Psalms 127:2

"It is vain for you to rise up early,

To take rest late,

To eat the bread of toil;

For so he giveth unto his beloved sleep."

Of course, there is no prohibition here against getting up early, or working late, the point being simply that without the blessing of God, it will do no good at all.

This writer was in Japan as a guest chaplain of the USAF shortly after World War II, and he visited sister Nettie Andrews, who had lived in Shizuoka for thirty years, serving the Lord as a missionary. She survived the pitiless bombing of that great city by the USAF, which left the major part of it in total ruins, but when I asked her about her terror during the bombing she remarked, "He giveth his beloved sleep." She had slept without interruption through that whole terrible night!

We have already noted in the chapter introduction that these first two verses are supposed to have applied particularly to Solomon in the matter of his building the Temple (house) and in that sleep at Gibeon in which God, by means of a dream, conveyed to Solomon remarkable wisdom and understanding.

However, we must not leave this without remembering, as Kidner suggested, that, "Like much of Solomon's wisdom, the lessons of this psalm were mostly lost on him. His building, both personal and in the temple, became reckless (1 Kings 9:10ff, 19), his kingdom a ruin (1 Kings 11:11ff), and his marriages a disastrous denial of God (1 Kings 11:lff).[9] In fact, Solomon's reign over Israel was an unqualified disaster, the scandal of forty generations. The most pitiful thing of all being that the Jews fell in love with it, a love that blinded their eyes to the Christ when he came. Their rejection of the Messiah was solely because the leaders of the nation wanted nothing, either in heaven or on earth, as much as they wanted the restoration of that godless earthly kingdom.

Before leaving this portion of the psalm, there is a quotation from Leupold which many Christians have found to be true: "Those who have put their trust for success in what it may please God to give have found it to be true, as the psalm says, that, `He will give what is right to his beloved while he sleeps.'[10] We cannot understand exactly how Leupold came up with this understanding of the passage; but we can find no fault with the statement as it stands. There are countless examples of where it has happened exactly that way.