Psalms 87

The psalm begins, quite literally, at the ground floor: His foundation is in the holy mountains. Before a single word is said about Zion's beauty or her people, the song fixes our eyes on what the city rests upon - and it is not the bedrock of Mount Zion but the act of God. His foundation: God laid it. This is the whole secret of the city's glory, and the reason the rest of the psalm can make such enormous claims. Cities rise and fall on the strength of their walls and the wealth of their builders; this one rests on something no army can undermine, because the One who founded it is God Himself. Notice, too, the plural - the holy mountains. The psalm is not measuring acreage; it is naming a holy place, a dwelling set apart, the spot on earth where heaven has touched down. Everything that follows - the love of God for her gates, the glory spoken of her, the nations written into her register - grows from this first short line. The city is glorious because of its foundation, and its foundation is the living God.¹

The LORD loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob (v. 2). It is a tender, almost surprising line. Zion is not loved because it is grander than every other place - the dwellings of Jacob means all the other homes and settlements of God's own people, scattered across the land, each of them dear. And yet the gates of Zion are loved more. Why the gates in particular? In the ancient world the gate was the heart of a city's public life: the place of welcome and of judgment, where the elders sat, where the stranger was received or turned away, where the life of the community flowed in and out. To say God loves Zion's gates is to say He loves the city precisely at the point where it opens to the world - the threshold over which people come in. Hold that thought, because the psalm is about to fling those gates open to the most unexpected guests imaginable. The love that settles on the gates is a love that is preparing to welcome.

Now the psalm does the thing that sets it apart from every other song of Zion. God begins to speak, and He calls a roll of names - but not the names of Israel's tribes. He names the nations: I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them that know me: behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia (v. 4). Rahab here is not the woman of Jericho; it is a poetic name for Egypt, the old house of bondage, the proud sea-monster of the south.³ Babylon is the empire of exile, the city that would one day burn the temple - the great imperial mother-city of the ancient world, whose pride this psalm quietly overturns. Philistia and Tyre were Israel's long-standing rivals on the coast; Ethiopia (Cush) the distant land at the edge of the known world. Run your eye down that list and you are reading the names of oppressors, enemies, and outsiders - the very peoples a song about Zion might be expected to curse. Instead, God makes mention of them - the same warm verb used elsewhere for calling someone to mind with favour - and against each He writes the unthinkable: this man was born there. Born, that is, in Zion. The enemies are being entered into the citizens' register, not as conquered subjects but as native sons.

And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was born in her: and the highest himself shall establish her (v. 5). Two things lock together in this verse, and they are the whole logic of the psalm. First, the citizens are counted one by one - this and that man, person after person, each individually born in Zion. It is not a faceless crowd absorbed into the city; it is named persons, each with a birthright. Second, the reason this can stand is that the highest himself shall establish her. The same God who founded the city in verse 1 now establishes her - sets her firm, makes her sure - with His own hand. A city that men established could never make such a promise good; the nations would overwhelm it, or it would crumble from within. But because the Most High Himself establishes Zion, she is large enough and secure enough to be the birthplace of the whole world. The breadth of the welcome rests entirely on the strength of the Builder. Only a city founded and established by God could open its register to Egypt and Babylon and not be undone.

The psalm ends not with a decree but with music: As well the singers as the players on instruments shall be there: all my springs are in thee (v. 7). First the picture of the city full of song - every musician, voice and instrument alike, gathered in Zion and making one great sound. A city founded by God, established by the Most High, peopled from every nation, can only end in worship. But it is the last phrase that lingers: all my springs are in thee. A spring is a source - the place water rises up from the ground, the fountainhead of a river, the very origin of life in a dry land. To say all my springs are in thee is to say: everything that makes me alive, every source of my joy and refreshment, every fountain I drink from, is found here, in the city of God. It is the confession of someone who has discovered where their life truly comes from. The newly enrolled citizen, born into Zion by grace, looks at the city and says: this is my source. The same image will surface again at the end of the Bible, when out of the city of God flows a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb (Rev. 22:1). The psalm that began with a foundation ends with a fountain - and both, from first to last, are God Himself.