Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms Part 37

The Revised Version is much better here than our Authorised Version, for it has recognised this breach of continuity of sequence in the promises, and translated as I have suggested; making the first words of my text, 'Thou, O Lord! art my Refuge,' the voice of one singer, and 'Because thou hast made the Most High thy habitation, there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any evil come nigh thy dwelling,' the voice of another.

Whether or no it be that in the Liturgical service of the Temple this psalm was sung by two choirs which answered one another, does not matter for our purpose. Whether or no we regard the first clause as the voice of the Psalmist speaking to G.o.d, and the other as the same man speaking to himself, does not matter. The point is that, first, there is an exclamation of personal faith, and that then that is followed and answered, as it were, by the further promise of continual blessings. One voice says, 'Thou, Lord! art my Refuge,' and then another voice--not G.o.d's, because that speaks in majesty at the end of the psalm--replies to that burst of confidence, 'Thou hast made the Lord thy habitation'

(as thou hast done by this confession of faith), 'there shall no evil come nigh thy dwelling.'

I. We have here the cry of the devout soul.

I observed that it seems to cut in two the stream of promised blessings, and that fact is significant. The psalm begins with the deep truth that 'He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.' Then a single voice speaks, 'I will say of the Lord, He is my Refuge and my Fortress, my G.o.d, in Him will I trust.'

Then that voice, which thus responds to the general statement of the first verse, is answered by a stream of promises. The first part of our text comes in as the second speech of the same voice, repeating substantially the same thing as it said at first.

Now, notice that this cry of the soul, recognising G.o.d as its Asylum and Home, comes in response to a revelation of G.o.d's blessing, and to large words of promise. There is no true refuge nor any peace and rest for a man unless in grasping the articulate word of G.o.d, and building his a.s.surance upon that. Anything else is not confidence, but folly; anything else is building upon sand, and not upon the Rock. If I trust my own or my brother's conception of the divine nature, if I build upon any thoughts of my own, I am building upon what will yield and give. For all peaceful casting of my soul into the arms of G.o.d there must be, first, a plain stretching out of the hands of G.o.d to catch me when I drop. So the words of my text, 'Thou art my Refuge,' are the best answer of the devout soul to the plain words of divine promise. How abundant these are we all know, how full of manifold insight and adaptation to our circ.u.mstances and our nature we may all experience, if we care to prove them.

But let us be sure that we _are_ hearkening to the voice with which He speaks through our daily circ.u.mstances as well as by the unmistakable revelation of His will and heart in Jesus Christ. And then let us be sure that no word of His, that comes fluttering down from the heavens, meaning a benediction and enclosing a promise, falls at our feet ungathered and unregarded, or is trodden into the dust by our careless heels. The manna lies all about us; let us see that we gather it. 'When Thou saidst, Seek ye My Face, my heart said unto Thee, Thy Face, Lord, will I seek.' When Thou saidst, 'I will be thy Strength and thy Righteousness,' have I said, 'Surely, O Jehovah! Thou art my Refuge'?

Turn His promises into your creed, and whatever He has declared in the sweet thunder of His voice, loud as the voice of many waters, and melodious as 'harpers harping with their harps,' do you take for your profession of faith in the faithful promises of your G.o.d.

Still further, this cry of the devout soul suggests to me that our response ought to be the establishment of a close personal relation between us and G.o.d. 'Thou, O Lord! art my Refuge.' The Psalmist did not content himself with saying 'Lord! Thou hast been _our_ Dwelling-place in all generations,' or as one of the other psalmists has it, 'G.o.d is _our_ Refuge and _our_ Strength.' That thought was blessed, but it was not enough for the Psalmist's present need, and it is never enough for the deepest necessities of any soul. We must isolate ourselves and stand, G.o.d and we, alone together--at heart-grips--we grasping His hand, and He giving Himself to us--if the promises which are sent down into the world for all who will make them theirs can become ours. They are made payable to your order; you must put your name on the back before you get the proceeds. There must be what our good old Puritan forefathers used to call, in somewhat hard language, 'the appropriating act of faith,' in order that G.o.d's richest blessings may be of any use to us. Put out your hand to grasp them, and say, 'Mine,' not 'Ours.' The thought of others as sharing in them will come afterwards, for he who has once realised the absolute isolation of the soul and has been alone with G.o.d, and in solitude has taken G.o.d's gifts as his very own, is he who will feel fellows.h.i.+p and brotherhood with all who are partakers of like precious faith and blessings. The 'ours' will come; but you must begin with the 'mine'--'_my_ Lord and _my_ G.o.d.' 'He loved _me_, and gave Himself for _me_.'

Just as when the Israelites gathered on the banks of the Red Sea, and Miriam and the maidens came out with songs and timbrels, though their hearts throbbed with joy, and music rang from their lips for national deliverance, their hymn made the whole deliverance the property of each, and each of the chorus sang, 'The Lord is my Strength and my Song, He also is become my Salvation,' so we must individualise the common blessing. Every poor soul has a right to the whole of G.o.d, and unless a man claims all the divine nature as his, he has little chance of possessing the promised blessings. The response of the individual to the worldwide promises and revelations of the Father is, 'Thou, O Lord! art my Refuge.'

Further, note how this cry of the devout soul recognises G.o.d as He to whom we must go because we need a refuge. The word 'refuge' here gives the picture of some stronghold, or fortified place, in which men may find security from all sorts of dangers, invasions by surrounding foes, storm and tempest, rising flood, or anything else that threatens. Only he who knows himself to be in danger bethinks himself of a refuge. It is only when we know our danger and defencelessness that G.o.d, as the Refuge of our souls, becomes precious to us. So, underlying, and an essential part of, all our confidence in G.o.d, is the clear recognition of our own necessity. The sense of our own emptiness must precede our grasp of His fulness. The conviction of our own insufficiency and sinfulness must precede our casting ourselves on His mercy and righteousness. In all regions the consciousness of human want must go before the recognition of the divine supply.

II. Now, note the still more abundant answer which that cry evokes.

I said that the words on which I have been commenting thus far, seem to break in two the continuity of the stream of blessings and promises. But there may be observed a certain distinction of tone between those promises which precede and those which follow the cry. Those that follow have a certain elevation and depth, completeness and fulness, beyond those that precede. This enhancing of the promises, following on the faithful grasp of previous promises, suggests the thought that, when G.o.d is giving, and His servant thankfully accepts and garners up His gifts, He opens His hand wider and gives more. When He pours His rain upon the unthankful and the evil, and they let the precious, fertilising drops run to waste, there comes after a while a diminution of the blessing; but they who store in patient and thankful hearts the faithful promises of G.o.d, have taken a sure way to make His gifts still larger and His promises still sweeter, and their fulfilment more faithful and precious.

But now notice the remarkable language in which this answer is couched.

'Thou hast made the Most High thy Habitation, there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.'

Did you ever notice that there are two dwelling-places spoken of in this verse? 'Thou hast made the Most High thy Habitation'; 'There shall no plague come nigh thy dwelling.' The reference of the latter word to the former one is even more striking if you observe that, literally translated, as in the Revised Version, it means a particular kind of abode--namely, a tent. 'Thou hast made the Most High thy habitation.'

The same word is employed in the 90th Psalm: 'Lord, Thou hast been our Dwelling-place in all generations.' Beside that venerable and ancient abode, that has stood fresh, strong, incorruptible, and unaffected by the lapse of millenniums, there stands the little transitory canvas tent in which our earthly lives are spent. We have two dwelling-places. By the body we are brought into connection with this frail, evanescent, illusory outer world, and we try to make our homes out of s.h.i.+fting cloud-wrack, and dream that we can compel mutability to become immutable, that we may dwell secure. But fate is too strong for us, and although we say that we will make our nest in the rocks, and shall never be moved, the home that is visible and linked with the material pa.s.ses and melts as a cloud. We need a better dwelling-place than earth and that which holds to earth. We have G.o.d Himself for our true Home. Never mind what becomes of the tent, as long as the mansion stands firm. Do not let us be saddened, though we know that it is canvas, and that the walls will soon rot and must some day be folded up and borne away, if we have the Rock of Ages for our dwelling-place.

Let us abide in the Eternal G.o.d by the devotion of our hearts, by the affiance of our faith, by the submission of our wills, by the aspiration of our yearnings, by the conformity of our conduct to His will. Let us abide in the Eternal G.o.d, that 'when the earthly house of this tabernacle is dissolved,' we may enter into two buildings 'eternal in the heavens'--the one the spiritual body which knows no corruption, and the other the bosom of the Eternal G.o.d Himself. 'Because thou hast made Him thy Habitation,' that Dwelling shall suffer no evil to come near it or its tenant.

Still further, notice the scope of this great promise. I suppose there is some reference in the form of it to the old story of Israel's exemption from the Egyptian plagues, and a hint that that might be taken as a parable and prophetic picture of what will be true about every man who puts his trust in G.o.d. But the wide scope and the paradoxical completeness of the promise itself, instead of being a difficulty, point the way to its true interpretation. 'There shall no plague come nigh thy dwelling'--and yet we are smitten down by all the woes that afflict humanity. 'No evil shall befall thee'--and yet 'all the ills that flesh is heir to' are dealt out sometimes with a more liberal hand to them who abide in G.o.d than to them who dwell only in the tent upon earth. What then? Is G.o.d true, or is He not? Did this psalmist mean to promise the very questionable blessing of escape from all the good of the discipline of sorrow? Is it true, in the unconditional sense in which it is often a.s.serted, that 'prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament, and adversity of the New'? I think not, and I am sure that this psalmist, when he said, 'there shall no evil befall thee, nor any plague come nigh thy dwelling,' was thinking exactly the same thing which Paul had in his mind when he said, 'All things work together for good to them that love G.o.d, to them that are called according to His purpose.' If I make G.o.d my Refuge, I shall get something a great deal better than escape from outward sorrow--namely, an amulet which will turn the outward sorrow into joy. The bitter water will still be given me to drink, but it will be filtered water, out of which G.o.d will strain all the poison, though He leaves plenty of the bitterness in it; for bitterness is a tonic. The evil that is in the evil will be taken out of it, in the measure in which we make G.o.d our Refuge, and 'all will be right that seems most wrong' when we recognise it to be 'His sweet will.'

Dear brother! the secret of exemption from every evil lies in no peculiar Providence, ordering in some special manner our outward circ.u.mstances, but in the submission of our wills to that which the good hand of the Lord our G.o.d sends us for our good; and in cleaving close to Him as our Refuge. Nothing can be 'evil' which knits me more closely to G.o.d; and whatever tempest drives me to His breast, though all the four winds of the heavens strive on the surface of the sea, it will be better for me than calm weather that entices me to stray farther away from Him.

We shall know that some day. Let us be sure of it now, and explain by it our earthly experience, even as we shall know it when we get up yonder and 'see all the way by which the Lord our G.o.d has led us.'

THE ANSWER TO TRUST

'Because he hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known My name.'

--PSALM xci. 14.

There are two voices speaking in the earlier part of this psalm: one that of a saint who professes his reliance upon the Lord, his Fortress; and another which answers the former speaker, and declares that he shall be preserved by G.o.d. In this verse, which is the first of the final portion of the psalm, we have a third voice--the voice of G.o.d Himself, which comes in to seal and confirm, to heighten and transcend, all the promises that have been made in His name. The first voice said of himself, '_I_ will trust'; the second voice addresses that speaker, and says, '_Thou_ shalt not be afraid'; the third voice speaks of him, and not to him, and says, 'Because _he_ hath set his love upon Me, therefore will I deliver him.'

Why does this divine voice speak thus indirectly of this blessing of His servant? I think partly because it heightens the majesty of the utterance, as if G.o.d spake to the whole universe about what He meant to do for His friend who trusts Him; and partly because, in that general form of speech, there is really couched an 'whosoever'; and it applies to us all. If G.o.d had said, 'Because thou hast set thy love upon Me, I will deliver thee,' it had not been so easy for us to put ourselves in the place of the man concerning whom this great divine voice spoke; but when He says, 'Because _he_ hath set _his_ love upon Me,' in the 'he'

there lies 'everybody'; and the promise spoken before the universe as to His servants is spoken universally to His servants.

So, then, these words seem to me to carry two thoughts: the first, what G.o.d delights to find in a man; and the second, what G.o.d delights to give to the man in whom He finds it.

I. Note, first, what G.o.d delights to find in man.

There is, if we may reverently say so, a tone of satisfaction in the words, 'Because he hath set his love upon Me,' and 'because he hath known My name.' Thus, then, there are two things that the great Father's heart seeks, and wheresoever it finds them, in however imperfect a degree, He is glad, and lavishes upon such a one the most precious things in His possession.

What are these two things? Let us look at each of them. Now the word rendered 'set his love' includes more than is suggested by that rendering, beautiful as it is. It implies the binding or knitting oneself to anything. Now, though love be the true cement by which men are bound to G.o.d, as it is the only real bond which binds men to one another, yet the word itself covers a somewhat wider area than is covered by the notion of love. It is not my love only that I am to fasten upon G.o.d, but my whole self that I am to bind to Him. G.o.d delights in us when we cling to Him. There is a threefold kind of clinging, which I would urge upon you and upon myself.

Let us cling to Him in our thoughts, hour by hour, moment by moment, amidst all the distractions of daily life. Whilst there are other things that must legitimately occupy our minds, let us see to it that, ever and anon, we turn ourselves away from these, and betake ourselves, with a conscious gathering in of our souls, to Him, and calm and occupy our hearts and minds with the bright and peaceful thoughts of a present G.o.d ever near us, and ever gracious to us. Life is but a dreary stretch of wilderness, unless all through it there be dotted, like a chain of ponds in a desert, these moments in which the mind fixes itself upon G.o.d, and loses sorrows and sins and weakness and all other sadnesses in the calm and blessed contemplation of His sweetness and sufficiency. The very heavens are bare and lacking in highest beauty, unless there stretch across them the long lines of rosy-tinted clouds. And so across our skies let us cast a continuous chain of thoughts of G.o.d, and as we go about our daily work, let us try to have our minds ever recurring to Him, like the linked pools that mirror heaven in the midst of the barren desert, and bring a reflection of life into the midst of its death.

Cleave and cling to G.o.d, brother! by frequent thoughts of Him, diffused throughout the whole continuity of the busy day.

Then again, we might say, let us cleave to Him by our love, which is the one bond of union, as I said, between man and G.o.d, as it is the one bond of union between man and man. 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength,' was from the beginning the Alpha, and until the end will be the Omega, of all true religion; and within the sphere of that commandment lie all duty, all Christianity, all blessedness, and all life. The heart that is divided is wretched; the heart that is consecrated is at rest. The love that is partial is nought; the love that is worth calling so is total and continuous. Let us cling to Him with our thoughts; let us cling to Him with the tendrils of our hearts.

Let us cleave to Him, still further, by the obedient contact of our wills with His, taking no commandments from men, and no overpowering impressions from circ.u.mstances, and no orders from our own fancies and inclinations and tastes and l.u.s.ts, but receiving all our instructions from our Father in heaven. There is no real contact between us and G.o.d, no real cleaving to Him, howsoever the thought of G.o.d may be in our minds, and some kind of imperfect love to Him may be supposed to be in our hearts, unless there be the absolute submission of our wills to His authority; and only in the measure in which we are able to say, What He commands I do, and what He sends I accept, and my will is in His hands to be moulded, do we really get close and keep close to our Father in the heavens. He that hath brought himself into loving touch with G.o.d, and clings to Him in that threefold fas.h.i.+on, by thought, love, and submission, he, and only he, is so joined to the Lord as to be one Spirit.

Now that is not a state to be won and kept without much vigorous, conscious effort. The nuts in a machine work loose; the knots in a rope 'come untied,' as the children say. The hand that clasps anything, by slow and imperceptible degrees, loses muscular contraction, and the grip of the fingers becomes slacker. Our minds and affections and wills have that same tendency to slacken their hold of what they grasp. Unless we tighten up the machine it will work loose; and unless we make conscious efforts to keep ourselves in touch with G.o.d, His hand will slip out of ours before we know that it is gone, and we shall fancy that we feel the impression of the fingers long after they have been taken away from our negligent palms.

Besides our own vagrancies, and the waywardness and wanderings of our poor, unreliable natures, there come in, of course, as hindrances, all the interruptions and distractions of outside things, which work in the same direction of loosening our hold on G.o.d. If the s.h.i.+pwrecked sailor is not to be washed off the raft he must tie himself on to it, and must see that the las.h.i.+ngs are reliable and the knots tight; and if we do not mean to be drifted away from G.o.d without knowing it, we must make very sure work of anchor and cable, and of our own hold on both. Effort is needed, continuous and conscious, lest at any time we should slide away from Him. And this is what G.o.d delights to find: a mind and will that bind themselves to Him.

There is another thing in the text which, as I take it, is a consequence of that close union between man in his whole nature and G.o.d: 'I will set him on high because he hath known My name.' Notice that the knowledge of the name comes after, and not before, the setting of the love or the fixing of the nature upon G.o.d. G.o.d's 'name' is the same thing as His self-revelation or His manifested character. Then, does not every one to whom that revelation is made know His name? Certainly not. The word 'know' is here used in the same deep sense in which it is employed all but uniformly in the New Testament--the same sense in which it is used in the writings of the Apostle John. It describes a knowledge which is a great deal more than a mere intellectual acquaintance with the facts of divine revelation. Or, to put the thought into other words, this is a knowledge which comes after we have set our love upon G.o.d, a knowledge which is the child of love. We forget sometimes that it is a Person, and not a system of truth, whom the Bible tells us we are to know. And how do you know people? Only by familiar acquaintance with them. You might read a description of a man, perfectly accurate, sufficiently full, but you would not therefore say you knew him. You might know about him, or fancy you did, but if you knew him, it would be because you had summered and wintered with him, and lived beside him, and were on terms of familiar acquaintance with him. As long as it is G.o.d and not theology, the knowledge of whom makes religion, so long it will not be the head, but the heart or spirit, that is the medium or organ by which we know Him. You have to become acquainted with Him and be very familiar with Him--that is to say, to fix your whole self upon Him--before you 'know'

Him; and it is only the knowledge which is born of love and familiarity that is worth calling knowledge at all. Just as with our earthly relations.h.i.+ps and acquaintances, only they who love a man or a woman know such a one right down to the very depth of their being, so the one way to know G.o.d's name is to bind myself to Him with mind and heart and will, as friends cleave to one another. Then I shall know Him and be known of Him.

Still further, this knowledge which G.o.d delights to find in us men, is a knowledge which is experience. There is all the difference between reading about a foreign country and going to see it with your own eyes.

The man that has been there knows it; the man that has not knows about it. And only he knows G.o.d to whom the commonplaces of religion have turned into facts which he verifies by his own experiences.

It is a knowledge, too, which influences life. Obviously the words of my text look back to what the saint was represented as saying in an earlier portion of the psalm. Why does G.o.d declare that the man has set his love upon Him, and knows His name? Because the saint professed this, 'I will say of the Lord, He is my Refuge and my Fortress.' These are His name.

The man knows it; he has it not only upon his lips, but in his heart, and feels that it is true, and acts accordingly. 'He is my Refuge and my Fortress; my G.o.d, in Him will I trust.' The knowledge which G.o.d regards as knowledge of Him is one based upon experience and upon familiar acquaintance, and issuing in joyful recognition of my possession of Him as mine, and the outgoing of my confidence to Him. These are the things that G.o.d desires and delights to find in men.

II. Note, secondly, what G.o.d gives to the man in whom He finds such things.

'I will deliver him'; 'I will set him on high.' These two clauses are substantially parallel, and yet there is a difference between them, as is the nature of the parallelism of Hebrew poetry, where the same ideas are repeated with a shade of modification, and the second of them somewhat surpa.s.sing the first. 'I will deliver him,' says the promise.

That confirms the view that the promise in the previous verse, 'There shall no plague come nigh thy dwelling,' does not mean exemption from sorrow and trial because, if so, there would be no relevancy or blessedness in the promise of deliverance. He who needs 'deliverance' is the man who is surrounded by evils, and G.o.d's promise is not that no evil shall come to the man who trusts Him, but that he shall be delivered out of the evil that does come, and that it will not be truly evil.

And why is he to be delivered? 'Because he has bound himself to Me,'

says G.o.d, 'therefore will I deliver him.' Of course, if I am fastened to G.o.d, nothing that does not hurt Him can hurt me. If I am knit to Him as closely as this psalm contemplates, it is impossible but that out of His fulness my emptiness shall be filled, and with His rejoicing strength my weakness will be made strong. It is just the same idea as is given to us in the picture of Peter upon the water, when the cold waves are up to his knees, and the coward heart says, 'I am ready to sink,' but yet, with the faith that comes with the fear, he puts out his hand and grasps Christ's hand, and as soon as he does, and the two are united, he is buoyant, and rises again, and the water is beneath the soles of his feet. 'He sent from above, He took me; He drew me out of many waters.'

Whoever is joined to G.o.d is lifted above all evil, and the evil that continues to eddy about him will change its character, and bear him onwards to his haven. For he who is thus knit to G.o.d in the living, pulsating bond of thought and affection and submission, will be delivered from sin.

When a boy first learns to skate, he needs some one to go behind him and hold him up whilst he uses his unaccustomed limbs; and so, when we are upon the smooth, treacherous ice of this wicked world, it is by leaning on G.o.d that we are kept upright. 'He hath set himself close to Me, I will deliver him,' says G.o.d. 'Yea! he shall not fall, for the Lord is able to make him stand.'

Still further, we have another great promise, which is the explanation and extension of the former, 'I will set him on high, because he hath known My name.' That is more than lifting a man up above the reach of the storms of life by means of any external deliverance. There is a better thing than that--namely, that our whole inward life be lived loftily. If it is true of us that we know His name, then our lives are 'hid with Christ in G.o.d,' and far below our feet will be all the riot of earth and its noise and tumult and change. We shall live serene and uplifted lives on the mount, if we know His name and have bound ourselves to Him, and the troubles and cares and changes and duties and joys of this present will be away down below us, like the lowly cottages in some poor village, seen from the mountain top, the squalor out of sight, the magnitude diminished, the noise and tumult dimmed to a mere murmur that interrupts not the sacred silence of the lofty peak where we dwell with G.o.d. 'I will set him on high because he knows My name.'

Then, perhaps, there is a hint in the words, as there is in subsequent words of the verse, of an elevation even higher than that, when, life ended and earth done, He shall receive into His glory those whom He hath guided by His counsel. 'I will set him on high, because he hath known My name,' says the Jehovah of the Old Covenant. 'To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with Me on My throne,' says the Jesus of the New, who is the Jehovah of the Old.