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Psalms 122...the complete meaning of the term in vs.6, which is "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and they shall prosper that love thee."


The whole Psalm for context:


1. I WAS glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord.

2. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem.

3. Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together:

4. Whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, unto the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the Lord.

5. FOR THERE ARE SET THRONES OF JUDGMENT, the thrones of the house of David.

6. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love thee.

7. Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.

8. For my brethren and companions' sakes, i will now say, Peace be within thee.

9. Because of the hours of the Lord our God I will seek thy good.



God's mandate for praying for the "peace of Jerusalem" is NOT pointing to just this present earthly Jerusalem. God's word is many-layered and one must pray for understanding to see what is beneath the surface. This can only be done by the leading of the Holy Spirit and prayer.

The literal, superficial reading, at first sight, might indicate that this Psalm refers to the Jerusalem that is now the capital of the nation of Israel, since 1948, and the people living there. But, shouldn't we be praying for EVERY CITY AND NATION IN THIS WORLD and not just one? When I thought deeply and prayerfully about this, I realized that it is said that Jerusalem is in the "heart of the earth". That gives this verse a view most people don't see.


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This is a piece of an article on map-making that I ran across during my "internet travels":


The Delineation of the Earth
Every great people of antiquity, as a rule, regarded its own central city or most holy place as necessarily the centre of the earth.

The Chaldeans held that their ``holy house of the gods'' was the centre. The Egyptians sketched the world under the form of a human figure, in which Egypt was the heart, and the centre of it Thebes. For the Assyrians, it was Babylon; for the Hindus, it was Mount Meru; for the Greeks, so far as the civilized world was concerned, Olympus or the temple at Delphi; for the modern Mohammedans, it is Mecca and its sacred stone; the Chinese, to this day, speak of their empire as the ``middle kingdom.'' It was in accordance, then, with a simple tendency of human thought that the Jews believed the centre of the world to be Jerusalem.

The book of Ezekiel speaks of Jerusalem as in the middle of the earth, and all other parts of the world as set around the holy city. Throughout the ``ages of faith'' this was very generally accepted as a direct revelation from the Almighty regarding the earth's form. St. Jerome, the greatest authority of the early Church upon the Bible, declared, on the strength of this utterance of the prophet, that Jerusalem could be nowhere but at the earth's centre; in the ninth century Archbishop Rabanus Maurus reiterated the same argument; in the eleventh century Hugh of St. Victor gave to the doctrine another scriptural demonstration; and Pope Urban, in his great sermon at Clermont urging the Franks to the crusade, declared, ``Jerusalem is the middle point of the earth''; in the thirteenth century an ecclesiastical writer much in vogue, the monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, declared, ``As the heart in the midst of the body, so is Jerusalem situated in the midst of our inhabited earth,'' - ``so it was that Christ was crucified at the centre of the earth.'' Dante accepted this view of Jerusalem as a certainty, wedding it to immortal verse; and in the pious book of travels ascribed to Sir John Mandeville, so widely read in the Middle Ages, it is declared that Jerusalem is at the centre of the world, and that a spear standing erect at the Holy Sepulchre casts no shadow at the equinox.

Ezekiel's statement thus became the standard of orthodoxy to early map-makers. The map of the world at Hereford Cathedral, the maps of Andrea Bianco, Marino Sanuto, and a multitude of others fixed this view in men's minds, and doubtless discouraged during many generations any scientific statements tending to unbalance this geographical centre revealed in Scripture.

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So, since earthly Jerusalem is at the "heart of the earth" it is the ONE city which is the central, radiating focus of God's plan in salvation for the whole world....see John 3:16 for one of many verses. It's where Jesus Christ, and then His ApostleS, and finally, His disciples went forth to spread the Gospel throughout the world.

But, present-day Jerusalem is full of strife and UNBELIEVERS, and it will be UNTIL the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, when we "pray for the peace of Jerusalem" we are praying for the return of our Lord...because without Him, there will be no peace for Jerusalem, or for the rest of the world.

This prayer has NOTHING to do with Jews, Arabs, or Christians...and it has EVERYTHING to do with our Lord Jesus Christ and His Lordship over HIS people. Galatians 4:26..."But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all."


Arlene