Thoughts sparked by Psalm 48.

“Consider well her ramparts”—what an odd and striking phrase! You might expect to find it in a book of military strategy, but not in an ancient song of worship, yet there it is towards the end of Psalm 48.

The psalm celebrates the city of Zion. Zion’s significance is that it represents the ‘city of our God’. As the psalmist says “Within her citadels God has made himself known…” (Psalm 48:3). That is the context of the injunction to:

“12  Walk about Zion, go around her,

number her towers,

13  consider well her ramparts,

go through her citadels,

that you may tell the next generation

14  that this is God,

our God forever and ever.

He will guide us forever.”

This calls to mind a book I used to read (whilst pretending I was reading it to my young children) which had engrossing cross sections of machines, ships and castles.

We are being invited to wander round Zion and to take in the details. We are asked to linger in her streets, to count her towers, to ponder her stairways, to look from afar so as to observe her overall characteristics, and to inspect up close to take in the detail.

The Psalmist is talking about a practice he himself performs. He tells us as much in verse 9: “We have thought on your steadfast love, O God, in the midst of your temple”. We are being invited to linger in God’s presence. To get to know Him: to allow ourselves to become familiar with what God is like.

This matters. It matters more than anything else. Knowing God is what make gives Life to life. (This is a consistent theme of the Bible from first to last. See for e.g. Amos 5:4, John 10:10, Proverbs 9:10). Yet knowing God is not meant to be a solely or even mainly an intellectual exercise. You might know the layout of a city from a map but until you have visited it and taken time to see what it is like, you don’t know the half of it. You need a real visit, and to listen to the city’s people—to learn their stories of the city’s past and to see for yourself. Only that way can you start to experience the city.

This Psalm is urging us to pay a visit. To linger in God’s presence “That you may tell the next generation that this is God” (v13). This is salutary. We have largely lost the art of lingering in God’s presence: we have unlearned the stories that earlier generations told each other about what the God of the Bible is like. Contemporary popular ideas of what God are no longer a reliable guide (at least when measured against the God of the Bible). Consider this description by Rev Gerald Hughes

God was a family relative, much admired by Mum and Dad, who described him as very loving, a great friend of the family, very powerful and interested in all of us. Eventually we are taken to visit ‘Good Old Uncle George’. He lives in a formidable mansion, is bearded, gruff and threatening. We cannot share our parents’ professed admiration for this jewel in the family. At the end of the visit. Uncle George turns to address us.
‘Now listen, dear,’ he begins, looking very severe, ‘I want to see you here once a week, and if you fail to come, let me just show you what will happen to you.’ He then leads us down to the mansion’s basement. It is dark, becomes hotter and hotter as we descend, and we begin to hear unearthly screams. In the basement there are steel doors. Uncle George opens one.
‘Now look there, dear,’ he says. We see a nightmare vision, an array of blazing furnaces with little demons in attendance, who hurl into the blaze those men, women and children who failed to visit Uncle George or to act in a way he approved.
‘And if you don’t visit me, dear, that is where you will most certainly go,’ says Uncle George. He then takes us upstairs again to meet Mum and Dad. As we go home, tightly clutching Dad with one hand and Mum with the other. Mum leans over us and says, ‘And now don’t you love Uncle George with all your heart and soul, mind and strength?’ And we, loathing the monster, say, ‘Yes, I do,’ because to say anything else would be to join the queue at the furnace. At a tender age religious schizophrenia has set in and we keep telling Uncle George how much we love him and how good he is and that we want to do only what pleases him. We observe what we are told are his wishes and dare not admit, even to ourselves, that we loathe him.
Uncle George is a caricature, but a caricature of a truth, the truth that we can construct a God who is an image of our tyrannical selves”

The danger of constructing God in our own image is decreased if we follow the Psalmist’s advise and find ways to spend time in the presence of the living God and to ponder what He is like. We owe it to the next generation to do this. For how can we tell them ‘that this is God’ (v13) if we don’t know God ourselves? I might as well imagine that I can take you on a tour of a city that I have never taken the opportunity to explore but have only visited briefly between other engagements.

So how do we “Consider her ramparts” etc? Here are a some suggestions:

  • Making time. It takes time to explore a city. It takes time to get to know God. In the Psalmist’s day, work was only allowed 6 days out of 7. One day a week was set aside for worship. No doubt the Sabbath could be abused and often was, but our constant activity crowds out space for exploring what God is like and creates its own problems. Time to explore creative ways of designating time for pursuing God. Making some time sacrosanct and muting one’s mobile might be a start. Psalm 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God”.
  • Joining with others for worship of Christ. Our society puts huge emphasis upon the individual and individual fulfilment. Jesus called individuals to follow Him but He did not call them to do this on their own, but together with others. (Matthew 18:20, Acts 1:14, Acts 2:42-47 etc). It seems that God chooses to make himself known when His people gather together to worship Him. Joining together with other Christians for worship together is one way of touring the ramparts! (See Revelation 21:22).
  • What does the Bible reveal about God? Reading the Bible and wise commentaries that explain what scripture means is not a new idea. It is deeply unfashionable. Yet I believe that until we re-discover what God has revealed about Himself through scripture we shall continue to behave like people lost in the thick dark smoke of a fire, searching for an exit but unsure where the door we once heard about is, and increasingly uncertain what it looks like. For a contemporary and readable introduction to what God is like I recommend John Marc Comer’s book “God has a name” (available on Kindle, and as audio download) which explores the meaning of Exodus 34:6-7.
  • Find a travel guide. Find a friend who you respect who has been a follower of Jesus for longer than you and ask them to take you on a tour of the City. Take them to Psalm 48 and ask them to describe the ramparts. That should get a conversation going!

Post Script.

T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is another poem which invites us to take a tour of a city. I don’t understand it, but I enjoy the cadences and the first and last lines of this stanza make an important point. Theory and roaming in the imagination is all very well, but the important point is “Let us go and make our visit”

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.”

For those who want something more contemporary: there is the advice of the Schuyler Sisters in Hamilton when visiting a new city :

“Look around, Look around…”