Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down on the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes! It is like the dew of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion! For there the Lord has commanded the blessing, life forevermore.
– Psalm 133
Oh, there is so much here. This is such a good and such a needed chapter for us to hear and meditate on and pray according to.
Psalm 133 Highlights the Beauty of Unity
I’ll just summarize this picture of good and pleasant dwelling in unity between the people of God, between brothers and sisters in Christ, the New Testament. “It’s like,” and there’s so many pictures this Psalm could compare unity to, like trees in a forest or stars in the sky or fish in the ocean. So many different pictures of unity in diversity. So why is it like oil coming down on Aaron’s beard?
And it’s beautiful because, well, just think about it. What brought the people of God together in Jerusalem in the Old Testament? It was celebrations at the tabernacle or temple. They would offer sacrifices for their sin to reconcile them to God. And the priests, represented by Aaron, would offer those sacrifices. And you look back, Exodus 30 talks about how this oil would be poured over the priest’s head and would run down onto his beard, all the way down on his robes. Which by the way, over his breastplate, you would find 12 stones representing all 12 tribes of Israel. All represented by this priest as he offered sacrifices on their behalf.
So it makes beautiful sense. This good and pleasant unity was made possible among all of God’s people by God’s grace. He was forgiving their sins and restoring them to unity with him, which was paving the way for the deepest kind of unity we can have with anyone else. And we know, based on the New Testament, that a greater priest than Aaron has come.
Psalm 133 Reminds Us We Can Have Unity in Christ
Jesus has come and instead of offering some other sacrifice as a priest, he offered himself. He gave his life on the cross to pay the price for us to be forgiven of our sin, restored to unity with God, which then paves the way for the deepest kind of unity we could have with each other.
In other words, the Gospel makes unity in God possible. I wrote about this a good bit in my Don’t Hold Back book. But we are so tempted to divide over so many things that are not the Gospel. We lose the beauty of what God has designed for us, the goodness and the pleasantness that God has designed us for in the Gospel in unity around Jesus. I just want to encourage you, urge you to work toward unity with other brothers and sisters in Christ. Not a kind of unity that’s ambiguous and unity at all costs, no.
Unity in Christ. Unity in the truth. The love and mercy and grace of Jesus. And to work to maintain that kind of unity in the spirit of Jesus in the local church you’re a part of with other local churches, Christians in other local churches, and even Christians in different streams of the church than you are familiar with or sometimes even comfortable with, knowing that God has commanded blessing and life where unity is found.
God, we pray for this blessing in our lives and churches. God, we pray against the spirit of division that has been so prevalent and is so prevalent in your body among brothers and sisters in Christ. Lord, we pray for unity around Jesus and unity around the spread of the love of Jesus, the spread of this Gospel to the ends of the earth.
Praying for the Divehi People
God, as we pray for the Divehi people of India, who have no knowledge of the Gospel, no known followers of Jesus, God, we pray, give us unity as your people. So that just as you prayed, Jesus, John 17, the world might know, the nations including the Divehi people of India would be reached with the good news of your grace and your love in Christ, that they might be brought into the family and that you would make us a family marked by dwelling in good and pleasant unity, and marked by your blessing in this way. We pray Psalm 133 over our lives and your church in our day, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
