Psalms 115

1. Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, But unto thy name give glory, For thy mercy, and for thy truth’s sake. 2 Wherefore should the nations say, Where is now their God? 3 But our God is in the heavens: He hath done whatsoever he pleased. 4 Their idols are silver and gold, The work of men’s hands. 5 They have mouths, but they speak not; Eyes have they, but they see not; 6 They have ears, but they hear not; Noses have they, but they smell not; 7 They have hands, but they handle not; Feet have they, but they walk not; Neither speak they through their throat. 8 They that make them shall be like unto them; Yea, every one that trusteth in them. 9 O Israel, trust thou in the Lord: He is their help and their shield.

10. O house of Aaron, trust ye in the Lord: He is their help and their shield. 11 Ye that fear the Lord, trust in the Lord: He is their help and their shield. 12 The Lord hath been mindful of us; he will bless us: He will bless the house of Israel; He will bless the house of Aaron. 13 He will bless them that fear the Lord, Both small and great. 14 The Lord increase you more and more, You and your children. 15 Blessed are ye of the Lord, Which made heaven and earth. 16 The heavens are the heavens of the Lord; But the earth hath he given to the children of men. 17 The dead praise not the Lord, Neither any that go down into silence; 18 But we will bless the Lord From this time forth and for evermore. Praise ye the Lord.

THIS Psalm was probably composed for the service of the second temple, while yet the taunts of their heathen adversaries were ringing in the ears of the returned exiles, and while yet contempt for the idolatries which they had witnessed in Babylon was fresh in their hearts. The Psalm opens with a confession of unworthiness, and a prayer that God would vindicate His own honor against the scoff of the heathen (vs. 1, 2). It exalts Him, the invisible, omnipotent, absolutely Supreme Ruler of the universe, and pours contempt upon the idols and their worshippers (vs. 3-8). It bids all Israel, both priests and people, put their trust in Him who is alone worthy of trust, the help and shield of His people (vs. 9-11). It promises that Jehovah shall give His blessing to them that thus trust in Him, and calls upon them in return to give Him thanks forever (vs. 12-18). P.

1. Not unto us. The repetition of these words expresses the more vividly the deep sense of unworthiness, the unfeigned humility which claims nothing for itself. P.—Give glory, for thy mercy, for thy truth. The glory meant is not that of former, but of future deeds. The implied petition is, that God would interpose for the deliverance of His people, not to do them honor, but to glorify Himself, and especially to vindicate His mercy and fidelity, which seemed to be dishonored by His desertion of the chosen people. The favor sought is the completion of the work of restoration, still imperfect, though auspiciously begun. A.

This is not an exhortation to men to ascribe glory to God, but a prayer to God that He would glorify Himself for His own name’s sake. The address is to the Lord, and the imperative, “Give glory,” is prayer that He would secure it for Himself. This by no means conflicts with the delightful duty devolving on God’s people to give Him all glory; it rather assumes this, and goes still further, even to the prayer that God would do the great things we ask of Him, not to glorify us, but Himself. C.—This is not a doxology or form of thanksgiving, but a prayer. Not for our safety or welfare so much as for Thy glory, be pleased to deliver us. Not to satisfy our revenge upon our adversaries; not for the establishment of our own interest, but for the glory of Thy grace and truth do we seek Thine aid, that thou mayest be known to be a God keeping covenant; for mercy and truth are the two pillars of that covenant. Manton.

“The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord.” Though all outward discipline, and labor, and sorrows, and disappointments, and struggles, the efforts that we make after victory, though all these prepare Christians, and make us capable of receiving the gift, yet the gift comes only out of His infinite and undeserved, and, God be thanked! inexhaustible forgiving goodness and mercy. Though there is no heaven except to the victor, yet the victor does not fight his way into heaven, but Christ gives it to him. And when we stand as, God be thanked! we may hope to stand before that throne, we shall forget all about rewardableness and reward, and say, “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name” we give glory. Thou dost give me the grace to fight; Thou dost teach my hands to war; Thou dost cover my head in the day of battle; it is Thine own grace in me that thou dost crown. Thou art first, and last, and all—the motive and the strength of the conflict, the reward and the rewarder of the victory. All, Lord! all that I have is Thine, and mine is only weakness, and sin, and defeat. A. M.

Men see not one half of the realities of life. The true, real world is the unseen. The great transactions are wrought in the inner man. We are often led by a hand we do not see, and drawn on by a sweet influence we cannot define. Only the more spiritual, saintly souls discern God. But we at last come to see what God hath wrought. That will be a wondrous recognition of the all-working Spirit when a vast redeemed race shall, in review of life’s checkered course, sing the new song, and exclaim with deep significance, “Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory.” Chapman.

The noble host of reformers that have stood between old abuses and their victims are His army. The conquerors of oppression, of crime, of poverty, of superstition, of oceans that lay this side of heathenism, have all conquered in the name of Him who came to open prison-doors, and set the bruised at liberty. The valiant priests of labor have been but servants of that great High-Priest, passed into the heavens, who sanctified all lawful industry when he said: “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” And all the lengthening train of redeeming charities and philanthropies lift their accordant anthem to the one Redeemer, “Not unto us, not unto us, but unto Thy name give glory!” F. D. H.

1,2. He assigns three reasons why God should seek the glory of His name in preserving His people: Because He is merciful; because He is true and faithful in observing His promise; that the Gentiles may not see God’s people in a state of destitution and find cause for blaspheming Him or them. He therefore says, “for Thy mercy, and for Thy truth’s sake,” show thy glory, or give glory to Thy name. Bellarmine.

3. The answer to the taunt of the heathen, who, seeing no image of Jehovah, mocked at His existence. First, He is in heaven, invisible indeed, yet thence ruling the universe; next, He doeth what He will, in fine contrast with the utter impotence of the gods of the heathen. P.—It would be folly to assert the like concerning idols; therefore, if the heathen say, Where is your God? we reply, He is in heaven, but where are your idols? In the earth, not making the earth, but made from the earth. Geier.

4-8. Turning the tables and retorting their reproaches, the Psalmist says, “Their gods are nothing but a variety of manufactures; man-made things; at best, but silver and gold; often of wood only. See the same way of exposing the folly of idol worship (Isa. 40: 18-20; 44: 9-20; 46: 5-7; Jer. 10: 3-15). They are made with mouths, but these are only mere imitations, with no power to speak. As the Hebrew has it, they will not speak (future tense); they never will, never can, say the first word. So in all these specifications, the future means not only that they cannot now, but that they never will or can. They have hands, but they handle nothing; never use them; never even touch with those useless hands. “Neither speak they through their throat”—means they never make even the inarticulate, guttural noises common to the lower animals, which fall far short of the articulate voice. No less void of sense than these senseless idols are all their makers and their worshippers. This very worship proves their miserable folly. O.—

They have mouths, but they speak not for our direction; eyes have they, but they see not our condition; they have ears, but they hear not our supplication; they have hands, but they work not our redemption. These were not the gods that made men, but the gods that men made. W. Seker.

They have hands, but they handle not. Even their artist therefore surpasseth them, since he had the faculty of moulding them by the motion and functions of his limbs, though thou wouldest be ashamed to worship that artist. Even thou surpassest them, though thou hast not made these things, since thou doest what they cannot do. Augustine.—Do not mutter in their throat. The meaning is, that they cannot even make the faintest and most inarticulate guttural noise, like the lower animals; much less speak as men. A.

8. They that make them images show their ingenuity and doubtless are sensible men; but they that make them gods show their stupidity and folly, and are like unto them, as senseless, blockish things; they see not the invisible things of the true and living God in the works of creation; they hear not the voice of the day and the night, which in every speech and language declare His glory. By worshipping these foolish puppets they make themselves more and more foolish like them, and set themselves at a greater distance from everything that is spiritual, and withal they provoke God to give them up to a reprobate mind, a mind void of judgment (Rom. 1: 28). They that trust in them act very absurdly and unreasonably; are senseless, helpless, useless, like them; and they will find it so themselves to their own confusion. We shall know where our God is, and so shall they, to their cost, when their gods are gone. H.

Every one is just what his God is; whoever serves the Omnipotent is omnipotent with Him; whoever exalts feebleness in stupid delusion, to be His god, is feeble along with that god. This is an important preservative against fear for those who are sure that they worship the true God. Hengstenberg.—It belongs to the essential nature of religious worship to assimilate the moral attributes of the worshippers to those of the object of worship. The heathen themselves recognize this principle. “The sum of religion,” said Pythagoras, “is to be like him whom thou worshippest.” “Think of Buddha,” say the priests of that pretended deity, “and you will be transformed into Buddha.” This is consonant to the highest reason. The heart seeks to be in favor with its god; and what more natural means to that end than the imitation of his qualities and actions—the assimilation of our character to his? The god whom we worship must constitute our ideal of perfection; and the nearer we approach our ideal, the higher, in our own estimation, will be the degree of excellence which we have reached. Every act of worship, therefore, every prayer, every devout aspiration, every serious thought of the Divine nature, must tend to make us one with our God, and to transfer to ourselves the impress of His character. E. C. Wines.

“They that make them,” says the Psalmist, “are like unto them.” The man that makes a god is sure to resemble him. Selfishness, avarice, cupidity, are all idolized in Mammon. The man that puts Mammon in the place of the Eternal God becomes assimilated to the god to whom he bows; and more and more, as years roll on, the higher and nobler qualities of his nature are eliminated before the baser and viler. Thus the intended process of education is practically inverted; instead of learning to be men and rising to be Divine, the process of development sets in exactly the opposite direction, and men in this world learn to be more and more unmanlike, until the revolting consummation is reached, when the man seems to be transformed into the fiend, and the human seems lost in the devil. Aitken.

We may make a special application to the times in which we are now living. The god of modern thought is the creation of the thinker himself, evolved out of his own consciousness, or fashioned according to his own notion of what a god should be. Now, it is evident that such a being is no god. A god who can be fashioned by our own thoughts is no more a god than the image manufactured or produced by our own hands. The true God must of necessity be His own revealer. S.

It is evidently to be seen that the heathen religions are nothing but an abuse of the natural inclination which all men have to worship God, whom, because they know not, they guess at in the dark; for that they know there is and ought to be something that hath the care and providence of their affairs. But their religions were made lasting by policy and force, by ignorance and the force of custom, by the preferring an inveterate error and loving of a quiet and prosperous evil, by the arguments of pleasure and the correspondencies of sensuality, by the frauds of oracles and the patronage of vices, and because they feared every change as an earthquake, as supposing overturnings of their old error to be the destruction of their well-established governments. Bishop Taylor.

9-11. Trust in Jehovah, in contrast with the “trust” of v. 8. Trust in Jehovah, for He is not like the idols, He is the living God, “the help and the shield” of them that trust in Him. Trust in Jehovah, for He hath been mindful of us in times past, He will bless us in time to come (v. 12). The threefold division—Israel, house of Aaron, they that fear Jehovah—is the same as in Psalm 118 : 2, 3, 4. P.

“He is the help” of His people; they are helpless, and vain is the help of man; there is no help but in the Lord, and He is a present, seasonable, and sufficient help. Jehovah the Father has promised them help, and He has laid help upon His Son for them; and has set up a throne of grace, where they may come for grace to help them in time of need. Christ has helped them out of the miserable estate they were fallen into by sin; He helps them on in their way to heaven, by His power and grace, and at last brings them thither. The Spirit of God helps them to the things of Christ; to many exceeding great and precious promises; and out of many difficulties, snares and temptations; and He helps them in prayer under all their infirmities, and makes intercession for them, according to the will of God; and therefore they should trust in the Lord, Father, Son, and Spirit. Gill.

11. Ye that fear the Lord, trust in the Lord.** An exhortation in general to trust in Him, is a privilege great and glorious; but for a man to be singled out from his neighbors, for a man to be spoken to from heaven, as it were, by name, and to be told that God has given him a license, a special and peculiar grant to trust in Him, this is abundantly more; and yet this is the grant that God has given that man that feareth the Lord. Banyan.

12. The Lord hath been mindful of us; He will bless us. God hath, and therefore God will, is an ordinary Scripture argument. Trapp.—He has already shown His gracious recollection of us by beginning to bless us, and He will still go on to bless us; an idea simply but beautifully expressed by the repetition of the verb. A.—The repetition of the word “bless” adds great effect to the passage. It is His nature to bless, it is His prerogative to bless, it is His glory to bless, it is His delight to bless; He has promised to bless, and therefore be sure of this, that He will bless and bless and bless without ceasing. S.

13. He will bless them that fear the Lord, both small and great. Art thou in thine own thoughts or in the thoughts of others, of these small ones, small in grace, small in gifts, small in esteem upon this account? Yet if thou fearest God indeed, thou art certainly blessed with the best of saints. The least star stands as fixed as the brightest of them all in heaven. “He shall bless them that fear him, small and great.” He shall bless them with the same blessing of eternal life. For the difference in degrees of grace in saints doth not make the blessing, as to its nature, differ. It is the same heaven, the same life, the same glory, and the same eternity of felicity, that they are in the text promised to be blessed with. Banyan.

15. The Lord which made heaven and earth.** Christ fills all the space between God and man. There is no need for a crowd of shadowy beings to link heaven with earth. Jesus Christ lays His hand upon both. He is the head and source of creation; He is the head and fountain of life to His Church. Therefore He is first in all things, to be listened to, loved, and worshipped by men. A. M.

17. (It is) not the dead (that) are to praise Jehovah, and not all (those) going down to silence. This may be regarded as a further reason for expecting the Divine protection. God has chosen a people from among the nations of the earth, to praise Him not when dead but living, not in the silence of the grave, but with their voices in the present life. Thus understood, the verse teaches nothing as to the employments of the disembodied spirit, or of soul and body in the future state. All that is affirmed here (and perhaps in other places like it) is that the praises of the chosen people, as such, must be limited to this life. A.—Into silence. Into the grave—the land of silence. Nothing is more impressive in regard to the grave than its utter silence. Not a voice, not a sound, is heard there. Perfect stillness reigns and the first sound that shall be heard there will be the archangel’s trump. Barnes.

17,18. The Psalm thus closed was one of the songs of the second temple. What we hear in it is the voice of the Church rather than of an individual soul. And this may assist us in perceiving its entire harmony with faith in the heavenly glory. It much concerns the honor of God that there be continued on the earth a visible Church, in which His name may be recorded from generation to generation. That is a work which cannot be performed by the dead. Since, therefore, the uppermost desire of the Church ought ever to be that God’s name may be hallowed, His kingdom advanced, and His will done in the earth; it is her duty to pray for

continued subsistence here, on the earth, to witness for God. And it is to be carefully observed, that not only in this passage, but in all the parallel texts in which the Psalmists seem to speak doubtfully or disparagingly of the state of the departed, it is in connection with the interest of God’s cause on the earth. The thought that is uppermost in their hearts is, that “in death there is no commemoration” of God—no recording of His name for the salvation of men. This single circumstance might,