“By the rivers of Babylon – there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.” (Verse 1) This psalm must have been written sometime during the Babylonian Captivity, 606-536 B.C.
Being in a place where you don’t belong is not fun. Imagine how you would feel if you were stranded in a place where no one liked you, and you had no way to communicate with people you had lost track of, and your place of worship was destroyed.
Bitterness was in the heart of this writer against his captor nation, but it should not have been. God turned His back on Jerusalem and the Israelites because they had turned their backs on Him. The captors were God’s instruments to get the Jewish nation to return to Him.
First, the northern kingdom had been carried into captivity by the Assyrians. It happened when Hezekiah was king of the southern kingdom; about 100 years before Babylon invaded. In both instances, the majority of the people were worshipping false gods at the time of their captivity. At the time of the Babylonian captivity, the people had not kept the required Sabbatical year for 490 years.
That is why the Babylonian captivity was 70 years in length, to make up for the 70 Sabbatical years missed. A Sabbatical year was to be celebrated every seventh year so the ground could recover its energy since they had no fertilizers to renew its strength.
Christians sometimes go through their own Babylonian Captivity. Sometimes we get discouraged because church has become “ho-hum” for us. For some reason, we have lost the joy of worship with other believers. Maybe we watch preachers on TV or listen to them on the radio. While this is good, it doesn’t take the place of our lifting our voices in praise to God with other believers.
How do I know this? Because I had my own Babylonian Captivity for 20 years. It began to turn around when I started back to church. It was not an immediate turn around; it took time for me to sense God’s leading in my life. But I can say with the psalmist, “His faithful love endures forever”.