Thursday, November 27, 2025
Scripture Readings
- Primary Reading: Nahum 3, Habakkuk 1-3, Zephaniah 1-3
- Secondary Reading: Psalms 137
Devotional Thought
The rivers of Babylon were not quiet brooks but the wide, slow canals of the Euphrates basin, where the exiles of Judah sat down in the dust of a foreign empire. They had been marched from Jerusalem six hundred miles east, the temple burned behind them, the walls of Zion broken stone by stone. Now their captors—the same soldiers who had put chains on their wrists—wanted entertainment. “Sing us one of the songs of Zion,” they said, as though the Lord’s songs were party tunes, as though grief could be ordered up like wine. The exiles hung their harps on the willows and wept. Psalm 137 gives voice to a sorrow so heavy it cannot sing, and a love for Jerusalem so fierce it would rather lose the use of the right hand than forget her.
This is the same world Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah address. Nahum announces the fall of Nineveh, the bloody empire that had crushed nations underfoot. Habakkuk stands on his watchtower and asks God the hardest question: why do the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer? God’s answer is not an explanation but a promise—”the just shall live by his faith” (Habakkuk 2:4). Zephaniah thunders that the day of the LORD is near, a day of darkness and desolation, yet ends with God singing over His people: “he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing” (Zephaniah 3:17). And Psalm 137 sits in the middle of it all, refusing to pretend that exile is easy or that grief is unspiritual.
Notice that the psalm does not tidy up its ending. The final verses cry out for vengeance, for Babylon to be repaid in kind. We may flinch at them, but they are honest. They teach us that God can handle the rawest prayers of His people—that we do not have to sanitize our pain before bringing it to Him. At the same time, the psalm’s deepest impulse is not hatred but memory: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.” The exiles’ first instinct in Babylon was not to blend in but to remember who they were and whose they were.
This week, as Thanksgiving tables are set and families gather, many of us will sing songs of Zion in a strange land of our own—perhaps a land of loss, of unanswered questions, of a diagnosis or a prodigal child or an empty chair. The season invites gratitude, but gratitude does not require amnesia. We can remember Zion and give thanks at the same time. We can hang our harps on the willow and still whisper the Lord’s song. The God who promised Habakkuk that faith would outlast the empire is the same God who sings over His people in Zephaniah. He has not forgotten Jerusalem, and He has not forgotten you.
Reflection
- What “song of Zion” has been hardest for you to sing in a season of exile, and what would it look like to bring that grief honestly to God this week?
- Where in your life are you tempted to forget Jerusalem—to let the comforts or pressures of a strange land crowd out your memory of who God is and what He has done?
Prayer
O Lord, we sit by our own rivers and weep when we remember Zion. You know the songs we cannot sing and the harps we have hung on the willows. Receive our grief, even the parts we are ashamed of, and let our honesty be a kind of faith. Teach us to remember Jerusalem in a land that asks us to forget. When the day of the LORD feels near and our questions outnumber our answers, give us the faith of Habakkuk to live by faith and wait on You. And in Your mercy, sing over us again. Amen.
Psalm Verse
Psalms 137:1 — “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”