Ceaseless toil claims to justify itself. Our 24/7 agony shouts its own merit.
Hard, purposeful work is a noble thing, it is true. Only a questing, unworldly stab at false spirituality denies this.
Yet a different truth also intersects with our busy hands and our whirring minds: it is all useless if God is not in it.
Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep. (Psalm 127:1–2 ESV)
The language of vanity or emptiness attaches itself most frequently in the biblical literature to the worship of idols. Stone and wood depictions of the deity are the parade example of humankind’s penchant for ritualized stupidity. The prophets crow over the ridiculous sight of men and women carving their own gods and then praying to them for rain or rescue. They laugh at the spectacle of an earnest man who carves a god out of a tree trunk and then throws the rump of it into his stove, the better to bake his bread.
The idols are, par excellence, useless things. They waste time, hearts, and lives on their inert distraction of human purpose.
The writer of the 127th Psalm has a different angle of vision. He leverages the imagery and language of vanity to label earnest labor that takes no account of YHWH’s endorsement. Frenetic activity, cut adrift from the conscience that seeks to do with one’s own hands the very will of God, is as empty as an idolator’s useless bowing and scraping.
The psalm’s critique is meant to energize, not to demoralize. It turns its instruction to what is good by way of a prolonged glance at what is useless.
Imagine, the poem invites us to consider, a house that is built by YHWH, a city watched over by his unsleeping eye.
Bread on the table of a family with enough strength left to lift grateful hands to heaven. A man rising to the new dawn, the strength of a full night’s sleep in his legs.
A nation with the Lord’s own breath in its sails.
Canter Bridge 
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