I Lift Up My Eyes

The first thing I want you to know is that this was never written to be read sitting still. Psalm 121 belongs to a small bundle of fifteen psalms, Psalm 120 through to Psalm 134, each carrying the heading “A Song of Ascents”. The traditional understanding, and the one I find most convincing, is that pilgrims sang these on the way up to Jerusalem for the festivals, climbing the literal slopes towards the temple on its high ground. We do not know who wrote it. The text gives no name, and I would rather say that plainly than dress it up. What we can say is that it has the feel of a travelling people: short lines, a question, an answer, words made to be carried on foot. When I read it I picture a family on a dusty track, tired children, an older relative, the city still out of sight. That is the setting. This is not theology worked out in a quiet study. It is faith spoken out loud by people who still had miles to go and real reasons to fear what those miles might hold.

Here is something easy to miss in English, because translators reach for several different words. In the Hebrew of this psalm one verb keeps coming back: shamar, to keep, to guard, to watch over. Across the six verses it lands again and again, on the LORD who does not sleep, on the LORD as the one who keeps his people, on the keeping of your going out and your coming in. By my count it falls six times, and the repetition is surely deliberate. It is the writer pressing the same reassurance into you until it holds. I also notice the shape of these opening two verses: a question asked, then answered by the same voice. “Where does my help come from?” is not a cry into the dark with no reply. The psalmist talks himself back onto solid ground. And the answer is not a mood or a technique. It is a person with a title, the One “who made heaven and earth”, a phrase that surfaces again a few psalms on in this same collection, at Psalm 124:8, almost like a chorus the pilgrims knew by heart.

There is a layer here that the first singers would have heard and we tend to walk straight past. In the world around ancient Israel, the high places, the hills and the mountain shrines, were exactly where people went looking for divine help. The local gods were imagined to live up there. So when the psalmist lifts his eyes to the hills and then asks where his help actually comes from, I think he may be doing something quietly subversive. He looks at the obvious religious option of his day and says no, my help does not come from these heights or from whatever is supposed to dwell on them. It comes from the LORD, the God who made the very hills, and everything above and below them. I find that bracing. It is the same instinct the prophets keep returning to, that creation is never the thing to be trusted, only its Maker. Isaiah 40:26 presses the same point, calling the reader to look up at the stars and then remember who set every one of them in place. The cure for a frightened gaze is not a better view. It is a truer God.

This is where the psalm reaches towards Christ, and I want to trace it honestly rather than force it. The God described here is the watching, sleepless Keeper of his people. When I read the Gospels I see that same shepherd-heart taking on skin. In John 10 Jesus speaks of laying down his life for the sheep, and elsewhere of losing none the Father has given him. The promise of Psalm 121, that the LORD keeps your going out and your coming in, is gathered up in him. There is even a tender echo at Gethsemane, where the one who never slumbers stays awake while his closest friends cannot watch with him for a single hour. I do not want to over-read that link. But I do trust the direction of the whole Bible, that the Maker of heaven and earth is the one through whom all things were made, and that he came down to keep us himself. So the pilgrim’s confidence is not naive. It rests on a God who, in the end, did not watch our trouble from a safe distance but stepped into the road beside us.

I will be honest about where this lands for me. My eyes drop most often not in some dramatic crisis but in the ordinary grind: a bank balance that will not stretch, a phone call I am dreading, a worry sitting at the back of my mind while I try to make the tea. That is the anxious scanning the psalm names so well. What helps me is that the writer never pretends the hills are empty of threat. He admits the road is real, and then refuses to leave his hope out there on it. I have learned to say these two verses out loud, slowly, when I notice my chin has dropped, almost as a way of arguing myself back into the truth the way the psalmist does. It is not magic, and the fear does not always lift at once. But naming where my help comes from, out loud, before I have felt any relief, has carried me through more nights than I can count. The keeping is going on whether or not I feel watched over. That is the quiet ground I keep coming back to.

It is worth holding still over the word the psalmist uses, because for a pilgrim it carried two faces at once. The hills were the wild country he had to cross, the rough high ground that hid every danger on the road. Yet the hills were also where he was going. Jerusalem sat on high ground, and the temple stood on its own hill, the place the whole climb was aimed at. So when he lifts his eyes to the hills, the picture is not simple. He could be staring at what he dreads, or straining towards what he loves. And here is what moves me: the psalm refuses to let his hope settle on either one. Not the threatening heights, and not even the holy hill he was climbing towards. His help comes from the One who made every hill there is, the Maker of heaven and earth. The destination matters, but it was never the source. Look past the hill you fear and the hill you long for, to the God who set them both in place.

I once saw these words stitched on a cushion with a photograph of mountains behind them, and the meaning had quietly flipped over: the hills were the help. Half a sentence, lifted out, sold as the whole psalm. My own hunch, and I offer it as a hunch rather than a fact, is that the older English versions make this easy, because the line about the hills and the line about help run together so smoothly that you can read the pair as one calm statement instead of a fright followed by a question. Read that way, Psalm 121 becomes scenery. Read as it stands, it is somebody on a road he does not trust asking out loud where on earth rescue is going to come from. The cushion keeps the view and deletes the fear, and once the fear has gone there is nothing left for God to answer.

If I were teaching these two verses, the hard part would not be explaining them. It would be refusing to reach verse two quickly. The psalm makes you wait, and so should you.

Try it aloud. Read verse one, all of it, question included, and then say nothing for a slow count of five. It will feel far too long, and someone will shuffle. Good. That silence is where a great many people in the room live from Tuesday to Saturday, in the asking rather than the knowing, and a group that has sat in it for five awkward seconds hears verse two differently from a group handed both halves in one tidy breath.

Then get specific before you get comforting. Not “what are you afraid of”, which invites a safe answer, but this: name the hill actually in front of you this month. The scan result. The tribunal date. The child who has stopped picking up the phone. Say it, or write it down if the room is shy. The pilgrim named his road before he named his God, and a fear nobody will name is a fear this psalm never gets near.

Only then, verse two. Let it answer something real.

I would use these two verses as a call to worship without hesitating, on a Sunday when half the room has come in carrying something they have not said to anyone. It sits even better over a sending: a mission team, an ordination, a friend starting chemotherapy on Thursday, a family moving somewhere daunting. This is a song for people about to walk into the hills, not for people already lying wounded halfway up the road.

Which is why I would keep it in my pocket at a hospital bed in the first hour after bad news. I have watched verse two used to close a conversation rather than join one, said kindly, meant kindly, and it landed like a door shutting. They had not yet got as far as their own version of “Where does my help come from?” Wait until they have said the frightened part out loud, even if only to you. Then this psalm answers a question they have actually asked, and it is the best answer anyone has.

Here is something I only saw after years of reading this psalm as one unbroken piece of comfort. Verses one and two are singular and private. I lift my eyes. My help comes. Then verse three arrives and the voice swings round to speak to somebody else, and from there to the end it is your foot, your keeper, your going out and your coming in (Psalm 121:3 to 8). I do not know when that switch happens in the singing, or why, and nobody can tell me for certain. But I have stopped treating it as an accident of grammar. One traveller works his own fear out loud, question and answer, in front of us. Then that hard-won confession gets turned outward and said over somebody else’s road.

I picture an older pilgrim who has made this climb a dozen times muttering verses one and two to himself at the foot of it, the way you do when your nerve is going and nobody is listening. Two hours further up he says the rest over a nephew doing it for the first time, boots rubbing, eyes on the ridge. The psalm is not only spoken. It gets handed on. Whatever settled the first voice becomes the exact thing pressed into a second person’s mouth, and then presumably theirs to hand on again.

That is not how I was taught to think about comfort. I had it filed as something you receive and keep, like a coat. This reads more like something you are lent, use hard, and then have to give away before it does you any lasting good. It puts me in mind of the priestly blessing at Numbers 6:24 to 26, which is also something said over people rather than by them. I am not going to claim the two were ever used side by side at a temple gate, because I have no idea whether they were, and it would be an easy lovely thing to invent. I only find I cannot hear one now without half hearing the other.

I am no Hebrew scholar and I would rather say so than borrow authority I have not earned. But there is one root here I have looked at often enough to trust. The word behind “help” in these two verses is ezer, and it turns up at Genesis 2:18 for the woman made as Adam’s ezer kenegdo, a help corresponding to him. Translators have argued for a long time about how weak or strong that word is, and I am not going to pretend the argument is settled, because it is not. What I do keep noticing is that the same word gets used, again and again, of God himself coming to rescue his people. It is not the vocabulary of a junior assistant fetching things for somebody stronger.

Then there is the stone. After the Philistines are routed at Mizpah, Samuel sets up a marker and names it Ebenezer, stone of help, because the LORD had helped Israel right up to that day (1 Samuel 7:12). One specific rescue, on one specific afternoon, with a lump of rock left standing between two named places where anyone could walk past and put a hand on it.

So when this pilgrim stands at the bottom of a hill and asks where his help is going to come from, he is reaching for a word that already had a stone attached to it somewhere in his people’s memory. That is the part that gets me. I cannot tell you he had Samuel’s marker in mind; the psalm never says, and I would be making it up if I told you he did. But ezer was not a word floating free in the air for anyone singing in that hill country. It had a place on the map, and a date.

Luke says the family went up to Jerusalem for the Passover every year, and that when Jesus was twelve he stayed behind in the city without Mary and Joseph realising, because they assumed he was somewhere in the travelling company and got a full day down the road before they checked (Luke 2:41 to 44). That detail only works if you know how those pilgrimages ran. Families did not go alone. They moved with relatives and neighbours and half the village, and Luke’s own word for it is a company, a crowd big enough that you could lose a child in it for a day and not panic. I have always assumed the size of that crowd was partly the point, given what the road could hold. Luke does not say so, and I will not put it in his mouth.

If the Songs of Ascents were sung on the way up, which is the tradition I trust without being able to prove it, then somewhere on one of those childhood climbs a twelve year old sang these words with his own mouth. In a queue of dusty relatives, he asked out loud where his help came from. And he is the one who made heaven and earth.

I cannot prove he sang this psalm in that year, or in any year. I want to be careful, because this is exactly the sort of thing you talk yourself into. But I cannot stop turning it over, and it is not the theology of it that keeps me up. It is the physical fact. Footsore, twelve, hemmed in by cousins, singing a question he was himself the answer to. If he did sing it, he was not being falsely modest. He knew precisely where every pilgrim on that track was getting help from, his own included.

I have to be honest about the rest of this psalm, because verses one and two write a cheque that verses three to seven cash in hard, physical terms: your foot on the path, the sun by day, keeping from all evil (Psalm 121:3, 6 and 7). People sang that and then died on the road. Robbery, exposure, a fall in the dark on ground that gives you no second chance. It happened to real pilgrims who had these words in their mouths that same week, and pretending otherwise makes the psalm smaller, not safer.

Paul, of all people, lists danger from rivers, danger from robbers, shipwreck three times over (2 Corinthians 11:25 to 26). If anybody was being kept by God for a purpose it was him, and he was not kept from a single one of those hazards. He was kept through them, and in the end not even that.

I do not think the psalm is lying. I no longer think it is offering what the cushion version implies, a force field cut to the shape of your body. What I have come to believe, and I will not dress it up as more settled than it is, is that the keeping here is about whose you are rather than about what will or will not reach you on the way. That is a smaller comfort than the one I wanted at fifteen, and I am not going to pretend the two are the same size. It is also, on the worst nights, the only thing still standing.

Children ask the plain version of the question adults dress up. If Grandad was kept, why did he die in the ambulance. I used to reach for something that quietly moved the goalposts, heaven being the real keeping, and I do still believe that, but said quickly it sounds like a trick, and children clock tricks faster than we do.

What I say now is roughly this. The psalm promises he belonged to somebody who never once stopped watching him. It does not promise the road is safe. Both are true, I do not understand how they fit, and I tell them that part too, because a child can smell a made-up peace at forty paces and will trust you more for showing the seam than for papering it over.

Then the last line, which I think is the only reason this song can carry the weight we put on it. It does not stop at the city gate, where the walking stops. It keeps going, from this time forward, and forever more (Psalm 121:8). Whoever ended the psalm refused to let the keeping expire when the road did. So when I say Grandad was never for a single hour outside the sight of the God who made heaven and earth, going there or coming back, I am not reaching for something poetic to fill the silence. That is what the psalm claims, and it claims it past the end of the trip. I still wanted the other promise. I have mostly stopped asking for it.

• Where do my eyes drop first when I am afraid: to the savings, the plan, the strong people I am leaning on, or to the God who made all of it?
• The psalmist asks his question out loud and then answers it. Is there a fear I have never actually voiced and brought into the light?
• If the LORD genuinely does not sleep, what would change about tonight if I trusted that he is keeping watch while I cannot?
• Where do I need to lift my chin this week and say, before I feel a thing, “My help comes from the LORD”?

If you want to keep going, you might sit with more verses about hope or read across the psalms in the Bible.