My Chains Are Gone

Psalm 107 opens Book Five of the Psalter, the last of the five collections the Psalms are gathered into, and it reads less like a private prayer than like a thanksgiving service with one testimony after another. Four sorts of people are described in turn: wanderers lost in a desert, prisoners sitting in darkness, the sick who had come close to death, and sailors caught in a storm. Each lot get into trouble they cannot escape, each cry out, and each are rescued. After every story the psalm circles back to the same idea, that they cried to Yahweh in their trouble and he brought them out, though the exact wording shifts a little each time it returns. Our verse sits inside the second story, the prisoners. I find it helps to read the whole psalm aloud once before settling on verse 14, because the repeating is the point. The writer is not reporting a single rescue. He is showing that this is simply how God works, again and again, with all kinds of people in all kinds of pits. Verse 14 is one line of a long, patient argument that the Lord saves.

The short reflection on this page already sees the thing I would want anyone to see first, that the grammar carries the theology. Let me push a little further in. Read verse 14 and count who is acting: “He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and broke away their chains.” One subject does everything, and it is not the prisoners. They are the objects. Things are done to them. The phrase “shadow of death” has traditionally been heard as a thick, final sort of dark, the kind of place where you stop expecting morning, and it is the same expression that turns up in Psalm 23:4. (Translators are not fully agreed on the underlying Hebrew, so I would not lean the whole weight of a sermon on the word itself.) What I will lean on is where the verbs land. The psalm does not say the chains rusted, or that the prisoners gradually worked them loose. They were broken away from outside. That matters to me, because most of the chains I have watched people carry do not respond to effort. They respond to rescue.

It would be tidy to read this group as blameless victims, but the psalm is more honest than that. The verses just before ours say plainly that they sat in darkness because they had rebelled against the words of God and set themselves against the counsel of the Most High, and that their hard situation followed from it (Psalm 107:11 to 12). Some of this prison, in other words, was of their own making. I think that is one of the most pastoral things about the whole psalm. It does not pretend the prisoners are clean before it rescues them. It names the rebellion, names the consequence, and then, when they cry out, rescues them all the same. I have sat with people who could not believe God would help them, because they knew exactly how they had ended up where they were. This psalm meets that quietly. The cry that gets answered here is not the cry of the deserving. It is the cry of the desperate, and that is a very different and far kinder thing.

The reflection points to Paul and Silas in the Philippian jail (Acts 16:25 to 26), and that is the right instinct, because the New Testament keeps reaching for prison and freedom language to say what God has done. Jesus opens his ministry by reading from Isaiah and announcing release for the captives (Luke 4:18). He tells people that if the Son sets them free, they will be free indeed (John 8:36). Both are in the cross references on this page, and they are not decoration. They are the same thing Psalm 107 keeps saying, now with a name attached. By the time you reach the Gospels, the deepest darkness and the shadow of death are not only a figure of speech. There is a real grave, and then an empty one. So when I read that he brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, I cannot help reading it forward to the One who went into that darkness himself in order to bring the rest of us out of it.

Here is the honest difficulty. Paul and Silas felt the doors fly open that very night. Most of us do not. I have prayed about the same besetting thing for years and gone to bed still carrying it. So what do I actually do with a verse that promises broken chains when mine are clearly still fastened? A few things hold me steady. I let the past tense preach to me: “he brought them out” is a finished fact in the lives of countless people, and that crowd of rescued witnesses is real even on the mornings I do not feel rescued. I take the cry seriously, because in the psalm the turning point is never the prisoner’s strength, it is the moment they cry out, and that is something I can do today, badly and half believing, in the dark. And I try to stop measuring freedom only by how I feel. For the Christian the chain that mattered most, sin’s claim on us, is already broken whether or not my mood agrees. So I bring the chain still on me to the One who has a long history of breaking them, and I leave the timing with him.

• Which chain are you quietly convinced is just “how it will always be”? Have you ever actually brought that exact one to God, or only ever managed it on your own?
• The prisoners in this psalm were partly there through their own rebellion, and were rescued regardless. Is there a part of you that thinks your situation disqualifies you from being helped?
• The hinge of every story in Psalm 107 is a cry, not a strategy. What would it look like to simply cry out today, half-heartedly even, rather than wait until you feel ready?
• If the deepest chain is already broken in Christ, how might you live this week as someone who is genuinely free, while you wait on the rest?

If it helps to keep sitting with this, you could read more of this psalm in the book of Psalms or follow the theme of freedom and hope through our verses by topic.