I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence comeeth my help.. My help comet from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.. Suppose we take Psalm 121:1b and form the question, from whence comes my help? Great Aspirations Mountains stir intense hope and awaken vigor, but ultimately leave the climber exhausted and spent. Great men and great saints stir in us great aspirations and great hopefulness, but leave us ultimately exhausted with a feeling of hopelessness; the inference that we draw is that these people were built like that, and all that is left for us to do is to admire.. Longfellow says “Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime,” but I question whether this is profoundly true. The lives of great men leave us with a sense of our own littleness which paralyzes us in our effort to be anything else. Going back to the setting of this psalm, one realizes that the exquisite beauty of the mountain scenery awakens lofty aspirations; the limitless space above the highest mountain-peak, the snow clad summit, and the scarred side ending in foliage and beauty as it sweeps to the valley below, stands as a symbol for all that is high and lofty and aspiring. When. When one is young this is the type of scenery most reveled in, the blood runs quicker, the air is purer and more vigorous, and things seem possible to the outlook that were not possible when we lived in the valleys; but as one gets older, and realizes the limitations not only of physical life but in the inner life, the remembrance of the mountains and mountain-top experiences leaves us a little wistful with an element of sadness, an element perhaps best expressed by the phrase “What might have been had we always been true to the truth, had we never sinned, had we never made mistakes!” Even such simple considerations as these bring us to the heart of the psalmist’s song in this pilgrim song book-“ I will lift up mine eyes to the hills—from whence comes my help?” And the psalmist answers, “My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth,”—and there we have the essence of the spiritual truth. Not to the great things God has done, not to the noble saints and noble lives He has made, but to God Himself does the psalmist point The study of biography is always inspiring, but it has this one drawback, that it is apt to leave the life more given to sentiment and thinking and perhaps less to endeavor than is usually supposed; but when we realize what the psalmist is pointing out and what the New Testament so strongly insists on, that is “My help comes from the LORD.” We are able to understand such a mountain-peak character as the apostle Paul saying “Follow my ways which be in Christ.” We have not been told follow in all the footsteps of the mountain-like characters, but in the footsteps of their faith, because their faith is in a person.. Great Attainments This is such an important theme that it will profit us to look at it from another aspect. This is the age when education is placed on the very highest pinnacle. In every civilized country we are told that if we educate the people and give them better surroundings, we shall produce better characters. Such talk and such theories stir aspirations, but they do not work out well in reality. The kingdom within must be adjusted first before education can have its true use. To educate an unregenerate man is but to increase the possibility of cultured degradation. No one would wish to belittle the lofty attainments of education and culture, but we have to realize that we must put them in their high, mighty, second place. Their relationship in human life is second, not first. The man whom God made is first, and the God who made him is his only help. God seems to point this out all through His Book-Moses, learned in all the learning of the Egyptian schools, the highest and ablest prophet-statesman conceivable, realizes with a keenness and poignancy the bondage and degradation of his brethren, and sees that he is the one to deliver them: but God sends him for forty years into a wilderness to feed sheep. He removes first of all the big “I am” and then the little “I am” out of him. Read the account carefully; you will find at the end of those forty years, when God spoke to Moses again, saying, “Come now, therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” Moses said “Who am I?” All this points out one thing, that the ability of a man to help his fellow man lies lastingly with God, and is not concerned with is aspirations or his education or his attainments.. This same thing emerges in chapter 15 of John’s gospel where our Lord instructs his disciples by saying “I am” “I am the Vine…..” If the dominant identity of the disciple is not built up by the Lord Himself, in vain are the mountains looked to for help. There may be some who by aspiration and prayer and consecration and obedience, built up from looking at the lives that stand like mountain peaks, to attain a like similarity of character, and they are woefully lagging behind; their lips, as it were, have grown pale in the intense struggle, and they fall by the way, and the characters that used to stir intense hopefulness leave the soul sighing over “what might have been,” but now can never be. Let the message of psalm 121 come with new hope, “My help comes from the LORD who made heaven and earth.” A strong saintly character is not the production of human breeding or culture, it is the work of God In Celebration of Life in Him, Dr.Jim DeBruhl, gembeaux@bellsouth.net " Everything is wrong until God makes it right."
