I Was Glad

Read Psalm 122 in full before proceeding; it is only nine verses. Notice the gladness with which the pilgrim arrives at the house of the LORD, and the prayer for Jerusalem’s peace that closes the psalm. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! May those who love her prosper!
Psalm 122:6

The road is behind him now. In the last psalm the pilgrim was setting out, lifting his eyes to the dangerous hills and trusting the Keeper who would not let his foot slip. Here he has arrived. The long climb up to the holy city is over, and the very first thing out of his mouth is joy: I was glad because they said to me, “We will go to the LORD’s temple.” Our feet are standing inside your gates, O Jerusalem (vv. 1–2). The Hebrew word the NET renders temple is literally house: the house of the LORD. He stands at last inside the gates of the city of God, and his heart overflows. This is a psalm of arrival, and its great theme is gladness: the gladness of coming, with the people of God, to the house of God.

We should feel the warmth of that before we analyze it, because it is a note the modern believer badly needs to recover. Here is a man who is glad to go to worship. He is not dutifully resigned to it, not dragging himself there out of obligation, but glad, the way you are glad at the news of a feast or a homecoming. The mere invitation lit him up: we will go to the LORD’s temple, and his heart leapt. And now that he is there, standing within the gates, the gladness has only deepened. The whole psalm is the song of someone who loves the house of God and the gathered worship of God’s people.

And it is, throughout, a song of the people: not the solitary believer but the assembled congregation. The pilgrim did not climb alone; he came with the caravan, summoned by others (they said to me, “We will go”). He arrives at a city designed to accommodate an assembly, the place where the tribes go up to give thanks. This is worship as God designed it: not a private spirituality practiced in isolation, but the gathering of the whole people of God in one place to praise His name together. The gladness of Psalm 122 is a shared gladness, the joy of belonging to a worshiping people.

It is worth remembering, too, that this gladness came on a rhythm. The pilgrim went up to Jerusalem not once in a lifetime but again and again, three times a year, every year, as the festivals came round. Worship was the recurring punctuation of Israel’s life, the regular returning to the house of God that gave shape and meaning to all the ordinary weeks between. The church keeps the same rhythm, gathered now not three times a year but every Lord’s Day, the weekly festival of the resurrection, when the people of God come again to the house of God to be met with His gifts. We are creatures of habit, and our habits form us; the habit of regular worship, returning week by week to hear the word and receive the sacrament among the people of God, is one of the chief means by which a pilgrim’s heart is kept glad and his feet kept on the road. The gladness of Psalm 122 is not a once-in-a-lifetime rapture but the renewable joy of a people who keep coming back.

The psalm has three movements. First the gladness of arrival at the house of the LORD (vv. 1–2). Then a brief portrait of what Jerusalem is: the city bound together, where the tribes gather to give thanks, where the throne of David is set (vv. 3–5). And finally a prayer for the city’s peace, pray for the peace of Jerusalem, sought for the sake of the brothers and for the sake of the house of God (vv. 6–9). Gladness, gathering, and a prayer for peace: that is the shape of it.

But we read it, as we read all the Psalms, with the question the whole series turns on: where is the house of the LORD, and where is Jerusalem, for us? The earthly temple is long gone, the city razed and rebuilt and contested ever since. And the answer the New Testament gives will lift this homely pilgrim song into something far larger, for the true house of the LORD is now the Lord Jesus Himself and the people gathered into Him, and the true Jerusalem is the city that is to come. We will arrive, with the pilgrim, at the house of the LORD, and learn to be glad.

I was glad because they said to me, “We will go to the LORD’s temple” (v. 1). Hear where the gladness falls: not on the arrival, not yet, but on the invitation. He was glad the moment the words were spoken, glad at the very prospect of going. The thought of the house of God was enough to lift his heart before he had taken a single step. There is a diagnostic in that for every one of us. What is our response when we hear we will go to the LORD’s temple? For the pilgrim it was instant joy. For many of us, if we are honest, it is something nearer to obligation: a thing we ought to do, a box to be checked, a morning we might rather spend otherwise. The psalm holds up a gladness we have too often lost, and invites us to ask why.

Our feet are standing inside your gates, O Jerusalem (v. 2). Now the joy of arrival, and notice how physical and concrete it is. Our feet are standing inside the gates. This is not a misty inner experience; it is a body, in a place, among a people. After the long road, the pilgrim plants his feet on the stones of the holy city and can hardly believe he is finally here, where God has put His name, where the worship of the living God is carried on. There is a deep satisfaction in simply being there: arrived, inside the gates, in the place where God meets His people.

Why such gladness over a building and a city? Not for the architecture. The house of the LORD was glad ground because God was there, because it was the appointed place where He met His people, where the sacrifices were offered, where sins were atoned and prayers heard and praises sung. To go to the house of the LORD was to go where God had promised to be found. That is why the prospect alone could make a man glad: he was going to meet his God, in the company of his people, in the place God had chosen. Strip away the temple’s stones and that is the heart of it, and it is a heart that beats just as truly wherever God now gathers His people to meet them with His gifts.

If we have lost the gladness, it is worth asking honestly why, for the diagnosis usually points to the cure. Sometimes it is mere familiarity: we have been so many times that the wonder has worn smooth, and we no longer notice what we are doing or whom we are coming to meet. Sometimes it is distraction: we arrive with our minds full of the week’s worries and the day’s to-do list, present in body but not in heart. And sometimes, more subtly, it is that we have come to think of worship as something staged for us (a performance to be evaluated, an experience to be consumed), so that we leave asking whether we got anything out of it, as though we were the audience and the point. The pilgrim’s gladness is recovered the moment we remember the truth, that we are not the audience but the worshipers, that we come not to be entertained but to meet the living God, and that in His house He gives what is given nowhere else: His own word, His own Son’s body and blood, the forgiveness of sins, the company of His people. Remember who waits for you there, and what He hands you, and the gladness tends to return.

And there is one more thing to say about those gates the pilgrim was so glad to stand within, for the Lord Jesus took the image and made it His own. I am the door, He said; if anyone enters through me, he will be saved. The gates of the earthly Jerusalem opened to any who made the climb; the gate of the true house of God is a Person, and we enter through Him or not at all. This is no narrowing of the gladness but its ground, for the gate stands open. He has thrown it wide by His own death and risen to welcome us through. The pilgrim’s feet stood within the gates after a long and dangerous road; the believer’s standing in the house of God rests on something surer than his own arrival, on the One who is Himself the door and has brought us in. We are glad to be within the gates because the Lord Jesus has opened them, and no one can shut what He has opened.

Bound Firmly Together

Jerusalem is a city designed to accommodate an assembly. The tribes go up there, the tribes of the LORD, where it is required that Israel give thanks to the name of the LORD (vv. 3–4). The pilgrim looks around the city and sees, first, its unity. Older translations render verse 3 as a city bound firmly together, compact and whole, its houses knit close; the NET’s designed to accommodate an assembly sees the same city from the side of the people who fill it. And that physical togetherness pictures a deeper one, for to this one city the tribes go up, all of them, the scattered families of Israel converging three times a year on a single place. The festivals were decreed precisely so that the whole people would gather as one. Worship knit the nation together; the city bound firmly together was the meeting place of a people bound firmly together.

This is one of the great correctives the psalm offers our individualistic age. We are prone to think of faith as a private matter between the soul and God, and of worship as something we might do as well at home, or in the woods, or alone with a screen, as in the assembly. Psalm 122 will not have it. Worship, in the Bible, is overwhelmingly a together thing: the tribes going up, the congregation gathered, the people of God in one place lifting one voice. The New Testament keeps the same shape, warning us against abandoning our own meetings and calling the church a body, a household, a people. There are things God gives His people only in the gathering (the preached word that comes from outside us, the sacrament placed in our hands, the encouragement of fellow believers, the simple strength of not being alone) that we cannot supply ourselves in isolation. The pilgrim was glad to go with others, to a gathering. We are not meant to go it alone.

And mark the purpose of the gathering: that Israel give thanks to the name of the LORD. That is what the assembly is for. The people do not climb to Jerusalem to be entertained, or to have their felt needs met, or even chiefly to feel something; they go to give thanks to God, to render Him the worship due His name. Worship is, first and last, God-ward. He gathers His people, comes to them with His gifts, and they respond with thanksgiving and praise. The gladness of Psalm 122 is not the gladness of a satisfied consumer but of a grateful worshiper, glad to be among the people giving thanks to the name of the LORD.

And the togetherness of the gathering reaches further than the believers we can see beside us in the pew. When the church assembles for worship, the letter to the Hebrews says, she comes to the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the assembly and congregation of the firstborn, who are enrolled in heaven, and to the spirits of the righteous, who have been made perfect. The little congregation gathered in any ordinary building on any ordinary Sunday is joined, in that hour, to the whole company of the redeemed across all the ages: the saints who have gone before, the angels of heaven, the church in every land. We are never so unalone as when we worship; the smallest gathering of two or three is bound firmly together not only with one another but with the entire family of God in heaven and on earth. This is part of what we forfeit when we imagine we can worship as well by ourselves: not only the brothers and sisters at our side, but our place in the great assembly that no solitary devotion can supply. To go up to the house of the LORD is to take our seat among a countless multitude.

There is a place, too, where this being-bound-together is not merely pictured but actually given, and it stands at the center of the church’s gathered worship. At the Lord’s table the people of God are made one in the most concrete way imaginable: because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all share the one bread. The Supper is the meal of unity: many sinners, from many tribes and tongues, receiving the one Christ and so being knit into one body in Him. The pilgrim came to a city bound firmly together; the believer comes to a table where he is bound, with all who share it, into the body of the Lord Jesus Himself. This is unity of a deeper kind than mere agreeableness or shared opinion. It is the unity of those who have all been fed from one loaf, all forgiven by one sacrifice, all made members of one Lord. The city bound firmly together finds its truest form at the altar, where Christ gives Himself to His people and makes them, in the giving, one.

Thrones of the House of David

Indeed, the leaders sit there on thrones and make legal decisions, on the thrones of the house of David (v. 5). Jerusalem was not only the place of worship; it was the seat of the king. There David’s throne was set, and from there justice was administered to the nation. The city of God was the city of God’s king, the place where the LORD’s anointed reigned and where right was upheld. To go up to Jerusalem was to go up to the city of the king as well as the house of God; worship and rightful rule met on the same hill.

And the moment we hear the house of David, the whole series should prick up its ears, for we have followed that house through the royal psalms: the King at the LORD’s right hand in Psalm 110, the divine Bridegroom-King of Psalm 45, the righteous King of Psalm 72 whose reign outran every son of David who ever sat the throne. The thrones of David’s house were always pointing past the men who occupied them to the One who would not pass away: the Lord Jesus, great David’s greater Son, the King whose throne is forever, who reigns now at the right hand of the Father and will reign when every earthly throne has crumbled. The true Jerusalem is the city where the true King reigns, and He reigns in righteousness, so that the justice the earthly thrones could only approximate is, in His city, perfect and unfailing.

There is comfort in this for the pilgrim of any age. The city we are climbing toward is not a lawless place, nor a leaderless one. It has a King, and the King is good, and His judgments are true. In a world where thrones are so often seats of injustice, where power preys on the weak and the courts can be bought, the believer lifts his eyes to a city whose King cannot be corrupted and whose justice cannot fail. To go up to His city is to come under the reign of the only Ruler who has never once done wrong, and to find, in that reign, not threat but refuge.

And there is a wonder in this city that the earthly Jerusalem could only hint at: here, the King and the worship meet in one place, and in the true Jerusalem they meet in one Person. For the Lord Jesus is not only the King enthroned over the city; He is also the great Worshiper in the midst of it, the one who leads His people’s praise. The New Testament puts an old psalm on His lips: I will proclaim your name to my brothers; in the midst of the assembly I will praise you. The King of the city stands among His people as their brother and leads the thanksgiving, so that when the church gives thanks to the name of the LORD, she does not do it alone or in her own strength, but joins her voice to her King’s, who sings in the midst of the assembly. We have met Him before in this volume as the priest-king after the order of Melchizedek, who both reigns and intercedes; here He reigns and worships, the King upon the throne and the firstborn leading the family’s praise. To go up to His city is to come under His reign and into His song at once.

Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem

The psalm turns, at the end, into a prayer, and into a play on the city’s own name. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! May those who love her prosper! May there be peace inside your defenses, and prosperity inside your fortresses! (vv. 6–7). The name Jerusalem carries within it the word shalom, peace; she is, by her very name, the city of peace. And so the pilgrim prays for her to be what her name says: for peace inside her defenses, prosperity inside her fortresses, blessing on all who love her. He cannot stand inside the gates of the city of God and not pray for her good.

And he tells us why he prays it: For the sake of my brothers and my neighbors I will say, “May there be peace in you!” For the sake of the temple of the LORD our God I will pray for you to prosper (vv. 8–9). Two reasons, and they are the right ones. He seeks the city’s peace for the sake of his brothers and … neighbors, his fellow worshipers, the people of God who gather there; their welfare is bound up with the city’s welfare. And he seeks it, above all, for the sake of the temple of the LORD, because it is the place of God’s dwelling and worship. His love for the city is finally a love for God’s people and God’s house. He does not seek Jerusalem’s good for his own advantage, but for the sake of the worship of God and the welfare of God’s people in it.

And this gives the believer a prayer to pray still, for the true Jerusalem has her wars too. The church on earth is often anything but a city bound firmly together; she is torn by quarrels and divisions, wounded by her own members, scattered where she ought to be united. So the pilgrim’s prayer becomes ours: pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Pray for the peace of the church, for her unity, for the healing of her divisions, for the welfare of her people and the faithfulness of her worship. And we are to do more than pray it; we are to seek her good, to work for her peace, to be peacemakers among the brothers rather than troublers of the camp. There is a missionary edge to the prayer as well, for the peace the true Jerusalem holds is meant to go out: we pray that the gospel of peace would spread to the ends of the earth, gathering more and more pilgrims into the city, until the whole redeemed multitude stands within her gates. To love the house of God is to pray and labor for the peace of His people.

But the earthly Jerusalem, as we have already seen in this volume, could not keep her peace. She was besieged and burned; her towers fell; her children wept by the rivers of Babylon. The peace the pilgrim prayed for proved fragile, as every earthly peace is fragile. And so the prayer reaches, whether the pilgrim knew it or not, for a peace that no army could shatter, a peace the true Jerusalem alone could hold. That peace has a name, and we turn to it now.

The True House of the LORD

Where, then, is the house of the LORD for us, and where is the city of peace? The New Testament answers on every page, and the answer is first of all a Person. When the Jewish leaders demanded a sign, the Lord Jesus said, destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again, speaking, John tells us, of the temple of His body. He is the true house of the LORD, the place where God fully dwells, the meeting-place of God and man. The earthly temple was only ever a picture of Him; in Him the reality has come. To go to the house of the LORD now is, first, to come to Christ, for in Him alone is God truly met, sins truly atoned, prayers truly heard.

And those who come to Christ are built into a house themselves. The New Testament dares to call the gathered church the temple of God: you are God’s temple and … God’s Spirit lives in you; you are being built together into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit; you, as living stones, are built up as a spiritual house. This is the staggering thing the pilgrim could not yet see: that the house of the LORD would one day be not a building of stone on a single hill, but a people, a worldwide people, gathered around the word and the table, indwelt by the Spirit, knit together as one body in Christ. When the church gathers for worship, the believer goes up to the house of the LORD as truly as ever the pilgrim climbed to Zion, and the gladness of Psalm 122 becomes his own: I was glad because they said to me, “We will go to the LORD’s temple.”

And the peace of Jerusalem is found, at last, in the One who is our peace. The Lord Jesus Himself went up to Jerusalem: went up as a pilgrim to the festivals, and went up, finally, to die. He wept over the city as He came, longing that she had known the things that make for peace; and then He made that peace Himself, through the blood of his cross, reconciling sinners to God and to one another. Through Him we have peace with God, the deep peace of sins forgiven and enmity ended; and He leaves with His people a peace the world cannot give and cannot take away. The fragile peace of the earthly Jerusalem pointed to this unbreakable peace, secured not behind strong walls and towers but at a cross, and kept safe forever in the city that is to come.

And this is why the believer comes to the house of God not as a trembling stranger but as a welcomed child. Under the old covenant, the way into God’s presence was hedged about with warnings: the curtain, the holy of holies that only the high priest could enter, and only once a year, and never without blood. The pilgrim’s gladness at the gates was real, but he still stood outside the inner sanctuary, held at a reverent distance from the presence itself. The gospel has opened the way in. Because the Lord Jesus has made peace by His blood, we now have, the Scriptures say, confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of the Lord Jesus: the curtain torn from top to bottom, the distance abolished, the children brought home into the Father’s house. The believer who comes to worship does not stop at the threshold; he comes all the way in, into the very presence of God, welcomed by the blood of his Savior. That is a gladness deeper than the pilgrim at the gate could yet imagine: not merely to stand within the walls of the city, but to come boldly into the throne room of God Himself, and to find there not a frown but a Father’s welcome.

For there is a Jerusalem still ahead of us. The letter to the Hebrews tells trembling Christians that they have come to Mount Zion, the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the assembly and congregation of the firstborn, and to the Lord Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. Every time the church gathers, it is a foretaste of that great assembly, a little outpost of the heavenly Jerusalem, where the same God is worshiped and the same Christ is present and the same peace is given. And one day the foretaste will give way to the feast, when the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven, the city that has no temple because the Lord God … and the Lamb are its temple, where the peace prayed for in Psalm 122 will at last be perfect and unending. The pilgrim’s gladness at the gates was a small, true taste of the gladness that is coming, when the people of God stand at last within the gates of the Jerusalem that cannot fall.

Gathering the Threads

We arrived, with the pilgrim, at the house of the LORD, and found the air full of gladness. He was glad at the very invitation (we will go to the LORD’s temple) and gladder still to stand at last within the gates, because the house of God was where God met His people. We saw that his joy was a shared joy: he came with the caravan, to a city bound firmly together, where the tribes gathered as one to give thanks to the name of the LORD. That is a rebuke to our private, go-it-alone spirituality, and a reminder that there are gifts God gives only in the assembly, and that we are not meant to worship alone. We saw the thrones of David’s house, the city of the King, pointing past every earthly throne to the Lord Jesus, great David’s greater Son, whose reign is righteous and whose justice cannot fail. And we heard the closing prayer for the peace of Jerusalem, sought for the sake of the brothers and the house of God.

Then we asked where the house of the LORD and the city of peace are found now, and the gospel lifted the homely pilgrim song into something vast. The true house of the LORD is the Lord Jesus Himself, the temple of His body, in whom God fully dwells; the church gathered into Him is now a spiritual house, living stones indwelt by the Spirit, so that to go up to worship with God’s people is to come to the house of the LORD still. The true peace of Jerusalem is Christ Himself, our peace, who went up to the city to weep over it and to die for it, making peace by the blood of His cross. And the true Jerusalem is the city that is to come, the heavenly assembly we already taste whenever the church gathers, and will enter in full when the new Jerusalem comes down and the peace prayed for is perfect at last. So we learn, with the pilgrim, to be glad: glad to go to the house of the LORD, glad to gather with His people, glad in the King who reigns and the peace He has made, and gladdest of all for the homecoming still ahead.

For Discussion

The psalm opens, I was glad because they said to me, “We will go to the LORD’s temple” (v. 1). What does it mean to be glad, not merely dutiful, about gathering for worship, and what tends to dampen that gladness in us?
Jerusalem is a city designed to accommodate an assembly, where the tribes go up to give thanks to the name of the LORD (vv. 3–4). Why is worship something God’s people do together, as an assembly, and not only alone? What do we lose when we try to go it alone (compare Hebrews 10:25)?
For the Christian, where is the LORD’s temple found now (consider 1 Corinthians 3:16; Ephesians 2:21–22; Hebrews 12:22–24)? How is the gathered church both the house of God now and a foretaste of the heavenly assembly?
The city has thrones … of the house of David (v. 5); it is the city of the king. How does the earthly Jerusalem’s throne point to Christ, great David’s greater Son, and what does it mean that the true Jerusalem is where the true King reigns?
The psalm turns into a prayer: Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! (v. 6). Where is true and lasting peace finally found (Ephesians 2:14; Romans 5:1), and how does the Lord Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem and went up to it to die, secure the peace the city longed for?
The psalmist prays for the city’s good for the sake of the temple of the LORD our God (v. 9). How might love for God’s house and God’s people shape the way we pray for, and invest in, the gathered church?

Looking Ahead

Psalm 122 brought us, glad, into the city bound firmly together, where the tribes gather as one. The next session lingers on that togetherness, with the last of the Songs of Ascents we will study, the short and lovely Psalm 133. Look! How good and how pleasant it is when brothers live together! (Psalm 133:1). It is a psalm in praise of the unity of God’s people, the sweetness of the family of faith living together in peace.

And it paints that unity in two unforgettable pictures: the precious oil poured on the head of Aaron the high priest, running down over his beard and his robes; and the dew of Mount Hermon falling on the hills of Zion. We will ask what makes the unity of God’s people so good and pleasant, why it is likened to the anointing of the priest and the gift of refreshing dew, and how this unity is finally found not in our agreeableness but in the one Head, the Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the anointing flows down over all His body. After the gladness of the gathering, we will consider the blessing of dwelling together as one.

Read Psalm 133 in full before the next session; it is only three verses. Sit with its two images, the anointing oil and the mountain dew, and ask what they tell us about the unity of God’s people and where that unity comes from.

Closing Prayer

O LORD our God, give us again the gladness of Your pilgrim, the joy that leaps at the words, let us go to the house of the LORD. Forgive us for the times we have come to Your house dutifully, or stayed away carelessly, or imagined we could worship as well alone. Gather us with Your people; bind us firmly together as one body; and meet us in the assembly with the gifts only You can give (Your word from outside us, Your Son’s body and blood, the strength of not being alone), that we may give thanks to Your name with glad and grateful hearts.
We bless You that the true house of the LORD is Your Son, in whom You fully dwell, and that He has built us into a spiritual house, living stones indwelt by Your Spirit. We thank You that He is Himself our peace, who went up to Jerusalem to weep over it and to die for it, making peace by the blood of His cross, and giving us a peace the world can neither give nor take away. Reign over us as our righteous King; keep us glad in Your gathered people here; and bring us at last within the gates of the Jerusalem that cannot fall, the city whose temple is the Lord God and the Lamb, where the peace we have prayed for will be perfect and unending. Through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.