The Helper
I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; from where shall my help come? My help comes from the Lord, Who made heaven and earth. Psalm 121:1-2 NASB
Who made – Yesterday we discovered that God’s sovereign choice to create anything at all implies His ultimate concern and involvement with creation, and as such, creation is the continual unfolding of the purposes of God. That means every moment is a new unveiling. Every moment is the summation of all past moments of God’s purposes and the beginning of all God’s yet-to-be choices for His creation. It is this continual renewal that makes life with meaning possible.
Now notice that the Psalmist implicitly recognizes this fact in his appeal for help. He pleads for the assistance of the maker of heaven and earth. It is the creative God who must come to his rescue, not because the creative God is a God of power but because the creative God is a God of possibilities. The Psalmist could have appealed to El Shaddai or El Elyon, both names of power, but he doesn’t. Why not? If he needed rescue, wouldn’t he want the power God to show up? Well, maybe, but rescue doesn’t really change things. The same ol’ same ol’ is still there, waiting to come around again. No, what he wants is a new destiny, a way that isn’t going to take him back to the place where he’ll need rescue again. And for that he needs the creative God, the maker of heaven and earth who chose to bring about something that could never have been anticipated, who chose a new destiny for everything that exists, and can still do that again.
For us, heaven and earth seem like givens in our world. In fact, we can’t think of a world without these two concepts since they involve all that is created. But Heschel reminds us that the existence of everything is not a given. It is an act of a creative being who decides to do what is unexpected. There is no obligation for God to create. He remains God without all the risks and potential failures of creation. And yet He chooses to make it so, just as the Psalmist now wants Him to choose to make something new, to bring about something unanticipated once more; to change the direction of the universe and in so doing, rewrite the future so that this plea will change things (pardon the imagery since I don’t really believe the “future” is written in advance). It’s like the movie The Adjustment Bureau. The future, cries the Psalmist, needs to be remade.
Aren’t we like this poet? Most of the time we plead for ordinary rescue. We just want God to “fix” things, to act as our personal genie and bring about a comfortable life for us. Or something like that. But the poet’s words really describe our true situation. Rescue without a new direction is ultimately pointless. We don’t want to be just pulled out of the fire. We want the fire to stop, and for that we need a new universe. Only the creator God can make that happen—and He will if, as the rabbis tell us, we are willing to stake our lives on our prayers.
Topical Index: future, Creator, power, Psalm 121:1-2
