Commentary - Psalm 126:4-6

Bird's-eye view

Psalm 126 is a song of ascents, one of the psalms sung by pilgrims on their way up to Jerusalem. It is a psalm of dramatic reversal, a song about the Lord's turnings. The first half celebrates a past, almost unbelievable deliverance from captivity that made the people of God feel like they were dreaming. The second half, which we are considering here, pivots to a heartfelt plea for God to do it again, to bring another such restoration. This plea is then grounded in a pair of agricultural aphorisms that have become precious to the saints down through the centuries. The core principle is this: present sorrow, when invested in faithful kingdom work, will inevitably yield a future harvest of unimaginable joy. The path to laughter runs through a valley of tears, and the way to a heavy harvest begins with a light bag of precious seed, sown in apparent desperation.

This is not a psalm of grim duty, but one of confident expectation. The connection between the tears of sowing and the joy of reaping is not incidental; it is causal. God has structured the world in such a way that the painful, tearful, faithful work of planting is the necessary prelude to the shouting, joyful work of harvesting. This is a foundational law of the kingdom. It was true for the exiles returning to Zion, and it is supremely true in the gospel, where the ultimate sowing in tears, the suffering and death of the Lord Jesus, yielded the joyful harvest of resurrection and salvation for many sons.

Outline

Context In Psalms

As one of the Songs of Degrees (Psalms 120-134), this psalm was part of the hymnal for Jewish pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem for the great feasts. This context of pilgrimage is crucial. A pilgrimage is a journey from a lower place to a higher place, from the mundane to the holy, from exile to home. Psalm 126 perfectly captures the emotional landscape of such a journey. It begins with the memory of a great deliverance (the return from Babylon being the most likely candidate), which serves as the fuel for present faith. But the people are not yet fully "home." They are still on the way, still facing hardship, which is why they must pray, "Restore our captivity." The psalm therefore sits between memory and hope, using God's past faithfulness as the grounds for appealing for His future intervention. It is a psalm for people on the road, people who know that God has acted but who desperately need Him to act again.

Key Issues

Sowing in Tears, Reaping in Joy

The central metaphor of this section is agricultural, and it is profoundly important. The Bible teaches elsewhere that what a man sows, that he will also reap (Gal 6:7). If you plant thistle seeds, you get thistles. If you plant wheat, you get wheat. But this psalm adds a crucial distinction. While the what of sowing determines the what of reaping, the how of sowing does not determine the how of reaping. In fact, the opposite is true. The adverbs are inverted. You sow tearfully, but you reap joyfully. You go out with a light load, a bag of "precious seed," but you come back staggering under a heavy one, the "sheaves."

This is a law of the kingdom. The world thinks that the way to get joy is to pursue joy. The Bible teaches that the way to get joy is to pursue faithfulness, even when it is hard and sorrowful. The tears are not a sign of failure; they are part of the process. They water the seed. The farmer who sows his seed in a time of famine is not throwing away his last meal foolishly. He is acting in faith, believing in the harvest to come. His weeping is the expression of his desperation and his dependence. He is entrusting his future to the soil, and ultimately, to the God of the harvest. And the promise of God is that this act of faith will not be disappointed. The return with joy is not a possibility, but a certainty. He "shall doubtless come again with rejoicing."

Verse by Verse Commentary

4 Restore our captivity, O Yahweh, As the streams in the Negev.

After reflecting on the great, dream-like restoration of the past, the psalmist pivots to the present need. The prayer "Restore our captivity" or "Turn again our captivity" shows that the initial return was not the final chapter. There is still hardship, opposition, and a sense of being hemmed in. They need God to do it again. The simile used is powerful and instructive: "as the streams in the Negev." The Negev is the arid south country. For most of the year, the riverbeds, the wadis, are bone dry. But when the rains come, they are suddenly and violently filled with raging torrents of water, transforming the landscape in a moment. This is what the psalmist is asking for. Not a slow, gradual improvement, but a sudden, dramatic, overwhelming flood of divine blessing and deliverance. He is asking God to do what only God can do, to bring life out of a dead and dry place in a flash.

5 Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy.

Here the psalmist lays down the governing principle of God's kingdom economy. This is a divine proverb. It establishes a fixed connection between two seemingly opposite experiences: sowing in tears and reaping in joy. Sowing is hard work. It is toil. In the context of the returning exiles, it meant planting crops in a desolate land, surrounded by enemies, with no guarantee of a harvest. The "tears" represent the sorrow, the hardship, the risk, and the pain of their labor. But this sorrowful labor is not in vain. The promise is absolute. The reaping will come, and it will not be a quiet, grim affair. It will be accompanied by "shouts of joy," with ringing cries of exultation. The joy will be proportionate to the previous sorrow. The depth of the pain in the planting season determines the height of the ecstasy in the harvest.

6 He who goes to and fro weeping, carrying his bag of seed, Shall indeed come again with a shout of joy, carrying his sheaves with him.

This verse personalizes and intensifies the principle from verse 5. It paints a picture of an individual farmer. We see him walking back and forth across his field, weeping as he goes. Why is he weeping? Because the seed he carries is "precious." It is all he has left. To cast it into the ground is an act of desperate faith. If the harvest fails, his family starves. Every seed thrown away is a potential mouthful of bread lost. This is the cost of discipleship. It is the painful surrender of what is precious in the present for the sake of a promised future. But the focus of the verse is on the guaranteed outcome. The Hebrew is emphatic: "he shall indeed come again," or as the old version has it, he "shall doubtless come again." His return is not in question. And his return will be a mirror image of his departure. He went out weeping, he will come back shouting. He went out carrying a small bag of seed, he will come back struggling under the weight of his sheaves. The harvest is not just a replacement of what he sowed; it is a multiplication of it. This is the promise that fuels all Christian labor, from raising children in the fear of the Lord to preaching the gospel in a hostile land.

Application

This psalm is a great encouragement to all Christians who find themselves in a dry season, in a time of tearful sowing. We live between the first and second comings of Christ. We have experienced the great, dream-like deliverance of our own conversion. God turned our captivity to sin and death, and it was a marvel. But we are not yet fully home. We still live in the Negev, a dry and weary land. We still have captivities that need turning. This psalm gives us the script for what to do. We are to look back at what God has done for us in Christ, and on that basis, we are to plead with Him to act again. "Lord, you saved me from my sin. Now save my marriage. Restore my wayward child. Revive your church."

And as we pray, we are to work. We are to be about the business of sowing. Every act of faithful obedience in a time of discouragement is a seed sown in tears. Every time you choose to love your wife when you do not feel like it, you are sowing. Every time you patiently instruct your children when they are driving you mad, you are sowing. Every dollar you give to the church when your budget is tight is precious seed. Every time you share the gospel with a hostile neighbor, you are sowing in tears. This psalm promises us that this labor is not in vain. The harvest is coming. There will be a day when every tear is wiped away, and all our sorrowful faithfulness will be transformed into an eternal weight of glory. The joy will come, the sheaves will be heavy, and the shouting will be loud.