By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion. – Psalm 137:1

Today's Scripture Reading (September 16, 2026): Psalm 137

On March 18, 2012, George Tupou V, the King of Tonga, died. His reign had actually been fairly short, only six years, and yet the news of his death sent the Island nation of Tonga into mourning. In the days following the king's death, trees and buildings were draped with the colors of mourning, black and purple. The king was given a state funeral featuring a procession of 1,000 pallbearers. And the inhabitants of Tonga lined the streets just to have one final chance to say goodbye to their king.

For Tonga, the reality was that while Tupou V's reign was short, it was extremely effective. In a short six-year span, the nation's culture changed. Tupou V began limiting the monarchy's power and pushing Tonga toward a constitutional democracy. The king was a forward thinker who wanted nothing more than to transfer power from being a possession of the monarch and place it into the hands of the people. The nation's identity was changing as more power was given to people outside the Royal Family. For this reason, when the king died, the people responded with an outpouring of mourning and grief that honored their dead king.

We can pretend about a lot of things, but the real condition of our hearts often shows in how we mourn and what drives us into mourning. As the exiles settled in Babylon, they too were experiencing a change in their national identity, but in the opposite direction. Judah, once an independent nation proud of its place in the world, was now defeated; their nation had been destroyed, and the people had been carried into exile. Now a foreign king ruled over the people of Judah, and the result was a deep time of mourning.

The people could not hide this mourning. The psalmist says that they sat on the banks of a river that they did not know and wept over what it was that had been lost, and there was absolutely nothing that could bring back the comfort the people needed to soothe their souls.

The mystery that the psalmist did not seem to understand was that even then, as the exiles sat far from the rivers of their youth, God was on the move, preparing to empower them and to create a national identity that more closely reflected the idea that God had desired for Israel from the very beginning. All God needed was a leader willing to honor him, and as strange an idea as this would have been for the exiles to understand, that leader would not be found among the kings of Judah. That moldable leader would actually become a series of moldable leaders, starting with Nebuchadnezzar, the king who ruled by the rivers of Babylon. God was already at work as he began to restore a nation while it mourned what it had lost. And in the future, the seeds of success for the nation would be planted by the rivers of Babylon.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 50