No matter how carefully we try to promote and protect our interests, we will not always succeed. Even when misfortune does not befall us, its possibility makes us anxious, and this keeps us from being perfectly happy. This is why the Scriptures tell us that it is only when our hearts are fixed upon that which cannot be shaken that we can face the prospect of bad news without fear (cf. Ps. 112:7; Heb. 12:26–29). 

In our relativistic age, happiness is seen as a matter of personal taste. If you come across someone whose happiness aesthetic differs from yours, you are expected to shrug and politely say, “Whatever makes you happy.” This makes sense to those who see human beings as more authentic when they act in accordance with their feelings. On the other hand, those who see all people as sharing the same human nature will conclude that some things are universally conducive, and others universally detrimental, to personal fulfillment. These differing perspectives correspond to two different paths to happiness, only one of which can lead to a happy end.
The Path of Deified Desire
It is widely assumed in our time that happiness consists in having positive feelings (or at least not having negative ones). Closely related to this is the notion that subjective preferences should be the determining factor for how objective reality is ordered. As C.S. Lewis once put it, modern man has rejected the approach to life that focuses on how to conform the soul to the natural moral order, replacing it with an approach that seeks to subdue everything to his desires.[1] This outlook is now in full bloom, and it is being implemented politically on the basis of various supposed “existential threats.” In the words of professor Russell Berman, the formidable “nexus of government, media, major corporations, and the education establishment . . . aspires to a permanent state of emergency to impose a new mode of governance by intimidation, censorship, and unilateral action.”[2] The powerful in our society claim to have the knowledge and expertise needed to fashion a new world that corresponds to their imaginations, all the while ignoring the constraints of the actual world. Psychologist Mattias Desmet explains this rise in coercive control as “the logical consequence of mechanistic thinking and the delusional belief in the omnipotence of human rationality.”[3] Theologically, it is a manifestation of what Martin Luther was talking about when he said that “man cannot of his nature desire that God should be God; on the contrary, he desires that he himself might be God and that God might not be God.”[4]
The same dynamic is evident at a personal level in the embrace of expressive individualism, which Carl Trueman defines as “a prioritization of the individual’s inner psychology—we might even say ‘feelings’ or ‘intuitions’—for our sense of who we are and what the purpose of our lives is.”[5] Note how expressive individualism undergirds the response of William “Lia” Thomas (winner of the 500 meter freestyle at the 2022 NCAA Women’s Swimming Championships) when he was asked about his biological advantage when competing against women:
There’s a lot of factors that go into a race and how well you do, and the biggest change for me is that I’m happy, and sophomore year, when I had my best times competing with the men, I was miserable. . . . Trans people don’t transition for athletics. We transition to be happy and authentic and our true selves.[6]
As anyone who followed Thomas’s story knows, the thing that made him happy brought unhappiness to female swimmers who were forced to share a locker room with and compete against a biological male. When one person’s pursuit of happiness gets in the way of someone else’s pursuit of happiness, the conflict has to be adjudicated by something beyond individual feelings. But in a relativistic and therapeutic society that makes feelings ultimate, it simply boils down to which side has more power. This is exactly what happened in Thomas’s case, as the cultural ascendancy of transgender ideology resulted in his teammates and competitors being bullied into silence.
Such things are to be expected when a society unmoors itself from any sense of objective moral order. Trueman shows how the modern West has done this by employing Philip Rieff’s taxonomy of “worlds” to describe the various types of culture that societies embody. In this taxonomy, first worlds are pagan, second worlds are epitomized by the Christian West, and third worlds describe modernity. Trueman explains,
First and second worlds thus have a moral, and therefore cultural, stability because their foundations lie in something beyond themselves. To put it another way, they do not have to justify themselves on the basis of themselves. Third worlds, by way of stark contrast to the first and second worlds, do not root their cultures, their social orders, their moral imperatives in anything sacred. They do have to justify themselves, but they cannot do so on the basis of something sacred or transcendent. Instead, they have to do so on the basis of themselves. The inherent instability of this approach should be obvious. . . . Morality will thus tend toward a matter of simple consequentialist pragmatism, with the notion of what are and are not desirable outcomes being shaped by the distinct cultural pathologies of the day.[7]
Lewis foresaw this when he wrote, “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”[8] And as Desmet notes, this produces a level of destabilization and anxiety that causes people to long “for an authoritarian institution that provides direction to take the burden of freedom and the associated insecurity off their shoulders.”[9] This is why today’s West is simultaneously marked by libertinism and legalism. The rise of authoritarianism (or what Rod Dreher describes as “soft totalitarianism”)[10] is yet another manifestation of how fallen man slavishly looks to law for his deliverance. This is what the apostle Paul is talking about in Galatians 4 when he speaks of being enslaved to the “elementary principles of the world,” a phrase that describes the legalistic religious principle that was active for Jews under the law of Moses and for Gentiles under the law of nature. In the words of John Fesko, the phrase “elementary principles of the world” in Galatians 4 refers to “the creation law that appears in both the Adamic and Mosaic covenants.”[11] Because of fallen man’s enslavement under the law, when a society makes feelings and desires preeminent, the inevitable result is not happiness, but tyranny. This further demonstrates that the good order for which human nature was designed cannot be restored by human effort but only by receiving salvation as a free gift through faith in Jesus Christ, in whom we are accepted as righteous in God’s sight and renewed in the whole man after the image of God.[12]
The Path of Rightly Ordered Desire
Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) expounds on the other path to happiness in his dialogue On the Happy Life, written soon after his conversion to Christianity.[13] In this dialogue, Augustine discusses the connection between desire and happiness by saying, “If [a man] wants good things and has them, he is happy; but if he wants bad things, he is unhappy, even if he has them.”[14] In other words, happiness cannot be separated from goodness, which is defined not by individual desires but by the objective moral order that God has inscribed in his world. What matters is not desire itself, but whether what we desire is good or bad.
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Contrary to what many people state, religions are NOT all the same, and do not all lead to the same God. Anyone who actually has studied the various major world religions closely knows how very different they actually are. Pretending they are all alike is a case of intellectual vandalism. It is also a case of seeking to short circuit the truth. Opposing truth claims are NOT identical nor can they be readily harmonised. Sure, we want people of differing faiths to try to live peacefully with their neighbours, but that is a different matter.

We can get into real trouble when we fail to make basic distinctions. Consider the issue of truth versus opinion, or fact versus feelings. You are entitled to your own opinions, tastes and preferences, but you are not entitled to your own truth or facts. Truth is truth, and facts are facts, regardless of how you feel about them or think about them.
The law of gravity may not be to your personal liking, but it remains in place nevertheless. You can speak all you like about “my truth” but there is only THE truth. So pretend all you like that the law of gravity is just someone’s personal opinion, but if you leap off a ten-story building you will discover immediately that your mere opinion does not matter at all.
Or consider the woman who now” identifies” as a man. She can start lopping of her hair – and other bits – but she still has every single cell in her body screaming ‘female.’ Reality has a nasty way of getting in the way of our illusions and preferences. In a similar fashion, a square will always be a square, no matter how hard we try to identify it as a circle.
All this is also true in the realm of worldviews, religions, and truth claims. Contrary to what many people state, religions are NOT all the same, and do not all lead to the same God. Anyone who actually has studied the various major world religions closely knows how very different they actually are.
Pretending they are all alike is a case of intellectual vandalism. It is also a case of seeking to short circuit the truth. Opposing truth claims are NOT identical nor can they be readily harmonised. Sure, we want people of differing faiths to try to live peacefully with their neighbours, but that is a different matter.
All this came to the fore quite recently. In a new post about the film Sound of Freedom I mentioned that there is a very real place for going through a doctrinal checklist, but we need not always be on the same page with someone when it comes to saving our child from sexual predators. So one gal wrote in with this comment:
I’m surprised that anyone would criticise this film on the basis of the theology of those involved in the production. We don’t judge, or even ask, about the beliefs of our doctor, our plumber or the supermarket checkout person.
I’m also surprised, Bill, that you advocate a “theological checklist” be applied to a potential marital or business associate. Having worked in several workplaces in my career, I’ve rarely known what beliefs my fellow workers hold, nor has it seemed of any relevance in the secular world of business.
I married a man from a different faith tradition and we’ve been very happy together for over 30 years. We don’t argue about theology because we both know it’s a matter of personal opinion. Who knows, we could both be wrong. We’ll never learn or consider a new viewpoint if we don’t discuss such matters with an open mind.
As I started to write a response to cover her various points, it grew longer and longer. Given that it might be of some help to others, I decided to turn it into a full-length article. So what follows is what I had said to her in reply:
Thanks ****. But I need to explain to you why some things DO matter when it comes to theology.
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We can follow the example of those who have gone before us. This is how we can pray Psalm 137 today. We call on and plead with God to be faithful to his promises. And we know that all of God’s promises find their Yes and Amen in Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:20). The exiles by the waters of Babylon appealed to God’s Word revealed in Scripture and we do the same today. And we have so much more – we have the Word himself who has revealed the glory of the Father (John 1).

Where were you on May 2, 2011? I was at an Usher concert with a few friends. It was a great concert, and I enjoyed hearing Usher perform several hits from his newest album, Raymond v. Raymond. The concert, though, is not the reason I remember that day. I remember May 2, 2011 because of what happened after the concert. As my friends and I left the venue, we noticed a lot of people excitedly looking at their phones. We assumed they were just reliving the concert we all just experienced. Until, that is, a pick-up truck with a huge American flag in the back drove by and a man shouted from the window, “Osama’s dead! We got him!” On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. special forces, and people halfway around the world broke out in jubilant shouts.
What was behind that? How did the killing of a stranger thousands of miles away provoke joy and excitement in the parking lot of an Usher concert? To state it succinctly, celebration broke out in that parking lot because the death of bin Laden represented the satisfaction of a communal grief and rage that was occasioned by an act of true evil.
What about Psalm 137? How could a group of people unflinchingly state, “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” and then have the audacity to write such a statement down? More to the point, how does a psalm that celebrates little ones dashed against rocks (Ps. 137:9) belong in the same Bible where Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14)? In Psalm 137, the Bible confronts our modern sensibilities and gives us significant pause. The goal of this article is not to sanitize the passage by reading it allegorically, nor is the goal to assert that this passage is an aberration from the biblical witness. Instead, a careful and faithful reading of Psalm 137 leads us to Christ and, in so doing, provides us with the means by which we can engage with evil and suffering in our world today.
The Bible is a strange book. It’s okay to admit that. Psalm 137 was likely written in the 6th century BC in ancient Hebrew. The cultural and historical setting in which Psalm 137 was expressed is far removed from the United States in 2021. And yet, Christians recognize that presiding over the cultural and personal diversity that led to the Bible is a sovereign, powerful, and single Author. When we encounter passages that highlight cultural distance, our first reaction ought to be a humble curiosity.
Where does Psalm 137 fit in the story of history? The first question a humble curiosity asks is one of context. Indeed, context will provide the key to understanding Psalm 137. Where does Psalm 137 sit in history, in the literary story, and in the redemptive story of Scripture? The historical setting of the psalm is apparent in the very first verse:
By the waters of Babylon,there we sat down and wept,when we remembered Zion.
Robert Alter, a professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, writes of Psalm 137 that, “This psalm was almost certainly composed shortly after the deportation of the Judahites by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E.”[1] Psalm 137 is one of the few psalms which makes clear its own historical context. The psalmist writes of the community of exiles sitting down by the waters of Babylon to weep. The city of Babylon and the surrounding country was known at that time for its extensive system of canals. The Jewish exiles likely retreated to different places of this system in order to gather as a community and, as this psalm makes clear, give voice to their grief.
But why grief? These original Jewish singers of this psalm lived through the capture of Jerusalem, the looting and destruction of the Temple, and their forced exile to Babylon. 2 Kings 25 describes the siege of Jerusalem lasting for two years. The siege resulted in a famine so severe that it led to mothers boiling their children for food (Lam. 4:9-10). The king at that time, Zedekiah, was captured. The Babylonians killed his sons in front of him and then put his eyes out so that the last thing he ever saw was the murder of his sons. The Temple was looted and burned down, along with the palace and all the houses of Jerusalem.
Psalm 137, then, is a song of lament. It is a communal expression of grief, an opportunity for the Jewish people to gather and tell the truth of their oppression. Their lament is further occasioned, however, by a more immediate context. In the midst of their weeping, their Babylonian captors goad them on, “Sing us one of your Zion songs.” These Zion songs are scattered throughout the Psalter and scholars have identified several of them. One of them is Psalm 48, which opens with, “Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King. Within her citadels God has made himself known as a fortress.”
Can you imagine the scene Psalm 137 depicts? The people of Judah are gathered along the canals of Babylon, lamenting the death and destruction visited upon them. And then, like taunting schoolboys, their captors jeer at them: “Sing us one of your songs! How about that one that says Zion is the city of the great king? The one that says God has made himself known as a fortress?” A hermeneutic of humble curiosity necessarily entails empathy, particularly since Christians are grafted into the story of Israel. The story of these Jewish exiles in the 6th century BC is our story. We weep with them.
Where does Psalm 137 fit in the literary story of Scripture? History is not the only important context we must examine. The Bible is a book written by one Author through many individual authors. Where does Psalm 137 fit within that picture? Here it is helpful to introduce the idea of a canonical reading of Scripture. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became popular among scholars to attempt to trace the various sources of the Bible to disparate authors. Instead of recognizing the unity of Scripture, scholars sought to dissect Scripture, particularly the Old Testament. A professor of Old Testament at Yale University changed this with the introduction of the “canonical reading” of the Bible. Brevard Childs asserted that it was most helpful to approach the Bible as it is received by faith communities. In other words, rather than dissecting Scripture into many individual parts, Childs recognized the Bible as a united literary document which deserved study as such. A canonical reading of the Psalms, then, considers questions such as the arrangement of the psalms and how the book functions as a literary whole.
Scholars have generally identified five ‘books’ within the Psalms. Psalm 137 is located in Book V of the Psalter. This final section of the Psalter consists of Psalms 107-150. O. Palmer Robertson describes Book V as “the climactic praises of the consummation of the kingdom” (emphasis in original).[2] Interestingly, the Psalm itself sits within a trio of Psalms that serve as a hinge between two larger collections within the book. Psalms 120-134 are known collectively as the Songs of Ascent.
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