Psalms 114

Praise ye the Lord. The music concludes upon its keynote. The Psalm is a circle, ending where it began, praising the Lord from its first syllable to its last. May our life-psalm partake of the same character, and never know a break or a conclusion. In an endless circle let us bless the Lord, whose mercies never cease.

Let us praise Him in youth, and all along our years of strength; and when we bow in the ripeness of abundant age, let us still praise the Lord who doth not cast off His old servants. Let us not only praise God ourselves, but exhort others to do it, and join with them in extolling the name of Him whose mercy endureth forever. S.

1. WHEN Israel went forth out of Egypt, The house of Jacob from a people of strange language; 2 Judah became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. 3 The sea saw it, and fled; Jordan was driven back. 4 The mountains skipped like rams, The little hills like young sheep.

5. What aileth thee, O thou sea, that thou fleest? Thou Jordan, that thou turnest back? 6 Ye mountains, that ye skip like rams; Ye little hills, like young sheep? 7 Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, At the presence of the God of Jacob; 8 Which turned the rock into a pool of water, The flint into a fountain of waters.

THE date and author of this Psalm are unknown. Its energy and fire; its abruptness, brevity, rapidity; its realization of miracles as acting; the astonishment of the Psalmist at the terror of the sea, the flight of Jordan northward, the quaking of the mountains and all hills; and the conclusion, that a look of the God of Jacob did these miracles, and turned the rock, not into water, but a pool of water, and the flint into a springing fountain, make up, says Herder, a picture of sublimity to which no parallel can be found. No other language could, with propriety and simplicity, express the images contained in the Psalm; and no other history (it is needless to say) could furnish truths for the foundation of it. G. H. S. J.

This is perhaps the most beautiful of all the Psalms which touch on the early history of Israel. It is certainly the most graphic and the most striking in the boldness of its outlines. In structure it is singularly perfect. This rests upon the common principle of pairs of verses, and thus we have four strophes, each consisting of two verses; each of these verses, again, consists of two lines, in which the parallelism is carefully preserved. The effect is produced not by minute tracing of details, but by the boldness with which certain great features of the history are presented. A singular animation and an almost dramatic force are given to the poem by the beautiful apostrophe in vs. 5, 6, and the effect of this is heightened in a remarkable degree by the use of the present tenses. The awe and the trembling of nature are a spectacle on which the poet is looking. The parted sea through which Israel walks as on dry land, the rushing Jordan arrested in its course, the granite cliffs of Sinai shaken to their base, he sees it all, and asks in wonder what it means? Then it is that the truth bursts upon his mind, and the impression of this upon the reader is very finely managed. The Name of God, which has been entirely concealed up to this point in the poem (even the possessive pronoun being left without its substantive, “Judah was His sanctuary, Israel was His dominion”), is now only introduced after the apostrophe in vs. 5, 6. “The reason seems evident, and the conduct necessary, for if God had appeared before, there could be no wonder why the mountains should leap and the sea retire; therefore, that this convulsion of nature may be brought in with due surprise, His name is not mentioned till afterward; and then, with a very agreeable turn of thought, God is introduced all at once in all His majesty” (Spectator). P.

This gem of Hebrew poetry serves to show how beautifully they could weave into their songs for the sanctuary the grand facts of their nation’s early history. The prayer of Nehemiah (chap. 9) witnesses to the use made of those same grand facts in their historical point of view, to inspire faith, to encourage prayer, and to suggest the great moral lessons taught there concerning their nation’s God and His people. C.

—There is here the highest poetry; but the poetry is the offspring of adoring faith, the rapt religious inspiration of which it is an outburst. And, as it could only have been written by one whose soul was penetrated by the historic reality of the Exodus, and before whose eye it stood up as one stupendous series of supernatural events fresh as those of yesterday, so the inspiration of this exalted lyric cannot possibly penetrate the soul that has discarded the Exodus as an historical event, nor can even its poetry seem otherwise than turgid. D. Brown.

1,2. The introduction sets forth at once both the great redemptive act and also the end of the redemption; viz., that God Himself might dwell among and rule His people. This sanctifying of the nation, as a nation to Himself, took place in the wilderness before the law was given: “Ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19 : 6). P.—The whole people at the coming out of Egypt were separated unto the Lord to be a peculiar people, a nation of priests whose motto should be, “Holiness unto the Lord.” The nation was peculiarly Jehovah’s dominion, for it was governed by a theocracy in which God alone was King. It was His domain in a sense in which the rest of the world was outside His kingdom. S.

3. The passage of the Red Sea and of the Jordan are combined, not only as miracles of a similar character, but as marking the beginning and the end of the great deliverance, the escape from Egypt, the entrance into the Promised Land. P.

3,4. The foundation of that new beginning in connection with the history of redemption was laid amid majestic wonders, the world of nature being enlisted in God’s service and being made to sympathize with His aims. The dividing of the Red Sea commences, and the dividing of the Jordan closes, the journey through the wilderness to Canaan; the sea turned aside, the Jordan halted and was dammed up to the north, in order that the redeemed people might march through. And between these two great wonders of the Exodus from Egypt and the entrance into Canaan there stands out the not less great wonder of the giving of the law. The skipping of the mountains like rams and of the hills like lambs depicts the quaking of Sinai and its environs. D.—The same power that fixed the fluid waters and made them stand still, shook the stable mountains and made them tremble; for all the powers of nature are under the check of the God of nature. H.

5-7. When the poet asks, “What aileth thee, O sea, that thou fleest?” he is living as it were in that olden time as if he were a contemporary, or the present and that far-off past fuse together in his mind; and therefore the answer he gives himself to his own question assumes the form of a triumphant summons. It is the Lord, the God of Jacob so mighty in wonders, before whom the earth must tremble. D.

8. These miracles at Horeb and Kadesh are selected as the most striking proofs of “God’s absolute creative omnipotence, and of the grace which changes death into life.” They are, moreover, parallel miracles, like the two mentioned in v. 3, and thus the poetical effect is heightened. P.

The rock into a pool of water. The same almighty power that turned waters into a rock to be a wall to Israel, turned the rock into waters to be a well to Israel. As they were protected, so they were provided for, by standing miracles; for such was the standing water, that fountain of waters into which the flinty rock was turned, “and that rock was Christ.” For He is a fountain of living waters to His Israel, from whom they receive grace for grace. H.

The flint into a fountain of waters. The causing of water to gush forth out of the flinty rock is a practical proof of unlimited omnipotence and of the grace which converts death into life. Let the earth then tremble before the Lord, the God of Jacob. It has already trembled before Him, and before Him let it tremble. For that which He has been He still ever is; and as He came once He will come again. D.

Our deliverance from under the yoke of sin is strikingly typified in the going up of Israel from Egypt, and so also was the victory of our Lord over the powers of death and hell. The Exodus should therefore be earnestly remembered by Christian hearts. Did not Moses on the mount of transfiguration speak to our Lord of “the exodus” which He should shortly accomplish at Jerusalem; and is it not written of the hosts above that they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and of the Lamb? Do we not ourselves expect another coming of the Lord, when before His face heaven and earth shall flee away and there shall be no more sea? We join then with the singers around the Passover table and

make their Hallel ours, for we, too, have been led out of bondage and guided like a flock through a desert land, wherein the Lord sup-

plies our wants with heavenly manna and water from the Rock of Ages. Praise ye the Lord. S.