“Marching AS to War”

Psalm 149

Nadia Bolz-Weber wrote of Psalm 149, “If only we could end at verse 6a.” Prior to the second half of verse 6 this psalm is a hymn of joyful praise. God’s people are celebrating a victory of some sort – they had been delivered from something by God.

We can’t be sure what that something was. Maybe it was a military victory over one of the many foes that surrounded them. Some hypothesize that they had been delivered from some sort of distress that had nothing to do with warfare. A few think that it is a hymn of victory sung by God’s people after their deliverance from their Babylonian exile.

Whatever it is a song of praise to the Lord God Almighty, the One who had chosen them out of all the nations to be his elect. As their Lord and God he is their defender. He stands with them against any force, military or otherwise, that threatens them.

If the psalm had stopped half way through verse 6, what a wonderful hymn of praise it would be. But it didn’t. It kept going, segueing into a call for holy war, a call for vengeance and punishment upon some unspecified enemy.

What are we as Christians to do with that? Are we to see these verses as an excuse to launch holy wars of our own? The closing verses of this psalm have been used to justify such wars in centuries past. And the results have been neither pretty nor holy.

Wrote Franz Delitzsch, a 19^th century German Lutheran biblical scholar and theologian: “The dream that it is possible to use such a prayer as this, without spiritual transubstantiation of the words, has made them the signal for some of the greatest crimes with which the church has ever been stained. It was by means of this Psalm that Casper Sciopuis in his ‘Clarion of the Sacred War’, a work written, it has been said, not in ink, but with blood, roused and inflamed the Roman Catholics Princes to the Thirty Years’ War. It was by means of this Psalm that, in the Protestant community, Thomas Munzer fanned the flames of the War of the Peasants. We see from these and other instances that when in her interpretation of such a Psalm the Church forgets the words of the Apostle ‘the weapons of our warfare are not carnal’, she falls back upon the ground of the Old Testament, beyond which she has long since advanced…”

That phrase, “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal” was the underlying theme for the commentary on today’s text. Wrote C. F. Spurgeon, “… we will not copy the chosen people in making literal war, but we will fulfill the emblem by making spiritual war.” The weapons for such war are enumerated by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 6, where we are reminded that since our struggle is not against flesh and blood enemies, but rather spiritual forces of evil, we must put on the whole armor of God. A sword is mentioned, but it is the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.

Spurgeon went on to write, “Christians have no commission of vengeance, it is theirs to execute the command of mercy, and that alone.” Even though we sing the words “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,” we are not singing about literally marching off to do battle in the physical sense. Please note that the phrase is “as to war,” with war being understood in a metaphorical sense. This was made pretty clear by Matthew Henry in his commentary: “Christ never intended his gospel should be spread by fire and sword, or his righteousness by the wrath of man.”

As I read this psalm, which was scheduled to be preached last week, I kept being drawn back to images of September 11, 2001. One of the most chilling of those images was captured on film as Islamic people around the world danced and sang – rejoiced – in response to the horrible carnage caused that day by radical Muslim terrorists, radical Muslim terrorists who committed their heinous deeds in the name of their god. In their minds they were waging holy war against the enemies of Allah.

That, my friends, is not how we Christians are called to respond to the enemies of Christ and his church. To quote again those earlier words of Spurgeon, “[We] have no commission of vengeance, it is [ours] to execute the command of mercy, and that alone.” Or to share Paul’s words from the 12^th chapter of Romans, “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

One final note on today’s text: verse 4 says, “For the Lord takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with victory.” Or as Jesus puts it, “Blessed are the meek [those whose gentleness is their strength], for they will inherit the earth.” And Jesus should know, for it is with the weapons of humility, servanthood, and sacrifice that he waged the ultimate holy war, the one in which he conquered sin, death, and evil once and for all time. Amen.