Working In The Dark

Psalm 134

A song for the ascent to Jerusalem.

1Oh, bless the LORD, all you servants of the LORD,

you who serve as night watchmen in the house of the LORD.

2Lift your hands in holiness,

and bless the LORD.

3May the LORD, who made heaven and earth,

bless you from Jerusalem.

It is never easy to work in the dark. And that is true no matter what kind of dark you are in.

In the Temple the Levites served various shifts night and day. It is probable that the first two verses of this psalm were sung by the Israelites who came to the Temple at night, and the final verse was sung back to the people by the Levites. Then the Levites went back in the Temple to serve the Lord in the shadows of the dark.

The shadows of the night can often be terrifying—even more than darkness by itself. Shakespeare speaks of King Richard’s terror of shadows: “Shadows tonight have struck more terror than can the substance of ten thousand soldiers.”

The poet John Milton also struggled with the darkness of his blindness: “Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?” he asked in his classic poem, “On His Blindness.” But then he got his reply: “God doth not need man’s work or his own gifts. Who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. . . . They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Whether your way is shrouded in shadows, whether your work is completely in the dark, or whether you feel, like Milton, that you’re merely standing and waiting, your task is to bless the Lord anyway. And don’t forget that Milton, whose blindness hit him in his forties, wrote his masterpieces in darkness.

Bless, O my soul! the living God;

Call home thy thoughts that rove abroad;

Let all the powers within me join

In work and worship so divine.

ISAAC WATTS

Fascinating Fact

The word LORD (Yahweh) appears five times in these three verses.

Notable Quotable

“To bless God (verse 1) is to acknowledge gratefully what he is; but to bless man (verse 3) God must make of him what he is not, and give him what he has not.”

DEREK KIDNER