Psalms 127

The psalm begins by laying the same word twice, like a hammer striking the same nail: they labour in vain… the watchman waketh but in vain (v. 1). Vain does not mean small or hard; it means empty, hollow, leading nowhere. Two pictures carry it. First the builder: Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it. The house may rise stone by stone, the plan may be sound, the work may be honest - and still the whole project is hollow if the LORD is not the one truly building it. Then the watchman: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. A city can post its guards, man its walls, and stay awake all night, and all that vigilance amounts to nothing if the LORD is not the one keeping the city. Notice carefully what the verse does not say. It does not say the builder should stop building or the watchman should stop watching. It does not praise idleness. It says that human effort, however diligent, is not the foundation it imagines itself to be - that beneath the visible work of hands there must be the invisible work of God, or the whole thing is built on air. The labour is real; whether it comes to anything is not finally up to the labour.³

Verse 2 turns the lens from the work to the worker, and the portrait is painfully recognizable: It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows. Here is the person who believes the outcome rests entirely on how hard they push - up before dawn, still at it past midnight, the day bracketed by anxious effort at both ends. The striking phrase is the bread of sorrows: even the meal, the moment that should be rest and nourishment, is eaten in worry, swallowed in a hurry, seasoned with the dread that if they let up for an instant everything will fall apart. It is a portrait of exhaustion that is not godly diligence but anxious self-reliance - the labour of someone trying to be their own builder and their own keeper. And then the verse pivots on a single word, for, into the gentlest contrast in the psalm: for so he giveth his beloved sleep. Over against the early rising and the late sitting and the bread of sorrows stands a gift - sleep, rest, the laying down of the anxious watch - handed freely to the ones God loves. The self-reliant strain through the night; the beloved are given rest.

The psalm now makes a move that, on its surface, seems like a change of subject - from building a house to bearing children - but it is in fact the same point pressed deeper: Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward (v. 3). The little word Lo calls for attention, as if to say: look, here is the truth at the heart of it. And the truth runs exactly parallel to verse 1. Just as the house is not finally the builder's own achievement, so children are not finally a human production. They are called an heritage - an inheritance, something handed down as a gift rather than earned - and a reward, given of the LORD. The Hebrew house of verse 1 (bayit) already held the household and the family within it, so the move from house to children is not a leap at all; it is the same word opening up. What the psalm quietly refuses is the proud assumption that the next generation is something we generate by our own power. The fruit of the womb is named His reward - a thing received with open hands, like the house that only stands because He builds it.³

Now comes one of the most vivid images in the Songs of degrees: As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth (v. 4). An arrow is not a decoration; it is a thing aimed and sent. In the hand of a mighty man - a warrior, one trained and strong - arrows are reach and power, the ability to act at a distance, to defend what is one's own. To call children arrows is to refuse the idea that they are merely a weight to be carried or a worry to be managed. They are, the psalm insists, a strength - a household's capacity to stand, to endure, to send something of itself forward into a future the parents will not live to see. And the phrase children of the youth - children born to a man while he is still young - carries a particular hope: a parent young enough to raise them, to train and aim them, to see them grown and standing strong while strength remains. The image is not of a burden but of a quiverful of potential, each one to be drawn and sent in its time. What looks to an anxious age like a cost, the psalm names as a kind of power: arrows in the hand of one strong enough to use them well.

The psalm closes on a beatitude: Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate (v. 5). The quiver completes the warrior image of verse 4 - the case a soldier carried his arrows in, and to have it full is to be well-supplied, ready, not lacking. The promise attached is twofold. First, they shall not be ashamed - in a culture where one's standing and future were bound up with one's household, a man surrounded by his children stood secure, not exposed. Second, they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. The city gate was where public matters were settled - where disputes were judged, where a man's case was heard, where false accusation could ruin a household that stood alone. A man whose grown children stood beside him there would not be silenced or overpowered; his family could answer for him, defend his cause, hold their ground. The whole picture comes full circle to the opening of the psalm. The house that the LORD builds and keeps is filled, in His giving, with people - and those people are not the homeowner's burden but his strength, his security, and in the end his joy. Every layer of it - the building, the keeping, the children, the standing in the gate - is received, not achieved.