing sorrow but for everything. Zion was gone. The temple where God had put His name was a heap of ash. The city, the land, the worship, the whole framework of their life with God had been ripped away. And so the harps, the instruments of praise made for the songs of the festivals, hang silent on the poplar branches (the willows of older translations), because there is no heart left to play them.

And the cruelty of their situation is sharpened by their captors. For there our captors ask us to compose songs; those who mock us demand that we be happy, saying: “Sing for us a song about Zion!” (v. 3). The Babylonians wanted entertainment: sing us one of those famous temple songs, perform your religion for us. It is hard to imagine a crueler demand: to be ordered to sing the joyful songs of the God who, to all appearances, had just failed to save you, for the amusement of the people who destroyed you. The taunt is the same one we have met before in the laments, Where is your God?, now dressed up as a request for a song.

We should not move too quickly past this grief, because it speaks to more believers than we might think. There is the literal exile of the refugee and the displaced, who knows exactly what it is to weep for a lost homeland among strangers. But there is also the exile every Christian comes to know, for the Scriptures call us foreigners and exiles in this world, people whose true home is elsewhere, who live among a culture not our own and feel, increasingly, the ache of not belonging. And there is the personal exile of loss: the believer torn from a life he loved by death, or illness, or ruin, sitting by his own rivers of Babylon, unable to sing. To all of them this psalm says: the grief is real, and it has a place. God’s own prayer book sits down and weeps by the river before it does anything else.

And notice the small phrase that gives the weeping its shape: we sit down and weep when we remember Zion. The tears flow from memory. The exiles weep because they refuse to forget, because they hold the lost city in their hearts even as they sit beside the foreign canals. This remembering is itself an act of faith, and a costly one. The easy thing in exile is to forget: to let Babylon become home, to assimilate, to stop aching for Zion and settle comfortably among the willows. To go on remembering is to keep the wound open, but it is also to keep the hope alive, for you cannot long for a home you have allowed yourself to forget. There is even a quiet contrast buried in the geography. Babylon was a land of great rivers, and beside them the exiles wept; but another psalm sings of a different stream: The river’s channels bring joy to the city of God. The rivers of Babylon water the tears of exile; the river of the city of God waters its joy. The believer who sits weeping by the one must keep remembering the other, or the foreign land will swallow him.

How Shall We Sing the LORD’s Song?

How can we sing a song to the LORD in a foreign land? (v. 4). It is the cry of a grief so deep it has silenced worship. There are seasons when a believer simply cannot sing, when the praise that once came easily dries up in the throat, when the old songs feel impossible in the strange new country of grief or loss or exile. The psalm does not scold that silence. It honors it. Sometimes the most honest thing faith can do is hang the harp on the willow and admit it cannot, just now, sing.

And yet here is a quiet wonder we must not miss: the very lament that asks how can we sing? became itself a song. Psalm 137 was set to music and sung by the people of God; the cry that worship had fallen silent became part of the church’s worship. This is what God does again and again in the Psalter: He takes the words of those who cannot sing and makes of them a song. The exile thought he had no song left, and the lament over his lost song turned out to be one. So with us: when grief silences the old praise, God gives new words (the words of honest lament), and even our we cannot sing becomes, in His hands, a kind of singing. The harp is not gone for good. It is only hung up for a while.

There is a deeper answer still to the exile’s question, one he could not yet see. How can we sing a song to the LORD in a foreign land? As it turned out, gloriously. For the very scattering that felt like the end became the seedbed of the song’s spread; the LORD’s praise would one day be sung in every foreign land on earth, in every tongue under heaven, as the gospel went out to the nations. The Lord Jesus Himself came into the foreign land of our exile, into a world that was not His home, a stranger with nowhere to lay His head, and sang the Father’s praise in it, and taught a fallen world the songs of Zion. The foreign land is not, in the end, a place where the LORD’s song cannot be sung. It is the place to which He sent the song, so that exiles of every nation might learn it and be brought home.

There is a further mercy that the exile could not have foreseen as he hung up his harp. The very catastrophe that silenced the temple songs taught God’s people that His presence was never finally tied to a building. With the temple in ashes and no altar to approach, the exiles learned to gather around the word of God, to pray and hear the Scriptures read in the foreign land, and out of that hard schooling grew a worship that did not depend on bricks and a particular hill. It was a painful lesson, but a true one, and the Lord Jesus would one day state it openly: the hour was coming, He told a woman at a well, when true worshipers would worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem only, but in spirit and truth. The God of Zion could be worshiped by the rivers of Babylon after all, not because Zion did not matter, but because the God of Zion is not a local deity bound to a single address. He is everywhere His word is, and everywhere His people call on Him; and the exile who thought he had been cut off from God’s presence was about to learn how near that presence still was, even in Babylon.

If I Forget You, O Jerusalem

At the center of the psalm is a vow, and it burns with love. If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand be crippled! May my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, and do not give Jerusalem priority over whatever gives me the most joy (vv. 5–6). The exile binds himself with the fiercest of oaths: may the hand that plays the harp be crippled, may the tongue that sings fall silent forever, if he ever lets Jerusalem slip from his memory. Zion is not merely one of his joys; it takes priority over whatever gives him the most joy (older translations say above my highest joy), the love that orders all his other loves. Far from home, stripped of everything, he refuses to let go of the one thing that matters most: the city where God dwelt among His people.

And this is where the psalm begins to lift our eyes, because that fierce love for Jerusalem was never really about bricks and walls. Jerusalem mattered because God was there, because it was the place of His presence, His worship, His dwelling among His people. And the earthly Jerusalem, as the exile had just learned the hard way, could be burned to the ground. So the longing this vow expresses reaches past the city that could be destroyed toward the one that cannot. The book of Hebrews says it plainly to Christians: you have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem; and again, here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come. The true Zion, the Jerusalem above, the city whose architect and builder is God: that is the home the exile’s heart was really aching for, and it is the home no Babylon can ever lay bare.

This reorders the believer’s loves the way the exile’s were reordered, but without the need for a catastrophe to do it. We are to set the city of God above our highest earthly joy, not because our earthly joys are nothing, but because they are not home, and were never meant to be. Every Christian is, at heart, an exile who has not forgotten Zion, who holds the memory and the hope of the true home above every comfort this foreign land can offer, and who would rather lose his right hand than lose his grip on the city that is to come. The exile’s vow is the pilgrim’s heart: If I forget you, O Jerusalem (the Jerusalem above), let everything else go first.

And there is one more turn the gospel gives to the exile’s longing, deeper than the heavenly city itself. Jerusalem was precious because God dwelt there; the temple was the place where heaven touched earth, where God put His name to be near His people. And the New Testament announces something that would have stopped the exile’s heart: that presence has come to dwell among us, not in a building but in a Person. The Word became flesh and took up residence among us; the Greek says He tabernacled among us, pitched His tent in our midst, as God once dwelt in the tabernacle and the temple. When men pointed to the temple, the Lord Jesus said, Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again, and He was speaking, John tells us, of the temple of His body. The place where God now dwells with His people is Christ Himself. So the exile’s ache for the house of God, his refusal to forget the place of the divine presence, is answered beyond his dreams: the presence he longed for took flesh, and in the risen Christ the true temple can never be burned, never be carried into exile, never be lost. To set Jerusalem above our highest joy is, in the end, to set Christ above it, for He is the presence the city was only ever pointing to.

Doomed to Be Destroyed

And then the psalm turns to its fury, and we will not soften it. Remember, O LORD, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. They said, “Tear it down, tear it down, right to its very foundation!” (v. 7). First the cry is against Edom: Israel’s kindred neighbors, who had stood by and cheered as Jerusalem fell, egging on the destroyers. And notice the direction of the cry, exactly as in the last psalm: Remember, O LORD. The exile does not march on Edom; he asks God to remember. The judgment is handed upward, not seized.

Then the cry turns against Babylon herself, and reaches the line that has stopped readers cold for centuries. O daughter Babylon, soon to be devastated! How blessed will be the one who repays you for what you dished out to us! How blessed will be the one who grabs your babies and smashes them on a rock! (vv. 8–9). There is no use pretending this is gentle. It is the most terrible sentence in the Bible. But we must understand what it is, and what it is not. It is not a program; it is a cry, wrung from people who had watched Babylon’s soldiers do this very thing to their own children, in the streets of the burning city. The horror in verse 9 is a horror Babylon committed first; the exiles are crying for the one thing the ancient world recognized as justice, that the atrocity Babylon inflicted should return upon Babylon, measure for measure, repayment for what you dished out to us. It is the scream of the genocide’s survivors, and they scream it not as a vow of vengeance they will carry out, but as a cry laid before God, who alone may judge.

Two things keep this from being mere bloodlust, terrible as it remains. First, the words soon to be devastated (older translations, doomed to be destroyed): Babylon’s fall was not the exile’s invention but God’s own announced verdict; the prophets had already foretold that what Babylon did to the nations would be done to her. The exile is praying that God’s revealed justice come to pass, not dreaming up a private revenge. Second, and most importantly, the cry is handed to God. The survivors of Babylon’s atrocities did not take up the sword and ride east to do to Babylon’s children what had been done to theirs. They wept, and they prayed, and they left the judgment with the LORD. That the rawest, most savage wound a human being can suffer (the murder of one’s children) is brought to God in prayer rather than answered with one’s own hands is not the failure of the psalm. It is, however terribly, its faith. The Bible gives even this a place: not to commend the horror, but to show that there is no anguish so deep, no wound so savage, that it cannot be carried to God and left in His hands.

We do need to be plain about how a Christian does and does not pray this now. We do not pray the ninth verse against anyone: not against a personal enemy, not against a nation, not against any child of any Babylon. To wish such a thing on a living soul would be monstrous, and the Lord Jesus has expressly forbidden it, telling us to love our enemies and bless those who curse us. What we may do (what the psalm finally teaches us to do) is to bring our real and terrible wounds to God without dressing them up, to cry out for His justice against the evil that has crushed us, and then to leave both the wound and the judgment in His hands, trusting Him to be more just than we could ever be and more merciful than we would ever think to be. The survivors of Babylon prayed their anguish and entrusted the verdict to God; they did not ride out to repay. That is the line we may not cross either. We may pray our pain. We may long for justice. We may not appoint ourselves the hand that brings it; and we are bidden, even as we cry for justice, to pray that our enemy might be met not with the rock but with the mercy that found us.

The True Zion

So how does this psalm find its peace, and where does the gospel meet it? It meets it in three places. The first is this: the cry for justice against Babylon is answered. Babylon was soon to be devastated, and she was; and the Scriptures take that fall and make of it a picture of the end of all evil. In the book of Revelation, Babylon the great falls at last: every empire of cruelty and oppression, the whole city of man set against God, brought down in a single hour, and heaven rejoices that God has judged her and avenged the blood of His people. The exile’s cry is not left unanswered. God does not forget the day of Jerusalem, or the children of the slain, or any of the unpunished atrocities of history. Every one of them will be judged, perfectly, by the One to whom vengeance belongs.

The second place the gospel meets this psalm is at the cross, and here the cycle is broken. The terrible logic of verse 9 is the logic of repayment: you smashed our little ones, so let yours be smashed; measure for measure, the wound passed back and forth forever. The cross shatters that cycle. There the curse the wronged cry down (the just judgment all this evil deserves) fell instead upon the Lord Jesus, who bore it in the place of sinners, so that the endless repayment might stop. And the staggering result is that the gospel then goes out to Babylon, to the children of the very people whose destruction this psalm cries for. In Christ, a Babylonian may become a brother; the daughter of the destroyers may be born again a daughter of God. The Magi who came to worship the infant Christ came from the lands of the old enemy; at Pentecost the gospel was preached to dwellers in Mesopotamia; and the great multitude before the throne is gathered from every nation, Babylon’s descendants among them. The cross does what the lex talionis never could: it offers the enemy not the rock but redemption.

And the third place is the true Zion, which is where the whole psalm has been pointing. The exile wept for a lost Jerusalem and vowed never to forget it, and the gospel tells him that the real Jerusalem, the one his heart was made for, can never be lost at all. The Lord Jesus entered our exile, was cast out of the city to die outside the camp, and has gone to prepare a place for His people: a city with foundations, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven, where God dwells with His people and will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more, or mourning, or crying, or pain. That is the home the exiles by the river were aching for without knowing its full name. Every tear wept by every river of Babylon (the tears of the deported, the bereaved, the survivors of every atrocity) will be wiped away by God’s own hand in the Zion that no Babylon can ever burn. The longing for home was pointing there all along.

And that homecoming is not a wish but a certainty, because the way home has already been opened and the destination already secured. The Lord Jesus did not merely point to the city; He went into it ahead of us. He has entered, as the Scriptures say, behind the veil as a forerunner on our behalf, the first of the exiles to reach the homeland, who has gone to prepare a place for the rest and promised to come again and take us to Himself. The believer’s hope of home is therefore not the vague yearning of an exile who has no idea whether he will ever get back; it is the settled confidence of one whose elder Brother has already arrived and is keeping a place for him. The grief by the rivers is real, and it may last a long time, but it sits inside a guaranteed homecoming. The harps are hung on the willows for the length of the exile, but the exile has an end, the road home has been walked and opened by Christ, and the day is coming when the redeemed will take their harps down again and sing the songs of Zion in Zion itself, with no captor to mock and no tear left to weep.

Weeping by the Rivers, Longing for Home

So we learn, from this hardest of psalms, how to be exiles. We learn to weep, and to weep honestly, for the grief of loss is real, and the God who gave us this psalm does not stand aloof from it: in His Son He wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41) and stood weeping at a friend’s grave (John 11:35). We do not have to pretend that what was lost was nothing, or that the foreign land is home, or that we can always sing. Sometimes the faithful thing is to hang the harp on the willow for a season and grieve. But we grieve as those who have not forgotten Zion, who hold the true home above our highest earthly joy, and would let everything else go before we let go of it.

We learn, too, what to do with the rage that real injustice produces, and it is what the last psalm taught us: not to take vengeance, not to bury the wound in bitterness, but to hand it to God, to bring even the most savage anguish into His presence and leave the judgment with Him, trusting that He sees, that He remembers, and that He will set every account right in His time. The cry for justice is not sub-Christian; it is the groan of a wronged creation for the day God will judge all evil. We are allowed to pray it. We are only forbidden to execute it ourselves.

And this shapes the whole way a Christian lives in the meantime, here in the foreign land. We are resident aliens, at home enough to weep over this world’s sorrows and work for its good, but never so at home that we forget we are only passing through. We hold Babylon’s comforts loosely, knowing they are not the city we are bound for; we invest our deepest treasure in the things of Zion, which cannot be carried off or burned; and we live with the settled, unhurried hope of people who know that the exile is temporary and the homecoming is sure. The early Christians were described as living in their own countries, but only as sojourners, sharing in all things as citizens, and enduring all things as strangers, because every foreign land was their homeland and their homeland a foreign land. That is the pilgrim posture this psalm teaches: not to despise the country we pass through, and not to mistake it for home; to grieve its griefs and resist its evils, while keeping our eyes fixed on the city whose architect and builder is God.

And above all we learn to long for home: to lift our eyes from the rivers of Babylon to the city that is to come, and to let that longing shape the way we live as exiles here. The Christian is a pilgrim with Jerusalem in his heart, weeping where there is cause to weep, refusing to forget the home he is bound for, handing the world’s injustice to the God who will judge it, and singing (even in the foreign land, even with a catch in the throat) the songs of a Zion he has not yet seen but will not, for anything, forget. The harps are hung on the willows only for a while. There is a homecoming coming, and a city that cannot be shaken, and a God who will wipe away every tear; and the exile who has set that Jerusalem above his highest joy will not be put to shame.

Gathering the Threads

We took up the most famous and most shocking of the imprecatory psalms, and refused to flinch from either its beauty or its horror. We wept with the exiles by the rivers of Babylon (torn from Zion, their harps hung silent on the willows, mocked by their captors to sing the songs of a God who seemed to have failed them) and learned that grief too deep to sing is no failure of faith, that God’s prayer book sits down and weeps before it does anything else, and that even the lament how can we sing? became, in God’s hands, a song. We heard the exile’s burning vow never to forget Jerusalem, to set it above his highest joy, and saw that the longing was really for a city no Babylon could burn: the heavenly Jerusalem, the home the believer’s heart is made for.

We faced the terrible closing cry without softening it. It was the scream of people who had watched their own children slaughtered, longing for the measure-for-measure justice the ancient world knew, against a Babylon God had already doomed to destruction; and we saw that even this they handed to God rather than seizing with their own hands, so that the Bible gives even the most savage wound a place at the throne of grace. And we found the gospel meeting the psalm in three ways: in the certain fall of Babylon the great, where every unpunished atrocity is at last judged; at the cross, where the curse was borne and the endless cycle of repayment broken, so that even Babylon’s children might become God’s; and in the true Zion, the city that is to come, to which the Lord Jesus leads His exiles and where every tear wept by every river of Babylon will be wiped away. The longing for home was pointing there all along. And so we weep, and refuse to forget, and hand the rage to God, and long for the city that cannot be shaken.

For Discussion

Psalm 137 opens with one of the most sorrowful images in Scripture: exiles weeping by the rivers of Babylon, their harps hung up, mocked by their captors. What does it teach us about grief so deep that worship falls silent, and about the loss of home?
How can we sing a song to the LORD in a foreign land? (v. 4). The exiles felt they could not sing, yet this very lament became one of the church’s songs. What does it mean that even we cannot sing became a song, and how does God give His people words for the dark?
The exile vows never to forget Jerusalem, giving it priority over whatever gives me the most joy (vv. 5–6). For the Christian, where is the true and lasting Zion (Hebrews 12:22; 13:14), and how does the exile’s longing for home point to the believer’s longing for it?
The psalm ends with the most shocking line in the Bible: a cry that Babylon suffer the very atrocity Babylon had inflicted on Jerusalem’s children. How does it help to understand this as the raw cry of genocide’s survivors, handed to God for justice rather than taken in their own hands, and why might the Bible include even this?
Babylon soon to be devastated (v. 8) is finally answered in Revelation, where Babylon the great falls; yet the gospel also goes out to Babylon, so that even an enemy’s children may become God’s children. How does the cross break the cycle of repayment that the lex talionis keeps going?
The believer is, in a sense, an exile in this world (1 Peter 2:11), weeping in Babylon but longing for home. How do we hold together honest grief over what is lost, a refusal to forget Zion, and hope for the city that cannot be shaken?

Looking Ahead

Psalm 137 left us weeping for a lost Jerusalem and longing for the road home. The next session sets our feet on that road. We turn to the Songs of Ascents, the little collection of pilgrim psalms (Psalms 120 through 134) that Israel sang as they journeyed up to Jerusalem for the great festivals, climbing the hill country toward the city of God. Where Psalm 137 wept by Babylon’s rivers, the Ascents walk the pilgrim road toward Zion.

We begin with the best-loved of them, Psalm 121: I look up toward the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the LORD, the Creator of heaven and earth. It is the song of a traveler looking up at the dangerous hills between him and the holy city, and finding his confidence not in the hills but in the One who made them: Israel’s Protector, who does not sleep or slumber, who guards the pilgrim’s every step by day and night, in all he does. After the long grief of exile, we will learn the songs of the road home, and the keeping of the God who walks it with us.

Read Psalm 121 in full before the next session; it is only eight verses. Notice how often the word *protect* (or *protector*) appears, and to whom the pilgrim looks for help as he sets out on the long road up to the city of God.

Closing Prayer

O LORD, You see Your people weeping by the rivers of Babylon, and You do not despise our grief. When we have lost what we loved, when worship dies in our throats, when we sit among strangers far from home, meet us there as the Savior who wept over Jerusalem and does not despise the tears of His people. Teach us to grieve honestly, and yet never to forget Zion: to set the city of God above our highest joy, and to long for the home that no enemy can ever burn.
We bring You the rage that injustice stirs in us, and the wounds too savage to bear, and we lay them in Your hands, for vengeance belongs to You, and You will judge all evil in Your time. We thank You that the curse our sins deserved fell upon Your Son, who entered our exile and was cast out to die outside the gate, and that in Him the endless cycle of repayment is broken, so that even our enemies may become our brothers, and the children of Babylon may be born again as Your own. Lead us home, we pray, to the true Jerusalem, the city that is to come, where You will wipe away every tear from our eyes and there will be no more weeping by any river. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who has gone to prepare a place for us, and who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.