Psalm 126:1-2 (NKJV)
When the LORD brought back the captivity of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing. Then they said among the nations, “The LORD has done great things for them.”
The movie Contact, starring Jodi Foster and Matthew McConaughey, came out in 1997 and was an adaptation of the Carl Sagan novel of the same name. It’s a Sci-Fi story and near the end of the film Jodi Foster’s character is catapulted via a wormhole to another part of the universe where she has a brief encounter with an alien intelligence far beyond our own. It is the culmination of decades of her dreaming about what it would be like to travel into space and encounter alien life (she played an astro-physicist). The scenes are spectacular, and as she awakens to finally see what she had only dreamt of, through tears of joy and overwhelming emotions, she repeated softly…
“I had no idea. I had no idea.”
I’ve always cherished this scene because I think our reaction will be similar when we open our eyes on the other side of this life and come face-to-face with our Lord and Savior and His Heaven. Such are the sentiments in this seventh of the fifteen Psalms of Ascent. Most associate this passage with the return from exile under Ezra and Nehemiah, but it is also possible that it describes David’s return from his brief exile from Jerusalem in Absalom’s coup (2 Samuel 15). Whatever the case, the writer and/or the people of God were completely overwhelmed by God’s goodness, mercy and faithfulness to bring them back to their most Holy Hill (Zion) after such a tragic time in captivity. In his commentary on this psalm, Spurgeon noted:
“Being in trouble, the gracious pilgrims remember for their comfort times of national woe which were succeeded by remarkable deliverances. Then sorrow was gone like a dream, and the joy which followed was so great that it seemed too good to be true, and they feared that it must be the vision of an idle brain. So sudden and so overwhelming was their joy that they felt like men out of themselves, ecstatic, or in a trance. The captivity had been great, and great was the deliverance; for the great God himself had wrought it: it seemed too good to be actually true: each man said to himself,
‘Is this a dream? O if it be a dream,
Let me sleep on, and do not wake me yet.’”
Ponder that for a minute in light of the day when your faith becomes your eyes and all that you had hoped for…prayed for…and looked forward to regarding your ascension into Heaven is right before your very eyes. What will you see? Who will you see? What will the surroundings be like? What will the colors be like? What will you hear? What will it be like to see the risen Christ face-to-face? What will it feel like to be completely free of sin and temptation? What kind of emotions will you experience when you finally have your faith completely validated by a reality that is simply beyond human comprehension? I’m pretty sure the words of that movie will come to me in that moment:
“I had no idea. I had no idea.”
