Scripture Daily

Context No. 422 of 4322 · Psalms

Context · Reflection

Psalms 48:1-14: in context

1Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, in the city of our God, in his holy mountain. 2Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion, on the north sides, the city of the great King. 3God has shown himself in her citadels as a refuge. 4For, behold, the kings assembled themselves, they passed by together. 5They saw it, then they were amazed. They were dismayed. They hurried away. 6Trembling took hold of them there, pain, as of a woman in travail. 7With the east wind, you break the ships of Tarshish. 8As we have heard, so we have seen, in the city of the LORD of Armies, in the city of our God. God will establish it forever. Selah. 9We have thought about your loving kindness, God, in the middle of your temple. 10As is your name, God, so is your praise to the ends of the earth. Your right hand is full of righteousness. 11Let Mount Zion be glad! Let the daughters of Judah rejoice because of your judgments. 12Walk about Zion, and go around her. Number its towers. 13Notice her bulwarks. Consider her palaces, that you may tell it to the next generation. 14For this God is our God forever and ever. He will be our guide even to death.

Psalm 48 is a song about Zion, the city of God, and it swells with confidence in a city God has protected. It tells how hostile kings once gathered against it, took one look, and fled in panic, trembling like a woman in labor, and how God broke the great ships of Tarshish with an east wind. As we have heard, the psalm says, so we have now seen. God has kept his city. But the psalm does not end in the emotion of that gratitude. It ends with an instruction, and the instruction is oddly concrete.

Walk about Zion, it says, go all the way around her. Count her towers. Consider her ramparts. Go through her citadels. And then the reason: that you may tell it to the next generation. This is not a call to sit and feel thankful. It is a call to get up and take a careful inventory, to walk the walls and count the towers one by one, to look closely at the specific defenses God has preserved, deliberately, so that you will have a concrete account to hand to your children. Faith here is passed on not by vague sentiment but by evidence gathered on purpose. You survey exactly what God has done and kept, tower by tower, and then you tell the next generation precisely what you saw. And the psalm closes with the summary worth all the counting: this God is our God forever and ever; he will be our guide even to death.

That is a discipline most of us skip. We may feel grateful for what God has done, but rarely do we walk around and actually count the towers, taking careful stock of the specific things he has done and preserved in our own lives, and rarer still do we do it for the express purpose of being able to tell the people coming after us. Have I ever deliberately counted my towers, made an inventory of God's concrete faithfulness, so that I could hand a real account to the next generation, or have I assumed my gratitude would somehow pass itself along without ever being surveyed or spoken?

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