The City Of God

The Songs of Ascent were road songs, which means every one of them was sung in the wrong country. Pilgrims sang Psalm 122 on roads owned by other kings, about a city where God himself dwelled. That makes this psalm more than a worship chorus — it's an anthem, and an anthem tells you which country you belong to.

"I was glad when they said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the LORD!'" For a church like ours, the psalm's question is not whether we love being together. It's what our gladness is evidence of. Either our joy is the warmth of a really good community — and the world is full of those — or it is the anthem of another city, leaking through the walls of this one. Augustine said all of history is the story of two cities built by two loves. Jerusalem, "bound firmly together" in the Bible's sanctuary language, shows us a city glued by a Name we confess rather than a name we make — a city where worship and justice share an address.

But the city called to be at peace killed the Prince of Peace outside her own gates. And in the reversal only God could write, the murder became the means: the blood spilled outside the city made peace for the world (Colossians 1:19–20). Then the house of the LORD got up and moved — the Word tabernacled among us, and through his death and resurrection we are now the living stones being built into God's dwelling. Our citizenship is in heaven; we are a colony of heaven, planted in a country of death not to escape it but to make the coming Kingdom visible inside it.

So we guard against the colony's two dangers — becoming a clubhouse, and being quietly assimilated — and we pray in both directions: peace over God's people, and shalom over the very city we're planted in. Our feet are already standing in the gates. Now we go be the city.