Psalm 127:1

 

Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

Surely one of the lessons we learn in our walk of life is that without the Lord’s help, we cannot succeed in any significant way. This psalm speaks of building a house, but it might as well speak of building a family or a profession, a government or a philosophy of life. In these endeavors—as noble as the intent might be and as laborious as the effort is—none of it will succeed in the end without the Lord’s help, without the Lord’s sanction, without the Lord’s protection, without the Lord’s approval. We can’t build an institution of any consequence without His help and we cannot defend that institution without it, either.

Perhaps the best short poem ever written by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a haunting piece entitled “Ozymandias.” It is a sonnet composed in response to an inscription chiseled onto the base of a collapsed and broken statue from the period of the great Rameses II of Egypt, which read, “King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.” The grand irony, of course, is that the king and his art—to say nothing of his fame and his empire—now lie in a heap for all to see exactly “where I lie.” Shelley’s poem is as follows:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.¹⁸⁹

Except the Lord build us and the structures of our lives, we labor in vain to build them at all.

Notes

^189. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” in New Oxford Book of English Verse, 580.