Psalms 108
Butler1. My heart is fixed, O God; I will sing, yea, I will sing praises, even with my glory. 2 Awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake right early. 3 I will give thanks unto thee, O LORD, among the peoples: And I will sing praises unto thee among the nations. 4 For thy mercy is great above the heavens, And thy truth reacheth unto the skies. 5 Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: And thy glory above all the earth. 6 That thy beloved may be delivered, Save with thy right hand, and answer us. 7 God hath spoken in his holiness; I will ex-ult:
I will divide Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth.
8. Gilead is mine; Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is the defence of mine head; Judah is my sceptre. 9 Moab is my washpot; Upon Edom will I cast my shoe: Over Philistia will I shout. 10 Who will bring me into the fenced city? Who hath led me unto Edom? 11 Hast not thou cast us off, O God? And thou goest not forth, O God, with our hosts. 12 Give us help against the adversary: For vain is the help of man. 13 Through God we shall do valiantly: For he it is that shall tread down our adversaries.
THIS Psalm consists of portions of two others; the first half of it being taken from the fifty-seventh Psalm, vs. 7-11, and the latter half from the sixtieth, vs. 5-12. There are a few not very important variations of the text. For the interpretation at large, the notes on the other two Psalms may be consulted. P.—The best solution which has been proposed is that David himself combined these passages to be the basis of a trilogy (Psalms 108-110), adapted to the use of the Church at a period posterior to the date of Psalms 57 and 60. A.
1-5. (Taken from Psalm 57: 7-11.) With the Hebrew poets there is not merely the potent enunciation of moral truth which comes home to the conscience, not merely the aggregation of noble images borrowed from the treasury of external nature, but more than all this, the revelation of a new and spiritual world, which owes nothing for its beauty to the fairest images of this material universe, and which, in fact, is as far above it as the heavens are above the earth. This is really the exclusive glory of the Old Testament poets, who stand alone in their knowledge of God, their dependence on God, and their trust in God. Take these verses as an instance. Here is the revelation of the nature of a Being who can inspire the heart with the liveliest gratitude, to whom the devotion of all the powers is an inadequate offering, who has inspired the mind of the speaker with a sense of unmerited mercy that is as glorious as it is omnipotent, and whose majesty is only equalled by His truth. But without postulating the existence of this Being it is not possible to deduce His existence from the contemplation of nature; and yet, if that existence is a fact, of what infinite insignificance are all other facts and existences compared with it? If the world of the invisible is a reality, and man’s relation to it real, as depicted in the Psalms, what a field is opened out for the poetic imagination, and how far more glorious must be its beauties than the fairest and loveliest of the images of earth! Leathes.
1. My glory. My soul, with all the faculties and powers which belong to the rational being, as created in the image of God. P.—As the glory of man above the brute creatures is that from a reasonable mind he can express what is his will by his tongue, so the glory of saints above other men is to have a tongue directed by the heart for expressing of God’s praise: “I will sing and give praise, even with my glory.” Dickson. 4, 5. The greatness of the attributes “mercy and truth” we have in v. 4; and there is an an
swerable greatness in his praises of God for them, v. 5: “Be Thou exalted, O God, above the heavens; and Thy glory above all the earth.” He wisheth and endeavoreth to exalt Him as high in his praises as He is in Himself; to exalt Him above the earth, above the heaven and the clouds. H. Jeanes.