Psalms 126

The psalm begins by looking back at a rescue so complete it hardly seemed possible: When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. The people had been carried away from their land, their city, their place of worship - cut off from everything that made them who they were. To be brought back was not a small adjustment of circumstances; it was the undoing of a catastrophe. And the psalm reaches for the one image that can hold the feeling: a dream. There is a particular kind of joy that arrives so suddenly, after so long a sorrow, that it does not feel real - the rescued keep half-expecting to wake and find the good news gone. That is the note struck here. The deliverance is so far beyond what they had let themselves hope for that they walk through it dazed, like sleepers who cannot quite believe their eyes are open. Notice, too, who turned the captivity: not a sympathetic emperor, not a shift in politics, but the LORD. Whatever earthly means were involved, the psalm sees one hand behind it all. The dreamlike wonder is not at their good fortune but at their God.³

The joy of the return is not quiet or restrained: Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing (v. 2). These are the mouths that had hung silent in exile, the tongues that had hung heavy with grief - and now they overflow, filled to the brim with laughter and song. And the change is so dramatic that it is noticed from outside: then said they among the heathen, The LORD hath done great things for them. The watching nations are not worshippers of Israel's God, yet even they cannot explain the reversal any other way. Something has happened to this people that no ordinary account will cover, and the only adequate explanation is a divine one: The LORD hath done great things for them. There is a quiet witness in this. When God works in a life so unmistakably that even those on the outside have to name His hand, the deliverance itself becomes a testimony - not argued, simply seen. The laughter of the rescued preaches to the nations watching from the edges of the road.¹

Watch what the people do with the nations' words. The heathen had said, The LORD hath done great things for them (v. 2). Now the rescued take that very sentence onto their own lips and turn it into worship: The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad (v. 3). Only one word changes - them becomes us - and the whole posture changes with it. What the outsiders observed from a distance, the people confess from the heart. The same fact, seen from inside, is no longer a report but a song. And the response to it is simply gladness: whereof we are glad. There is no boasting here, no taking of credit; the people do not say we accomplished great things but the LORD hath done great things for us. The proper answer to a deliverance you did not earn and could not have managed is not pride but glad-hearted thanks - the joy of those who know exactly to whom they owe their homecoming. It is worth doing the same with your own life: taking what is plainly true of God's goodness and saying it back to Him, in the first person, as praise.

The psalm now pivots from memory to prayer: Turn again our captivity, O LORD, as the streams in the south (v. 4). Having just celebrated one reversal, the people ask for another - a sign that the homecoming, however real, is not yet all it will be. There is still captivity to be turned; the rescue has begun but is not finished. And the image they reach for is exact. The streams in the south are the desert riverbeds of the Negev - the dry wadis that lie cracked and empty through the long rainless months, beds of dust where no water runs. Then the rains come, and overnight those same dead channels roar back to life, full and rushing, the desert suddenly threaded with water. Do that to us, the prayer says. Turn our dryness to flood as suddenly and completely as You turn the wadis of the south. It is a prayer that takes God's own world as its evidence: the same God who reliably fills the desert streams when the rains come can be trusted to fill a dry and waiting people. The pattern is written into the land itself - emptiness is not the final state; the water always comes back.³

The promise of the harvest turns on a small, tender phrase: bearing precious seed (v. 6). To us, scattering seed across a field can look like the most ordinary farm work. But picture it the way the psalm does, in a subsistence world where the grain in your hand was the difference between living and starving. To take that grain - food you could eat today - and bury it in the ground, trusting it to a future you cannot see, is an act of real sacrifice and real faith. The seed is precious; it costs something to sow it. And the sowing is done weeping - the farmer goes forth in tears, whether from the hardship of the labour, the leanness of the season, or the sheer cost of giving up today's bread for tomorrow's hope. The psalm does not pretend the weeping is small. It honours it. But it sets the weeping inside a larger certainty: the seed buried in sorrow is not thrown away. It is planted. What looks like loss - good grain vanishing into the dark earth - is in fact the only way a harvest ever comes. The tears of the sower water a field that will, in its season, be reaped with joy.