Does God Choose Sides?

If the LORD had not been on our side—let Israel say—if the LORD had not been on our side … [Psalm 124:1-2a].

College football has changed substantially since my Wake Forest years (1969-76). You’d be correct, of course, if you replied, “What hasn’t?” As participants have grown bigger and faster, a whole new set of safety rules has come into play. At many schools—I won’t say which, although I’m thinking of one in South Carolina whose name begins with a “C” and ends with an “N,”—football is big business.

During my WFU years, in business terms, Wake Forest football was bankrupt. Jokes circulated about our ineptitude. One year, at the fall football luncheon, the coach was asked what kind of year we had ahead. He retorted, “Well, let’s put it this way: last year we won just one game and we were shut-out on four Saturdays. This year?—we’ve got everybody back.” According to another joke, we were so bad that we needed someone to pray for us.

With regard to prayer, WFU—then still nominally associated with the Southern Baptist Convention—actually had things covered. That is to say that in those years, in the minutes before all our home games in Winston-Salem, we had the Reverend Dr. William Finlator, senior pastor at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church (Raleigh), offer a pregame prayer.

A splendid speaker, with a strong and clear voice, Dr. Finlator would always lift up the values of sportsmanship. He’d beseech our Lord to protect the “athletic combatants” from injury. He’d allow, in some form or fashion, that win or lose, each of us should handle the game’s outcome in an appropriate, respectful, Christian manner.

I remember that on one such Saturday, Dr. Finlator included something more or less like this, “As the psalmist teaches us, O LORD, we know that you are on our side.” Then he hesitated just a second or two for effect and continued, “Yet, as the psalmist also teaches, you are on the side of our opponents as well.” I suspect that at that moment, Dr. Finlator might have been thinking about Psalm 124, one of the Psalter readings appointed for this upcoming Sunday (the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost, RCL, Year B).

Originally, Psalm 124 was one of several “songs of ascents,” a psalm sung as worshipers—on major feast days—processed up the steps leading to the Jerusalem Temple. The psalm begins with an awkward point: “If the LORD had not been on our side ….” The text begs the question: Does Yahweh really take sides?

For the houses of Judah and Israel, it seemed clear that Yahweh had been on the side of the Hebrews for centuries. How else could one explain their survival over time? Had it not been for Yahweh, they would have perished in the famine that took place at the time of Joseph, who had been spirited away to Egypt as a slave. Had Yahweh not been on their side, the people would have been captured and taken back to slavery when the Egyptians pursued the Israelites out of Egypt after the first Passover (124:3). Had it not been for the intervention of Yahweh, the Israelites would have been engulfed by the flood of the Red Sea’s parting waters, not just the Egyptians (124:4-5). Still later, had Yahweh not been on their side, the house of Judah would have disintegrated after being overrun by the Babylonians. Indeed, for the psalmist, there was plenty of evidence that Yahweh was on their side.

And yet, if one looked closely, even the Hebrews had to admit that Yahweh was often also on the side of others with whom they did not share a blood relationship. In Joshua 6, we read how the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. And yet we also hear that Rahab, the “innkeeper”—or was it “the prostitute”—a pagan Gentile, was saved from the savagery, along with her family. Rahab will later show up in the pedigree of Jesus, our Lord [see Matthew 1:5].

Elsewhere we see that when Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, developed leprosy, he was healed through instructions from the prophet Elisha [see 2 Kings 5]. The Syrian was healed and yet apparently, there were still Hebrew lepers left unhealed.

While Yahweh certainly favored Abraham and Isaac, Yahweh was also on the side of Ishmael, Abraham’s first-born son. When Ishmael and his mother were abandoned by Abraham, Yahweh saw to it that both survived and even flourished. Ishmael went on to be the progenitor of his own nation [see Genesis 16, et seq.].

In first century Palestine, people came to understand that Jesus of Nazareth was on their side. He fed 5,000 people—mostly Hebrew—with a few loaves and a few fish. A bit later, when he was in “Gentile country,” He fed 4,000 more. He gave sight to the blind and the ability to walk to the lame. Much of His healing was among the Hebrews living in and around Jerusalem. Yet Jesus also healed the daughter of the Syrophoenician woman, a Gentile. He spoke with and changed the life of the Samaritan woman at the well. He healed the servant of the Roman centurion. He raised Lazarus from the dead, to be sure, but he also pardoned and accepted the thief on a cross after He Himself had been nailed to one of His own. It’s clear from the New Testament readings that if one asks if Jesus is on my side, or if He is on the side of others, the answer is “Yes!”

As much as it may stick in our craw, our Lord can be on our side, and yet also on the side of our enemies. We are all created in God’s image, are we not? In a world, and even occasionally in a church, that seeks to erect barriers to the inclusion of some others, Yahweh will have none of it. Just as Yahweh is committed to the wholeness and holiness of you and me, Yahweh is equally committed to those who may seem to oppose us. Does our Lord choose me or you? His response: “Only if you need me.”

Psalm 124 gives us one final additional insight (with three interior points) into the nature of Yahweh and His decision to be “on our side.” As we see in Psalm 124, Yahweh was on our side in the past, when he brought the Israelites out of Egypt, saved them from the Red Sea, fostered and fed them for 40 years in the wilderness, and brought them into the promised land. I say “our side” because had He failed to preserve the Hebrews, Gentiles would never have come along in their path.

Yahweh is on our side in the present, when we discover that—from the clutches of sin—“we have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare” (124:7). This is one of the most descriptive and beautiful metaphors in all of Scripture. Humanity found itself trapped in the snare of sin. And like the bird who struggles in the snare, the more we struggled to get out, the more we were entangled in the mess we’d found ourselves in. Through Christ’s effort—not our own—He snapped the trap that held us fast, releasing us to the possibility of true communion with the blessed Trinity. Through His actions, we are—in the present tense—free.

Finally, Yahweh will always be on our side, even in the future, for the psalmist teaches that our help will always come “in the name of the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth” (124:8). Past, present, future—Yahweh takes sides in the struggles of life. Emmanuel, God is always “with us.” Amen.