Dave's Diary

Daily Reading: Psalm 133

Psalm 133 is a “Psalm of Ascents”, which means that it was composed to be sung as a hymn by a group of worshippers headed for the Temple. A group of travellers going up to a Festival in Jerusalem would band together in a travelling “caravan” for the sake of safety and companionship. As they went they would prepare their hearts for the Festival by singing psalms that called them to pray (e.g. Ps 122), to worship God (e.g. Ps 135), to marvel at His goodness (e.g. Ps 126), or to trust in His protection on the road (e.g. Ps 121).

Psalm 133 was a hymn calling the travellers to a particular way of “living together”. For the duration of the journey they would “live together” in their travelling caravan with people who were at least from a similar tribe or region of Israel, but they would be from diverse backgrounds, trades and walks of life. But for the week or ten days of the Festival in Jerusalem, they would with hordes of other people, from all the different tribes, from all the different social levels, with different accents, dialects and habits.

The vision presented in Psalm 133 is of God’s people sharing their lives in unity and harmony because of their common love for God and their common desire to worship Him. The vision and the call was for God’s people to have one heart of love for God, and therefore to put in the hard work of building proper harmonious, friendly, kind, helpful, gentle, encouraging, life-giving relationships with one another.

Why would they bother to put in this kind of effort? I see four reasons presented in Psalm 133. They would do it because such relationships of unity and harmony are:

• Good: This way of living lines up with God’s character and is pleasing to God. If, as a child of God, you desire to please God with a life that reflects His beauty, then live in harmony with God’s other children.
• Pleasant: This way of living is also a wonderfully good and enjoyable experience for those who live it. It is the sort of environment within which we find fullness of life and flourish.
• Anointed: Verse 2 pictures the same oil of anointing that God poured on His priests to empower their service being poured out on God’s people. It’s a vision of God anointing everyone in the “community of unity” to be able to worship and serve Him powerfully and effectively. Harmony attracts God’s anointing.
• Blessed: Verse 3 promises that harmony also attracts God’s blessing for supernatural provision. Mount Hermon was renowned for the dew that formed overnight as the air cooled quickly. Some recorded that tents on Mount Hermon would be soaked as if it had rained overnight. This was not so on Mount Zion, on which Jerusalem was built. But when God’s people dwell together in unity, the psalm says, it attracts blessing as wondrous and supernatural as if Hermon’s dews fell in Zion.

There is every reason to make every effort to build abiding relationships of unity and harmony within our Christian Family. It is pleasing to God, it brings abundance of life, the anointing of God’s presence and supernatural blessings.

Heavenly Father, I long to live in deep and harmonious relationships within my Christian community. How can I give myself to the pursuit of this harmony today? Please guide me. Please anoint me. Please use me. Please form and fashion my local church to become this kind of community. Amen.