Since this is a worship psalm and its dominant note is thanksgiving we are reminded at the start that worship involves thanksgiving. Up to now in our study of these last psalms we have stressed that worship is acknowledging God as the great God he truly is and praising him for it. In other words, worship has to do with confessing God's attributes. But we are reminded here that it also has to do with thanking God for being who he is and for doing what he has actually done. How could it be otherwise if, as is the case, the only way we know what God is like is through his actions? 

Christians may have problems with the vindictiveness and violence of this passage of Psalm 137, but it is important to notice other points as well. In yesterday's study, for instance, we noted that the words are an appeal to God for justice. Today we look at two other things evident in these verses. 

Does Psalm 137 have meaning for us? Of course, and we do not need to allegorize the psalm to feel its relevance. We need only think how hard it is to sing the hymns of the church when we are immersed in this world's culture. It is why we escape to church to do it. Or we may think of how sad we become considering the state of the church itself when it is weak or plunged into apostasy or is in spiritual decline and when we seem unable to do anything about it. 

The Bible is filled with contrasts that lend substance and life to its teaching, and one of these is between Babylon, which stands for the world and its culture, and Jerusalem, which stands for God's kingdom. This contrast is both literal and figurative, literal because there was an actual earthly Babylon matched by a literal earthly Jerusalem—earthly Babylon overthrew the earthly Jerusalem in 586 B.C.—but figurative, too, because the Bible also speaks of Mystery Babylon, on the one hand (in Revelation 18, 19), and on the other, a new heavenly Jerusalem (in Revelation 21, 22). 

In recent years, I have noticed in many evangelical churches a decline and in some cases the total absence of worship elements that focus our minds on God, and at the same time a loss of the importance of the gospel.