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Exile in Babylon wasn’t so hard. According to Jeremiah 29, you could build houses, plant gardens, take wives, and have children. When the opportunity came for God’s people to return to Judah, most chose to stay.

But some couldn’t settle. When residents of Babylon asked the former residents of Judah for a song, they wept. “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land? … Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!” (Psalm 137:4, 6)

Their memory of Jerusalem’s destruction made it impossible to enjoy Babylon. They cried out to God to do to Babylon what Babylon had done to Jerusalem (Psalm 137:7-9).

The prayer of one such person ends on a troubling note: he prays for the violent death of Babylonian children (Psalm 137:9). The Babylonians had treated Judah so harshly that he asks for God to bring justice and do the same to the Babylonians. He asks God to exalt his people and destroy their enemies.

Exile may not have been so hard in Babylon, but it was enough to break the heart of those who remembered God’s promises and missed God’s dwelling place in Jerusalem.

Our Lives in Exile

Many compare our situation today to exile. “It may be that the motif of exile offers one of the most provocative and potentially fruitful ways for the church to define itself in this particular historical epoch,” writes Lee Beach in his book The Church in Exile: Living in Hope After Christendom.

Life in exile isn’t so bad. We have decent Internet, movies on demand, and decent food. It’s not hard to start to get comfortable.

It’s even easy to hear or sing the songs of our faith among those who don’t believe it and not even notice the dissonance.

Psalm 137 teaches us how to long for more.

Longing for More

I finished preaching last Sunday on the new earth. I described the vision of Ezekiel 47 and Revelation 22: God’s presence here on earth, bringing healing and life to the dead places, restoring all that’s broken. I concluded with a quote from Cyprian of Carthage:

Casting away the dread of death, let’s think about the immortality that follows afterwards … We who see that terrible things have come, and know that even more terrible things are coming, should count it the greatest blessing to leave as soon as possible. If in your house the walls were tottering with age, the roof shuddering, and the whole edifice, worn out and weak, likely to come crashing down in instant ruin, wouldn’t you get out quickly?

We can see the walls are tottering, and we long for more. Still…life’s pretty good here. It’s easy to settle and lose our longing for home.

Maybe we’re a little too happy in exile. When the walls totter and the roof shudders, it’s a reminder to long for the new earth to come.

Psalm 137 reminds us to not get used to our life as exiles, and instead to long for home. Come, Lord Jesus.

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