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.

Read on and you see what the psalm asks of the freed prisoners next: to say so and give thanks, because his steadfast love lasts (Psalm 107:1 to 2). That refrain returns after every rescue (Psalm 107:8, 15). This is no one-off favour. It is one line in a long chorus of rescues, the settled habit of a God who frees one desperate group after another. So once your chain is off, the most healing thing may be to say so out loud.

Notice the tense of the worship line so many of us know. People sing that their chains are gone, already done rather than still hoped for. That is the tense of our verse too. He brought them out. He broke the chains. The famous refrain is modern, not ancient, added long after John Newton wrote the hymn, but its instinct is as old as this psalm. It is a fact set to music, not a wish. When God has freed you, you thank him that he has.

I have used this verse as a promise, and I was wrong to. Somewhere along the way “my chains are gone” stopped being a testimony and turned into a guarantee: sing it with enough conviction and the chain will drop, and if it does not drop, everyone in the room can work out whose faith is to blame. Nobody says that part aloud. It gets heard anyway. A testimony says this happened, and the God who did it has not changed since. A guarantee says do this and get that. Only the first is on offer here, and it is the kinder of the two, because it leaves the timing with God instead of hanging it round the neck of whoever is still waiting.

The second misuse is quieter. Verse 14 belongs to the prisoners, one group among the several this psalm walks us through, and if the prisoners are the only stanza you ever preach then you have taught your church, without ever meaning to, that God specialises in addiction and leaves the lost and the dying and the terrified to sort themselves out. Give the verse its neighbours back.

If I am building a talk on this verse I refuse to end at 14, because two verses on the psalm goes after the gates and the bars as well (Psalm 107:16). Sit with the difference for a second. Chains hold a person. Gates and bars hold the place that holds the person. So what is being broken here is not only a man rubbing feeling back into his wrists in the dark; it is the door of the cell coming off, and the wall it was set into. A talk that stops at verse 14 leaves people staring at their own wrists. One that reaches 16 lets them watch the building come down.

The stanza hands you an outline for nothing, and I would not improve on it: the rebellion that got them there (verses 10 to 12), the cry that alters not one fact about the situation and everything about what happens next (verse 13), the chains (verse 14), and only then, once the iron is already off, the gates (verse 16). Preach it in that order and the last beat lands hardest. Preach the freedom first and you have spent your ending on your opening.

I would read verse 14 aloud at a service marking somebody finishing a recovery programme. At a baptism, where the person has a real story of being hauled out from under something. In the testimony slot of an ordinary Sunday, when someone is finally ready to say so. And in a prison chapel, carefully, because there the metaphor and the metal are the same object and the room will have got there before you finish your sentence.

I would not read it over someone still inside the addiction, still inside the depression, still inside the debt, as though saying the words were the same as breaking the thing. I have watched that land as an accusation on a face three rows back. And I would not open a bruising, unresolved church meeting with it because I wanted the evening to be over. Some rooms need verse 13 far more than verse 14: the crying out, and the not yet. Say verse 14 there before anyone can mean it and all you have taught them is to distrust it.

Long before it reaches a prisoner, this psalm gathers a crowd in “from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south” (Psalm 107:3), redeemed and brought back out of the lands. Read those opening three verses on their own, slowly. That is homecoming language. People who were scattered, and are not scattered any more, standing in one place again. I cannot date the psalm for you, and I would be wary of anyone who offers you a year for it. But a great many readers hear the exile behind that opening, and I hear it too, and it shifts the temperature of verse 14 for me more than any word study ever has. If the first voices singing this belonged to people who had been taken away from Jerusalem, or to their children, then “broke away their chains” was not an image somebody chose for its poetry. It was somebody’s Tuesday. Someone standing in that gathering could have told you what iron does to a wrist over a long enough walk.

And here is the bit I keep missing. I read verse 14 the way I read most verses: alone, late, at a kitchen table, as though it were addressed to me and my particular chain. It was sung by a room. Every family standing there had its own version of the dark, and they said the line out loud together anyway, which is a different act entirely. Half of them were probably singing it on behalf of the ones who could not get the words out. That is still the best use I know for this verse. Not working out whether it applies to me tonight, but saying it in a room where someone else needs to hear it in a voice that is not their own.

“He brought them out.” For years I read that as this psalm’s own phrase, coined for this prisoner. It is not. Ask Israel to introduce their God in a single line and you get almost exactly it: he is the one who “brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2). That is the sentence sitting at the top of the Ten Commandments, the one attached to the sea splitting and a whole nation walking out on dry ground. It is very nearly how God says his own name. He is the one who brings people out.

I am not going to pretend I can vouch for the Hebrew verb standing behind both, because I cannot, and this page has already owned up that translators do not fully agree about one phrase in this very verse. What I can see plainly in my own language is that the psalm refuses to reach for a smaller word. It has one anonymous man in one anonymous cell. No sea, no nation, no Pharaoh, no army drowning. And it hands him the Exodus sentence with nothing shaved off it.

That is what gets me every time. If you had asked me to write verse 14, I would have scaled the language down to fit the man. Something modest. Something proportionate, so as not to embarrass anybody. The psalm scales nothing. Whatever chain you are naming when you read this tonight, the words used for it breaking are not a hand-me-down from the real rescue, kindly cut down to your size. They are the same words at full length, Israel’s founding miracle, spoken over one person nobody ever bothered to name.

It is easy to take “darkness and the shadow of death” as mood language, the phrase you reach for when things feel bad. I doubt the first hearers had that luxury, because their own scriptures already held a very literal picture of this exact pit. Jeremiah was let down on cords into a cistern that had no water in it, only mud, and he sank into the mud (Jeremiah 38:6). Sit with the shape of that for a second. A shaft cut to hold water, no ladder, no wall worth climbing, and daylight stopping a few feet down. You would feel the cold of the mud before your eyes had anything to adjust to, and then find there was nothing to adjust to. He was still in it when Ebed-Melech went to the king and said plainly that the man would die where he was, then let old rags down for his armpits so the cords would not cut him, and had him hauled out (Jeremiah 38:7 to 13).

That is what a Bible-shaped imagination brings to “shadow of death” long before the phrase softens into a figure of speech for a bad week, and I find it steadies me, because it means the dark in verse 14 has real mud somewhere behind it. But the part that has quietly changed how I pray is this. Jeremiah did not sing his way out of that hole. Somebody upstairs had to notice he was missing, care enough to say so to the king who had allowed it, and go and find the rags. God broke that chain, and he did it with a man’s hands and an armful of worn-out clothes. So when I ask him now to bring somebody out of the dark, I have started listening for whether the answer is that I am meant to be the rope.

I want to be straight about the man this psalm never mentions and the Gospels will not let me forget. Herod had John the Baptist bound and put in prison, and no earthquake came. What came was a birthday party, a girl dancing, an oath sworn in front of the dinner guests that a proud man would not go back on, and John’s head carried in on a platter (Matthew 14:3 to 10). Earlier, from inside that cell, John had sent his own disciples to ask Jesus whether he really was the one who was to come, or whether they should be looking for somebody else (Matthew 11:3). That is not a sceptic on the edges. That is the man who baptised him, doubting in the dark. And Jesus sent back word about what was happening out on the roads, the blind seeing and the poor hearing good news, which is a beautiful answer and is not a rescue party. He went on to say that no one born of women had risen up greater than John (Matthew 11:11). Greatest, and still not let out.

I cannot tidy that and I have stopped trying to. Psalm 107 is testimony about the ones who came out. It never claimed everyone does, and scripture sets John down right beside it without a word of explanation, which I take to be deliberate and I take to be honest. If yours is the chain that never came off, or the one that only came off in death, you are not standing outside what the Bible knows about. You are standing where John stood. The only thing I have to hand you is small, and I hand it over anyway: Jesus did not tell him off for asking. He sent word, and he let the question stand.

Children understand a locked door faster than almost anything else we try to teach them, so verse 14 works in a room of mixed ages, provided you do not tidy it on the way through. Get them to hold their own two wrists together for ten seconds, then let go. That is the verse, in a game, and it needs no explaining afterwards. Tell them about Paul and Silas singing at midnight and the earthquake that shook every door open, because it is a thrilling story and it is true.

Then stop, just before the sentence you are about to say. I have heard myself say it. Something about how God always opens the door if you pray hard enough. A child will take that literally, as they should, because it is what you told them, and then a parent will leave, or the dog will die, or the best friend will move to another town, and the door will stay shut. The lesson they draw will not be that I over-promised. It will be that God lied.

So what I say now is smaller, and I think it is truer. Sometimes God breaks the chain that same night. Sometimes he does not, and he is in the dark with us while it is still on, and I will not stand here and tell you I know why it goes one way and not the other. I cannot explain that to a five year old because I cannot explain it to myself. What I can give them is the one thing this psalm ever asks of the prisoner, which is not bravery and is not enough faith: cry out. A small child can do that today. So can I, and most days that is all I have got.

• 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.