1. I WILL lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: From whence shall my help come? 2 My help cometh from the LORD, Which made heaven and earth. 3 He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: He that keepeth thee will not slumber. 4 Behold, he that keepeth Israel Shall neither slumber nor sleep.

5. The LORD is thy keeper: The LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. 6 The sun shall not smite thee by day, Nor the moon by night. 7 The LORD shall keep thee from all evil; He shall keep thy soul. 8 The LORD shall keep thy going out and thy coming in, From this time forth and for evermore.

Jehovah Thy Keeper.

THIS song is a charming expression of confidence in the unfailing protection of God. As intended for use by the company of pilgrims, the first two verses may have been sung by one band of singers, and the remainder by another in response. It would be appropriate for morning or evening worship when they were approaching the mountains of Jerusalem. De Witt.

This beautiful Psalm is the trustful expression of a heart rejoicing in its own safety, under the watchful eye of Him who is both the Maker of heaven and earth and the Keeper of Israel. The Creator of the universe, the Keeper of the nation is also the Keeper of the individual. The one ever-recurring thought, the one characteristic word of the Psalm, is this word keep. Six times it is repeated in the last five verses of this one short ode. The use of the same word in the original is evidently design—designed to mark by this emphasis of iteration the truth of God’s loving care for the individual, and so to banish all shadow of doubt, fear, and anxiety. P.

The idea is a very probable one, that the Psalm was the evening song of the sacred pilgrim band, sung on retiring to rest upon the last evening, when the long-wished-for termination of their wandering, the mountains of Jerusalem, had come into view in the distance. In this we obtain a suitable connection with the following Psalm, which would be sung one station further on when the pilgrims were at the gates of Jerusalem. Hengs.—At evening, as they are about to make preparations for their last night’s encampment, they behold in the far distance, clear against the dying light of the western sky, the holy hill with its crown of towers. The sight fills them with a sense of peace and security, and from the midst of the band a voice begins; “I will lift up mine eyes to the mountains,” etc. And another voice answers, “May He not suffer thy foot to be moved. May He that keepeth thee slumber not.” And anon the whole company of pilgrims take up the strain: “Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep; Jehovah shall keep thee,” etc. To-morrow, in the words of the next Psalm, they will sing, “Our feet are standing within thy gates, O Jerusalem.” P.

So soon as we read it, it commends itself to us by its tender, tranquil beauty. It is the song of a heart urging and persuading itself to a calm, unwavering trust in the sleepless providence of God. The Keeper of the whole nation is the Keeper of the individual man. The Keeper of the man and the nation does not fall into slumber from weariness; nor is His life, through mortal weakness, an alternate waking and sleeping. He guards them from the perils of the night as well as from the perils of the day. He keeps those who trust in Him from evil in every form. He keeps their very soul—their most inward and secret life. He keeps them in all the changes and intercourses of their outward life, their goings out and their comings in. He keeps them through all lapse of time, now and forevermore. By the iteration of one word, by the varied repetition of one thought, by the tenacious insistence on one point, the poet assures himself of the unceasing and watchful care of God, persuades himself to trust in it, banishes every shade of doubt from his heart, and loses all fear, lest he should be overlooked and forgotten by the God who has all men and all worlds on His hands. Cox.

It has been said Mr. Romaine read this Psalm every day; and sure it is that every word in it is calculated to encourage and strengthen our faith and hope in God. S. E. Fierce.—It is a token of the inspiration of the Psalms, that, however they may have been prompted by the circumstances of the writers, they come home to our personal experiences, and utter our thoughts and feelings as if coined out of the conflicts and the desires, the sorrows and the hopes, of our own hearts. J. P. T.

1. The whole Psalm is a description of Jehovah as the guardian or protector of His people. The phrase to lift the eyes, though sometimes used to signify the mere act of directing them to an object, has its strict and full sense, when a higher object is particularly mentioned, such as hills or heavens. The mountains here meant are the heights on which Jerusalem is built. A.

To the mind of the Jewish poet the everlasting hills of his native land were as shadows of the Infinite. The security which these mountain ranges afforded to Palestine, forming as they did so remarkable a barrier to the land on every side except toward the sea, suggested to the writer of the Psalm an emblem of the Divine protection. G. Forbes.—There is an affinity between souls and hills, especially for those who have become acquainted with their own solemn depths and sublime heights. In man’s earthly estate wonderful heights are laid low. He has descended from the eternal hills. Being away from his home and half a stranger to himself, the broken conformations of the outward world, the deep, dark, mist-shrouded valleys, the bold, aspiring, light-seeking mountains, deeply affect him. Man in trouble instinctively looks to the hills; he feels the attraction of the Fatherland, and knows there is help for him there. From the hill of the Lord we receive help in the valley. W. Pulsford.

It is looking upward to a Power above us which works the largest effects in both animating and purifying the soul, rather than any introspection, peeping about forever among our own petty attainments or defects. There is some secret provision in our nature which makes this act of looking upward the grandest exercise of our faculties. It is shadowed forth by the fact, that, in the common consent of all languages, what is noblest and best is placed over us. Heaven is arched above our heads. Excellence is a height. When we improve, we ascend. Greatness is figured as an elevation. Virtues in character are measured according to their loftiness. The divinest motions of the human spirit are aspiration and veneration—both looking upward. Prayer, we say, goes up. The more a man sees above him to reverence, the humbler he is; and “he that humbleth himself is in due time exalted.” The finest symbols of all generous attainment are mountains and the sky. And just as to a true and thoughtful mind the largest satisfaction found in the society of great hills is in looking up toward them from beneath, and letting the kindled and devout imagination travel up their glorious peaks into the infinitude and mystery whither the summits point, rather than in putting the foot on their crown and sending the eye arrogantly down into the conquered plains, so always, if our spiritual state is right, what is grandest on earth most impels us to look beyond it. F. D. H.

The supreme need of the soul is Divine illumination and guidance. The soul of man is to be lifted to its grandest height of spiritual outlook, and strengthened for its loftiest task by keeping the eyes fastened on Him whose throne is in the heavens. S. A. Harlow.—Nothing does so establish the mind amid the railings and turbulence of present things as both a look above them and a look beyond them—above them, to the steady and good hand by which they are ruled; and beyond them, to the sweet and beautiful end to which by that hand they will be brought. Jeremy Taylor.—Whosoever learns this first great lesson, to look away from himself and forget himself, to look to another and know that his help comes to him from without, to look to Christ adoringly, trustingly—and there is nothing so radically opposite to selfishness as this—whosoever can do this, and has done this, finds peace. The eye fills with light only by looking away from itself to the sunlight that is perpetually flooding the heavens. W. I. Budington.

2. He looks up to the holy mountains when he inquires longingly, Whence will my help come? And to this question of longing he answers himself, that his help comes from nowhere else than from Jehovah, the Maker of heaven and earth, from Him that is enthroned behind and upon these mountains, whose saving might reaches even to the remotest distances and corners of His creation, and with whom is help, i.e., both the willingness and the power to help, so that accordingly help comes from no other quarter than from Him alone. D.

“I will lift up mine eyes. Whence shall help come to me?” The question, observe, is not how he shall make his way to the help; how he shall get up to the mountains; the help is to come down from the mountains, “My help cometh from the Lord.” We do not have first to lift ourselves to God; God comes down to us; and whatever lifting there is to be done, He does. We do not have to climb to our refuge; He compasses our path and our lying down; fortifies the places where we walk and where we rest. We do not have to march to our reserves; when we are hard beset they pour down from the hills of God and range themselves around and beside us, as Elisha saw them from the house-top in Dothan. God Himself comes down into the sphere of our weakness, imperfection, ignorance, spiritual obtuseness, and from that low level commences the work of lifting, enlightening, and developing us. What we want is to have our eyes open so that we may see Him here and now, available to us as we are. V.

Maker of heaven and earth; a name of God occurring especially in these pilgrim odes, and other later Psalms. God’s creative power and majesty were, especially during the exile, impressed upon the heart of the nation, in contrast with the vanity of the gods of the heathen. P.

Nothing less than God’s help can really meet his needs. He will not peer into the valleys, he will not turn to fellow-men, to nature, to work, to pleasure, as if they had the relief he needed. “My help cometh from the Lord, who hath made heaven and earth.” It is the duty of every man to seek help from the Highest in every department of his life. P. Brooks.

There is absolutely no support for tired human spirits but in the idea of God and that which that idea implies. To the mountain of Sinai you must look for the quickening of conscience; to the mountain of Calvary for salvation from sin. As the mountains lift themselves above the world in a “stillness of perpetual benediction,” so God rises to our faith and hope above these storm driven plains of time. His Fatherhood overhangs us like a perpetual benediction. He helps us with a help that is quite sufficient, and that sustains us amid all circumstances; yea, with a help that makes us indifferent to circumstance. To men accustomed only to the light of reason and calculation it is difficult to present the spiritual help of the Lord. It cannot be explained. But it is the one profound fact that makes the difference between the submissive and meek-browed; yea, the rejoicing saint, and the complaining and rebellious sinner. The child of God who perhaps has nothing but poverty and pain, misery and misfortune, as the world reckons, somehow holds a boundless peace, and the martyr who smiles in his agonies is not a more conspicuous example of this strange unseen help of God than is the quiet, patient soul who, in ordinary ways of uneventful living, holds a steadfast faith and a happy hope in God. Oh, to be thus acquainted with God! To find His shadow every day on our road! To get His greeting with the morning light and His benediction when the evening falls, to live with Him, to have His shadow when life’s evening comes as the good night of time, the good morning of eternity! C. L. Thompson.

3,4. A great practical difficulty is to find a “keeper” who will remain awake during the whole night. The weariness of those who keep a faithful watch, and their longing for day during the tedious lonely hours of darkness, is alluded to in a graphic and beautiful figure of the Psalmist—

“My soul waiteth for the Lord More than keepers for the morning, More than keepers for the morning.”

The usual method adopted to secure due vigilance is to require the man to call out loudly or to blow a whistle every quarter of an hour. Yet, notwithstanding all precautions, as soon as sleep falls on the tired camp, it is too often the case that the hircling keeper lies down on the ground, wraps around him his thick abaiyeh, or cloak, and careless of his charge, or overcome with weariness, yields himself up to his drowsy propensities. Viewed in the light of these facts, how full of condescension and cheer is the assurance of God’s never-ceasing care—

“He who keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, He who keepeth Israel Doth not slumber or sleep.”

J. Neil:

4. Having reasoned that the God of nature will care for him, he now reasons that the God of nations will care for him. “He that keepeth Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” The Hebrew’s range of history was indeed limited to the history of his own people, but the study of that record had resulted in rooting deeply in the Hebrew mind the conception of God in history. All his education had emphasized one thought, that God had chosen his race and had taken it under His especial protection. He had been taught to associate God directly and intimately with all the heroes of his nation, and with all the incidents of its history. The more clearly he saw God working for his race, the more clearly he saw God working for him. The grandeur of God’s dealings with the people as a whole, the occasions on which He handled them as one man, did not at all interfere with his sense of God’s hand upon him individually. The fact that God watched over Israel as a nation was to him the best reason for believing that He watched over him. The God whose unslumbering eye had watched the destinies of Israel through all the changing years was the very One whom the pilgrim could most trust to preserve his life from all evil. And the Hebrew not only won comfort, but he drew it legitimately. All the past of all men is yours and mine for the reason that God is in it; and whatever lessons of His power or mercy or forbearance, of His goodness and love, of His favor and vengeance it contains, we may take and He means us to take for our own individual assurance or instruction or warning. V.

The “Maker of heaven and earth” is also the “Keeper of Israel.” It is His hand which has conducted the chosen people through all the vicissitudes of their strange, eventful history, through the perils of the darkness, through the perils of the light. Must not He, who keeps the whole nation, also keep every member of the nation? On this conception, on this conviction, the poet now plants himself. Standing in this new position, he asks, “Will the Keeper of Israel suffer my foot to totter? will He slumber in His watch over me?” and rejects the supposition with profound emotion. This is the special force of the Hebrew of v. 3, a force which we can only tamely render by representing the Psalmist as assuring himself, “He, verily, will not suffer thy foot to swerve, thy Keeper will not slumber,” for thy Keeper is the Keeper of Israel, and the whole history of Israel is a demonstration that He has never slumbered nor slept, never intermitted His providential care. Cox.

Fancy that to-night you were lifted above this great city, with its millions of inhabitants—the roof taken from every abode—before your inspection lies open every act of every being at every moment, all which you must see. Every word reaches your ear, and you must listen to all; every form of sorrow, every cry of agony. Not only visible acts, but every secret plan of purity or vice, of virtue or wickedness, every scheme of benevolence, and every purpose of riot, theft, licentiousness, robbery, and murder; every pang of the agonizing wife, mother, or child; the anxieties of the rich, and the distresses of the poor. Multiply these by a thousand—for a thousand millions of such beings people our earth. Hold in your memory—nay, ever-present before you—all the acts of these millions in the moments past, while the present moment unfolds its vastness, and add to that a foreknowledge of the interminable future. Under such a pressure every nervous system must be prostrate, every brain must reel. God alone knows, sees, understands all; and He is never weary, He never slumbereth or sleepeth. M. Simpson.

5. The Lord is thy keeper.** Two principal points are asserted in these words. Jehovah, and Jehovah alone, the omnipotent and self-existent God, is the Keeper and Preserver of His people. The people of God are kept, at all times and in all circumstances, by His mighty power unto everlasting salvation; they are preserved even “forevermore.” A. Serle.

Keeper. Shade. The titles of God are virtually promises, as when He is called a sun, a shield, a strong tower, a hiding-place, a portion. The titles of Christ, light of the world, bread of life, the way, the truth, and life; the titles of the Spirit, the Spirit of truth, of holiness, of glory, of grace, and supplication, the sealing, witnessing Spirit; faith may conclude as much out of these as out of promises. Clarkson.

The whole movement of Scripture doctrine, of its history and imagery is from God downward to man; and the incarnation, which gathers up all Scripture into itself, which is the key to all its history and to all its symbolism, is expressly a movement out of the very heart of God, down to sick, suffering, erring, sin-stained man. The life, the words, the death of Jesus Christ, are simply God’s way of saying to man, “All things are yours;” and so the Hebrew pilgrim was on the right track when he combined creative power and providential care in one and the same Being; when he recognized in the God of the mountains, the Father “full of grace and truth,” and saw nothing inconsistent in God’s creating and ordering the heavenly host, and in God’s making Himself a shadow in the heat for a weary man in the desert; in God’s keeping watch and ward round the circuit of the heavens, and in God’s acting as sentinel of a pilgrim’s tent in the wilderness. V.

5, 6. “The Lord thy shade,” throwing over thee the grateful shelter which thou mayest need. This shade will avert the sun-stroke in the heats of day, and whatever malarious or otherwise harmful influences may imperil you by night. There is no occasion to assume that the Scriptures endorse the notion of noxious influence from the moon itself. Night, with or without moon, brings more or less that is noxious. C.

The inward voice gives him the distinct assurance, “Jehovah is thy Keeper—thy Keeper, and not only the Maker of heaven and earth; thy Keeper, and not only the Keeper of Israel. He cares for thee, and watches over thee. When you are on the march, He will be to thee as a shadow from the heat, and a screen from the dazzling radiance that perturbs the senses, ’the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.’ In all changes of season and time He will be thy guard, adapting His help to thy varying needs.” Cox.

7. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil.** It is an absolute promise, there are no conditions annexed; it honors God for us simply to believe it, and rest on the Lord for the performance of it. As we view it, what have we to fear? The mouth of the Lord hath spoken it, His Word is immutable. Jesus is the Saviour of the body as well as of the soul. S. E. Pierce.—The threefold expression, “shall keep thee . . . thy soul . . . thy going out and thy coming in,” marks the completeness of the protection vouchsafed, extending to all that the man is and that he does. P.

8. Jehovah will keep thy going out and thy coming in, from now even to eternity.** This is the third repetition of the phrase, *Jehovah will keep, i.e., keep safe, protect, preserve, as if to silence the misgivings of a weak or tempted faith, by the reiterated declaration of this cheering truth. Going out and coming in is a proverbial Hebrew phrase for all the occupations and affairs of life. The original reference is to man’s going out to labor in the morning and returning home to rest at night. A.—A promise that we shall be kept in all our ways; that in all our business, in all our movements, amid all the changes and chances of our mortal life, we shall evermore be defended by that ready help which issues from an eye that cannot close and an arm that cannot fail. “Even forevermore.” There is a “going out” from this world; there is a “coming in” to the next world. Our “going out” through the dark valley shall be under the guidance of that blessed Shepherd whose rod and whose staff shall never fail to comfort the believer; our “coming in”

to the heavenly city shall be as heirs with that glorious Redeemer who must reign until He has put all enemies under His feet. Melvill.

God’s presence is enough for toil and enough for rest. If He journey with us by the way, He will abide with us when nightfall comes; and His companionship will be sufficient for direction on the road, and for solace and safety in the evening camp. Maclaren.—Thou shalt be under His protection in all thy journeys and voyages, outward bound or homeward bound, as He kept Israel in the wilderness, in their removes and rests. He will prosper thee in all thy affairs at home and abroad, in the beginning and in the conclusion of them. He will keep thee in life and death, thy going out and going on while thou livest, and thy coming in when thou diest; going out to thy labor in the morning of thy days, and coming home to thy rest when the evening of old age calls thee in (104 : 23). H.

How large a writ or patent of protection is granted here! No time shall be hurtful, neither “day nor night,” which includes all times. Nothing shall hurt, neither sun nor moon, nor heat nor cold. These should include all annoyances. Nothing shall hurt. “Thy soul shall be preserved, thy outgoings and thy comings in shall be preserved.” These include the whole person of man, and him in all his just affairs and actions. Nothing of man is safe without a guard, and nothing of man can be unsafe which is thus guarded. They should be kept who can say, “The Lord is our keeper;” and they cannot be kept, no, not by legions of angels, who have not the Lord for their keeper. None can keep us but He, and He hath promised to keep us “forevermore.” Caryl.—There is something very striking in the assurance that the Lord will not suffer the foot even of the most faint and wearied one to be moved. The everlasting mountains stand fast, and we feel as if, like Mount Zion, they could not be removed forever; but the step of man—how feeble in itself, how liable to stumble or trip even against a pebble in the way! Yet that foot is as firm and immovable in God’s protection as the hills themselves. In the hours of occupation and hurry, in the conflicts and perils of the day, in the helplessness of sleep, in the glare and heat of the noon-day, amid the damps and dews of night, that unslumbering eye is still over every child for his good. Man, indeed, goeth forth to his work and to his labor till the evening; but alike as he goes forth in the morning, and as he returns in the evening, the Lord still holds him up in all his goings

forth and his comings in; no manner of evil shall befall him. And oh! what a sweet addition is it to the promise, “He shall keep thy soul.” From the very dawn of life to its latest close, even forevermore, “He will keep thee from all evil; He will keep thy soul.” Bouchier.