Psalm 126:4

Psalm 126 is one of the fifteen Songs of Ascents (Psalms 120–134), sung by pilgrims as they went up to Jerusalem for the yearly feasts. Its first three verses remember a return from captivity so wonderful that it felt like a dream. The people’s mouths were filled with laughter and singing, and even the nations said that the LORD had done great things for them (Psalm 126:1–3). With verse 4 the psalm turns from remembering to asking. It moves in three steps: joy over what God has done (verses 1–3), a prayer for what is still to be done (verse 4), and a promise that grounds the prayer (verses 5–6).

The setting is most likely the time after the exile in Babylon. The decree of Cyrus, around 538 BC, let the exiles go home to Judah (Ezra 1), and that return was a real deliverance. Those who came back found Jerusalem in ruins, the temple destroyed and the land desolate. They lived with poverty, famine and quarrels among themselves, and the peoples around them opposed the rebuilding (Ezra 4, Nehemiah 4). Many Jews were still scattered abroad. God had begun the work, and much remained.

So the people pray, “Turn again our captivity, O LORD.” The verb shûwb means to turn back or return, and also to bring back or restore. The noun shᵉbûwth, translated “captivity”, can also mean fortunes or circumstances, and both senses fit here. The community asks God to bring home those still in exile and to restore the whole nation: its land, its temple, its well-being and its standing among the nations. The word “our” makes it the prayer of the whole people together.

This prayer shows faith living between what God has done and what he has promised. The people thank him for the first return and then ask him for the rest, because only the LORD, Yᵉhôvâh, the covenant God of Israel, can turn their condition around. God’s deliverance often comes in stages, and he calls his people to keep praying until his work is complete. He had promised the exiles “an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11), and through Ezekiel he spoke of a restored and flourishing Israel (Ezekiel 36), gathered from the nations into its own land, washed clean and given a new heart (Ezekiel 36:24–28).

“The south” is the Negev, the dry, semi-desert country south of Judah. Its streams are wadis, stream beds that lie parched for most of the year. The word ʼâphîyq means a channel or stream bed. When the short, heavy rains of winter arrive, these dry beds suddenly fill with rushing water, and the barren ground along them turns green and fruitful.

That is the restoration the psalmist asks for. He wants it to come suddenly and in abundance, bringing life to a desolate place, and he knows that it depends wholly on God, just as the wadis fill only when God sends the rain. The picture fits a people who had come home to a dry and ruined land. God promises this kind of change through Isaiah: “Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19). Through Joel he promises the former and the latter rain, floors full of wheat, and the restoring of the years the locust had eaten (Joel 2:23–26).

God’s grace can reach a dry life the same way, all at once, like a flood running down a desert stream bed. And even after a great answer to prayer, we still have reason to ask him to finish what he has started.

Verse 5 answers the prayer with a promise, given in a few words like a proverb. It takes what Israel had lived through, weeping in captivity and rejoicing at the return, and states it as a truth about God’s dealings with all his people.

Life in Israel ran by the farming seasons, so everyone knew what sowing and reaping meant. The verb zâraʻ means to sow or scatter seed, and figuratively to spread, plant and make fruitful. A farmer sows when there is still nothing to show for his work and waits for what will grow. Tears, dimʻâh, are weeping. Joy here is rinnâh, a raised voice: a shout or ringing cry of joy, and the same word can be a cry in prayer. The sower weeps over the furrows, and the reaper comes in shouting for joy.

For the returned exiles the tears were real. They had wept through the long captivity, they grieved over their ruined homeland, and the rebuilding was hard work. Farmers sowing in a dry season knew the same thing: painful labour comes first, and the joyful harvest after it. God promised through Jeremiah to make that change himself: “for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow” (Jeremiah 31:13).

The tears belong to the sowing. Faithful work done in grief, and grief carried in faith, are seed in God’s hands, and he wastes none of it. Present suffering is for a time and has a purpose, and patient trust in God’s timing is how his people come through it. Paul uses the same picture: “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” and “let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Galatians 6:7–9). He calls our troubles a “light affliction, which is but for a moment,” and says that it “worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17). Hosea calls Israel to “Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy” (Hosea 10:12). Paul promises that “he which soweth bountifully shall reap also bountifully” (2 Corinthians 9:6), and Hebrews says of the Lord’s chastening that “afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby” (Hebrews 12:11).

Verse 6 takes the general truth of verse 5 and paints it as one scene. A farmer goes out weeping, carrying his seed, and later comes home rejoicing with his arms full of sheaves. “Weepeth” and “rejoicing” stand at the two ends of the verse, and the second half finishes the story the first half begins.

“He that goeth forth” is a man who acts. He walks out to the field and does the work while he weeps. The verb bâkâh means to weep, bemoan and lament, an outward weeping that others can hear. It tells of hardship, sorrow and the cost of the work. Labour for God’s kingdom often begins in this way, with tears and with real personal cost.

The joy promised here is above all the gladness of seeing God’s faithfulness and the fruit of labour done for him, and he gives it in his own time and way. He can bless materially, and often does, as he wills. The harvest may be souls brought to Christ, a character made more like his, prayers answered, broken relationships restored, peace in the middle of ongoing hardship, or God’s justice established. Jesus spoke of seed on good ground that “beareth fruit, and bringeth forth, some an hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” (Matthew 13:23). What the verse guarantees is that God’s work through his faithful servants will triumph.

People also ask what it means if they never see the sheaves in their own lifetime. Some harvests come in this life. Others are gathered in later generations, or in eternity, since much faithful sowing feeds a larger work of God that outlives the sower. Paul tells believers that “your labour is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58). The fullest rejoicing waits for the return of Christ and his kingdom, when “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes” (Revelation 21:4).

The captivity that all people most need turned is bondage to sin, death and separation from God. Jesus came to turn it. He said that he was sent “to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18–19). Like the streams in the south, he brings life to dry ground: “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38), and that living water is the Holy Spirit he gives. In him we become new creatures (2 Corinthians 5:17), and he will one day make all things new (Revelation 21:5).

Christ is also the sower who went forth weeping. His sorrow in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:36–46), his cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), and his crucifixion (John 19:17–30) are the deepest sowing in tears there has ever been. The precious seed was his own life, given for our redemption, and at the time his death looked like a tragic loss. He spoke of it in the language of this psalm: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24).

Then he came again with rejoicing. He rose from the dead (Luke 24:1–12) and ascended, and he “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2). His sheaves are the great harvest of people redeemed by his blood, his church, gathered by the work of the Holy Spirit. All who belong to him share the same pattern. We suffer with him now, “that we may be also glorified together” (Romans 8:17), and our tears will become a harvest that lasts forever.

These verses give God’s people two things to do in the time between a first answer and the full one. We pray, as Israel did, thanking God for what he has already done and asking him to finish it, as suddenly and generously as rain on the Negev. And we keep sowing, even with tears, because the seed is precious and the promise is sure.

If your sowing is hard just now, the psalm puts you in good company. The exiles rebuilt with tears, and Christ himself went to the cross weeping. God sees every tear and every costly seed, and he has bound himself by his word to bring his people home rejoicing, with their sheaves in their arms.