Psalms 27
Butler9. The Lord hath a harvest and a gleaning time also, set for cutting down and binding together in the fellowship of judgments God’s enemies, who have followed the same course of sinning; for here we are given to understand that God will “gather their souls,” and so will let none escape. Dickson.
11. Trusting in God, the Psalmist resolves that the plain way of righteousness shall be his choice, and those who will may prefer the tortuous paths of violence and deceit. Yet he is by no means a self-righteous vaunter of his own strength, for he cries for redemption and pleads for mercy. Our integrity is not absolute nor inherent, it is a work of grace in us, and is marred by human infirmity; we must, therefore, resort to the redeeming blood and to the throne of mercy, confessing that though we are saints among men, we still bow as sinners before God. S.
12. The epilogue. The prayer is changed into rejoicing, which is certain of the answer that shall be given. Hitherto shut in, as it were, in deep trackless gorges, he even now feels himself to be standing upon a pleasant plain, commanding a wide range of vision, and now blends his grateful praise of God with the song of the worshipping congregation and its full-voiced choirs. D.—The even place upon which our foot stands is the sure covenant faithfulness, eternal promise and immutable oath of the Lord of Hosts; there is no fear of falling from this solid basis or of its being removed from under us. Established in Christ Jesus by being vitally united to Him, we have nothing left to occupy our thoughts but the praises of our God. Let us not forsake the assembling of ourselves together, and when assembled, let us not be slow to contribute our portion of thanksgiving. S.
1. THE LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? 2 When evil doers came upon me to eat up my flesh, Even mine adversaries and my foes, they stumbled and fell. 3 Though an host should encamp against me, My heart shall not fear: Though war should rise against me, Even then will I be confident. 4 One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after; That I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, To behold the beauty of the LORD, and to inquire in his temple. 5 For in the day of trouble he shall keep me secretly in his pavilion: In the covert of his tabernacle shall he hide me;
He shall lift me up upon a rock 6 And now shall mine head be lifted up above mine enemies round about me; And I will offer in his tabernacle sacrifices of joy; I will sing, yea, I will sing praises unto the LORD. 7 Hear, O LORD, when I cry with my voice: Have mercy also upon me, and answer me. 8 When thou saidst, Seek ye my face; my heart said unto thee, Thy face, LORD, will I seek. 9 Hide not thy face from me; Put not thy servant away in anger: Thou hast been my help; Cast me not off, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation. 10 For my father and my mother have forsaken me, But the LORD will take me up. 11 Teach me thy way, O LORD;
And lead me in a plain path,
Because of mine enemies [them that lie in wait for me].
12. Deliver me not over unto the will of mine adversaries :
For false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty.
THE Psalmist breathes his longing for the Divine fellowship, which shall be at once vision and guidance, and hidden life in distress, and stability, and victory, and shall break into music of perpetual praise. A. M.—To remain all his life near to God’s house is here his one prayer, and that, delivered from his enemies, he will there yet present his thank-offering is his confident expectation. D.—The expression of confidence occurs at the beginning and the end, the description of the danger and the prayer for deliverance in the body of the Psalm. If God be for him and admit him to His household, he is satisfied and safe (vs. 1-6). With this persuasion he implores that God will interpose for his deliverance from present danger (vs. 7-12). If he did not believe that God would grant his request he must despair; but as he does believe it, he encourages himself to wait for it (vs. 13, 14). There is no apparent reference to any particular historical occasion, but an obvious intention to provide a vehicle of pious sentiment for all God’s people under the form of trial here described. A.
The Psalm consists of an expression of the most assured confidence in Jehovah, whatever enemies may threaten, and an earnest cry for help and comfort in present need, out of which the soul rises again to hopeful trust in God. P.—He must have little knowledge of the fluctuations of the devout life who is surprised to find so swift a passage from confidence to conscious weakness. While the usual order in the Psalms, as the usual order in good men’s experience, is that prayer for deliverance precedes praise and triumph, true communion with God is bound to no mechanical order, and may begin with gazing on God, and realizing the mysteries of beauty in His secret place, ere it drops to earth. It is perhaps a nobler effect of faith to begin with God and hymn the victory as if already won, than to begin with trouble and to call for deliverance. But with whichever we commence, the prayer of earth must include both; and so long as we are weak, and God our strength, its elements must be “supplication and thanksgiving.” The prayer of our Psalm bends round again to its beginning,
13 I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD
In the land of the living.
14. Wait on the LORD :
Be strong, and let thine heart take courage ;
Yea, wait thou on the LORD.
and after the plaintive cry for help breaks once more into confidence (vs. 13, 14). A. M.
I. Though darkness break in upon him, the darkness of night, of trouble, of temptation, Jehovah is his light, and if he is in Him, he is in the light, and there shines on him a sun which never sets and suffers no eclipse. That God is light is no metaphor. David calls Him his salvation in view of all that oppresses him, and the stronghold of his life in view of all which endangers him; in Jehovah he overcomes far and wide, in Him is his life hidden as in a rocky fortress. D.
My light. This is the first, and, in the Old Testament, the only passage in which the term “light” is expressly applied to the Lord; although expressions full of the same beautiful thought occur in Isa. 60: 1-20 and Micah 7: 8. In the New Testament we read “God is light” (1 John 1: 5); Christ “the true light” (John 1: 7-9); and the Lamb the light of the Church (Rev. 21: 23). Cook.
The combination of the two ideas, “light and salvation,” is very suggestive. Light is essential to life, health, and growth. Owing to this healing, life-giving power of natural light, we see how it becomes the salvation of the natural man. He owes to it all the vital force by which he conquers and beats back the foes of nature that seek to destroy his life. And in regard to our souls, the Lord is our salvation because He is our light. What the sunlight is to the plant, God is to the soul. He is the source of our spiritual life. Between Him and the nature which He formed in the image of Himself there is the closest and the most intimate relationship. They are co-natural. Apart from Him the soul can find no substitute for God, none to fill His place, none to induce the sweet contentment and calm repose which it seeks. “Whom have I in the heavens but Thee; and there is none upon the earth whom I desire besides Thee;” this is the deepest language of the soul. The good of man is to be found in the deepened sense of God’s love, in the clear revelation of His grace and the fuller enjoyment of His peace. If He lifts upon us the light of His countenance, we are saved in the truest and highest sense. No assertion, then, of our dependence upon God for the creation and maintenance of the life of our souls can be too absolute. We need all of God for our saving health, for the very life of our souls. All His qualities, all His powers, are indispensable for our spiritual existence. In Christ Jesus, God in all His fulness has come very near to us; is our brother-born; lies in our bosoms; dwells in our hearts, and transfigures us into His own likeness, as the sunflower becomes an image of the sun.
And thus having God as his light and his salvation, the Psalmist might well say, “Whom shall I fear?” Having his heart at rest in God, and having his times in God’s hands, what cause for fear remained? With peace within and light without, he was raised above all earthly fears. His eyes were opened; and while he was compassed about with foes innumerable and most formidable, he saw himself at the same time surrounded with horses and chariots of fire, and realized that greater was He that was with him than all that could be against him; that the hostile things and persons of life could have no power at all against him, were it not given them for wise and gracious purposes by his heavenly Father. And so, if we fear God, we need know no other fear. He has taken away all that causes us to fear; all that can affright us is in the firm control of a wise and loving almighty hand. All providence becomes to us special providence; all things are eager and tender ministers to us. More important interests are involved in our salvation than in the fate of the whole natural creation; and sooner than a hair of our head shall be injured, God would bury the whole physical world in ruin. God is our refuge and strength: a very present help in trouble; therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed. Perfect trust in God is perfect peace. H. Macmillan.
To know that “God is light” is one thing, and to be able to say, “The Lord is my light,” is quite another thing. The Lord must be the light by which the way of life is made plain to us—the light by which we may see to walk in that way—the light that exposes the darkness of sin—the light by which we can discover the hidden sins of our own hearts. When He is thus our light, then He is our salvation also. He is pledged to guide us right; not only to show us sin, but to save us from it. Not only to make us see God’s hatred of sin, and His curse upon it, but also to draw us unto God’s love, and to take away the curse. With the Lord lighting us along the road of salvation, who, or what need we fear? Our life is hid with Christ in
God. We are weak, very weak, but His “strength is made perfect in weakness.” With the Lord Himself pledged to be the strength of our life, of whom need we be afraid? Anon.
When we can truly say, “Christ is all,” then God enables us to add, “And Christ is mine.” When we have no righteousness of our own, when we can find nothing within ourselves wherein to trust and rejoice, when we feel our exceeding sinfulness and helplessness—then God comforts us with His abundant mercy. We behold the amazing, infinite, and immutable love of God; we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. Jesus Himself is our righteousness, our beauty. We sing the new song. God is our light and our salvation. Saphir.
The true test question by which every man is to try his religion is this, Have I found God in it? Has it more than pleased me? has it pierced me, brought me to the light, given me to know God? If it has not done this for you, too little cannot be made of it. And the sooner it is cast behind you, with all its fine sentiments, in a total turning of your heart to God Himself, the better. The life of God in the soul of man—that is religious character, and beside that there is none. And that is salvation, without which there is no salvation. For this it is that makes salvation; that the soul, before without God, alienated from the life of God, is won back to a real God-welcome, and has Him revealed inwardly in holy Fatherhood, as the life of its life. Hungry as the prodigal, it has come back from its wanderings in shameful penitence, to be greeted with a kiss, and clothed again, and feasted, and hear its Father say, “O dead, thou art alive again!” Bushnell.
3. Here is great courage for the time to come. “Experience breeds hope and confidence.” David was not so courageous a man of himself; but upon experience of God’s former comfort and assistance, his faith brake as fire out of the smoke, or as the sun out of a cloud. He that seeth God by a spirit of faith in His greatness and power, he sees all other things below as nothing. Therefore, he saith here, he cares not for the time to come for any opposition; no, not of an army. “If God be with us, who can be against us?” Sibbes.—Those who are willing to be combatants for God, shall also be more than conquerors through God. None are so truly courageous as those who are truly religious. If a Christian live, he knows by whose might he stands; and if he die, he knows for whose sake he falls. Where there is no confidence in God, there will be no continuance with God. W. Secker.
4. One thing.** Changes, great changes, and many bereavements there have been in my life. But one thing has never failed—one thing makes me feel that my life has been one; it has calmed my joys, it has soothed my sorrows, it has guided me in difficulty, it has strengthened me in weakness. It is the presence of God—a faithful and loving God. The presence of God is not only light, it is unity. It gives unity to the heart that believes it—unity to the life that is conformed to it. It was the presence of God in David’s soul that enabled him to say, “One thing have I desired of the Lord;” and in Paul’s that enabled him to say, “This one thing I do.” George Wagner.—This “one thing,” that David desires, is in effect that one thing needful that Christ speaks of in the Gospel; which Mary makes choice of there, as David doth here. R. Baker.
A lifelong residence in Jehovah’s house, and therefore an intimate inward intercourse with the God who has His dwelling, His residence in the holy tent, is the one heart’s desire of David, so that he may delight himself by gazing upon the gracious revelation of Him that can be seen there by the spiritual eye. D.—His one desire is not to be freed from foes and dangers, but to have more intimate fellowship and communion with God. This was his one cherished wish, which he carried in prayer to Him who alone could grant it. One thing have I desired, literally, asked, of Jehovah. And this he would continue to seek after, seek by prayer and by all the appointed means. That I may dwell in the house of Jehovah: be received as a member of His family, not an occasional or temporary guest, but a permanent resident. The reference is not to attendance upon public worship at the sanctuary so much as to the symbolic meaning of that sacred edifice. It was the dwelling-place of God, where His presence was continually manifested. The Psalmist wished to live with God, to be ever near Him, to have the constant sense of His presence and favor. And this he would do, not merely on Sabbath days or special occasions, not merely for a brief period, but all the days of my life. W. H. G.
Such happiness had he experienced in the service of God in His tabernacle, such peace and joy had he found there, that there, if it might have been, he would have chosen always to remain. For there God vouchsafed to dwell; there He manifested His immediate presence; there David seemed, as it were, to abide under the very shadow of the Almighty. The supreme blessedness of a life entirely devoted, like that of the priests, to the service of God, seems often to have forced itself upon the minds of the holy Psalmists, and upon none more than upon that of David, who was compelled so often to wander at a distance from the sanctuary. There is the same feeling here of the perfect security and abounding happiness of such a dwelling-place as in Psalm 23: 6. Indeed, the two Psalms have much in common. P.
Prayer, praise, thanksgiving, contemplation, are the peculiar privilege and duty of a Christian, and that for their own sakes; from the exceeding comfort and satisfaction they afford him, and without reference to any definite results to which prayer tends, and without reference to the answers promised to it, from a general sense of the blessedness of being under the shadow of God’s throne. Newman.—His deepest desire was that he might “dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of his life,” an impossible wish, if he meant nothing more thereby than bodily participation and presence in the ritual worship of an external sanctuary. He meant that, but he meant it for the sake of what it meant, and that was union with God in faith and love, in aspiration and desire. Communion with God is true blessedness. Without it there is none. To live near Him, to have His dear name sealed upon our hearts so to keep all their springs pure; to bear constant regard to Him in all acts, and to have thoughts of Him flowing in unbroken current through our lives, like the clear streams that run through the dusty streets of some cities—this is the secret of all life being blessed. A. M.
Communion and fellowship with God is that one thing, which if a Christian has, he needs desire no more; that we should all desire and desire again, and that is enough even to satisfy us, the fruition of God, and the beholding of Him in His ordinances, in His temple, to have correspondence and fellowship and communion with Him. Now this is so infinitely sweet, that it was the Psalmist’s only desire, and the sum of all his desires here, and therefore much more in the tabernacle of heaven, which doth make up the consummation and completeness of all our happiness. J. Stoughton.
Beauty of the Lord. The several perfections which co-exist and unite in the nature of God produce a glorious beauty. Holiness is beautiful; mercy is beautiful; truth is beautiful. But, over and above, there is a beauty which belongs to such combinations and harmonies as the Psalmist describes, when he tells us, “Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” “Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens; and
Thy faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds. Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy judgments are a great deep.” A. Gray.
To inquire in His temple. The more grace the more business ye will find ye have to do with God in His ordinances; little grace hath little to do, and much grace hath much to do; he hath always business with God, special, earnest business. R. Steele.—Not seeking sinners alone, but assured saints should be inquirers. We must inquire as to the will of God and how we may do it; as to our interest in the heavenly city, and how we may be more assured of it. We shall not need to make inquiries in heaven, for there we shall know even as we are known; but meanwhile we should sit at Jesus’ feet, and awaken all our faculties to learn of Him. S.
We shall never see the glory of that light which dwells between the cherubim, if our visits to the shrine are brief and interrupted, and the bulk of our time is spent outside the tabernacle amid the glaring sand and the blazing sunshine. The Psalmist desired to “dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of his life, that he might behold the beauty of the Lord”—for he knew that only such continuousness of abode would fit his eyes to see the light, and attune his ears to hear the voice of answer to him inquiring in the temple. Let us fix our eyes on Him—our Lord. Surely there is enough there to draw and satisfy the most prolonged eager gaze. He is our Example, our Redeemer, our Prophet. In Him we see all of God that man can apprehend, and all of man. In Him we behold our wisdom, our strength, our righteousness. We may gaze on Him with the confident look of faith, with the submission of obedience, with the rapture of love. A. M.
5. By his tent, as appears from the preceding verse, we are to understand the tabernacle, not considered merely as a place of public worship, but as Jehovah’s earthly residence, His mansion. In the last clause the idea of protection is conveyed by an entirely different figure, that of a person placed upon a high rock beyond the reach of danger. A.—God’s sanctuary is a sheltering asylum on a hill, where Jehovah safely guards him who flees thither, from the storms of trouble without; there he is inaccessible to any dangers; he has them far beneath him, and his feet rest on a rock. D.—The gracious presence of God, His power, His promise, His readiness to hear prayer, the witness of His Spirit in the hearts of His people; these are the secret of His tabernacle, and in these the saints find cause for that holy security and seserenity of mind in which they dwell at ease. This sets them up upon a rock which will not sink under them, but on which they find firm footing for their hopes; nay, it sets them upon a rock on high, where the raging, threatening billows of a stormy sea cannot touch them; it is a rock that is higher than we (61: 2). H.
The time of trouble. Though God does not always deliver His people out of trouble, yet He delivers them from the evil of trouble, the despair of trouble, by supporting the spirit; nay, He delivers by trouble, for He sanctifies the trouble to cure the souls, and by less troubles delivers from greater. D. M.—How blessed it is to have a friend in God! How supremely wretched to have no place where to hide till the storm be overblown—no secret pavilion into which we may run from the strife of tongues! To depend, in the last extremity, on selfish human nature, is like the dependence of an army marching on the undermined soil, which rings hollow to every tread. God is a Friend for adversity, unwearied, of the utmost tenderness, patient in bearing with the wildest caprices and the manifold infirmities of those whom He admits into the sacred relation of friendship. He places Himself before His creatures in this endearing character. He invites them to enter into an eternal covenant of friendship. He pledges His own existence that He will fulfil its conditions. A faithful God has been His characteristic from the beginning. An all-sufficient voucher of His sincerity He has given in the blood of His Son. B. B. Edwards.
7-12. As in so many Psalms of David, there follows a rapid and complete change of tone. So long as the Psalmist fixes his thoughts wholly on God’s grace and promise, he has no feeling but joy and exultation; but when he reverts to his own state he is brought at once to his knees in earnest, almost plaintive prayers.
8. The original runs thus, word for word: “To Thee said my heart, in answer to Thy command, ‘Seek ye My face;’ Thy face, O Lord, will I seek.” The Psalmist hears the voice of invitation, his heart accepts and answers it; and, in order to express the completeness and promptitude of his acceptance, he puts the command and answer in direct juxtaposition. In plain unimpassioned prose the thought would be thus expressed: “Seek ye My face,” that is the invitation which my heart heard, and answered at once, “Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” The heart pleads the command and invitation; it addresses itself at once to God; this, it says, is what I heard; when I heard, I answered and obeyed. Cook.—The true nature of religious worship is seeking the face of God; this it is in God’s precept, Seek ye My face. He would have us seek Him for Himself, and make His favor our chief good; and this it is in the saint’s purpose and desire, “Thy face, Lord, will I seek; and nothing less will I take up with.” The opening of His hand will satisfy the desire of other living things, but it is only the shining of His face that will satisfy the desire of a living soul. H.
We have here, summed up in a kind of dialogue of two phrases, the whole speech of God to us men, and the inmost meaning of all that devout souls say to God. “Seek ye My face”—such is the essential meaning of all God’s words and works. “Thy face, Lord, will I seek”—such is the essential meaning of all prayer, worship, and obedience. A. M.—What is prayer but speaking to God—and what are answers from heaven but God’s reply to us? And wherever, therefore—in the study, the street, or in any toil or pursuit of the world, or amid the array of this world’s difficulties—wherever you may be, you can pour out the heart in expressions of desire or gratitude, of need or weakness, of praise and longing. Wherever such expressions rise from the heart, they are more precious than when they are stately expressed at morning dawn and at evening close because they are the spontaneous, the unprovoked expressions of a heart that in its silent depths is in communion with God, and lets forth only the incidental evidences of its deep and solemn, but silent, intercourse maintained within. Cumming.
Seek my face. The heart of all His self-revelation by speech and by deed is the gracious call to come to His brightness and be at rest. By the very make of our spirits, which bear on them alike in their weakness and their strength the sign that they are His, and can only be at rest in Him, He says, “Seek ye My face.” By all His providences of joy or sorrow, by disappointments and fulfilments, by hopes and fruitions, by losses and gains, by all the alternations which “toss us to His breast,” He says, “Seek ye My face.” And most of all in Jesus Christ, the true “angel of His face,” in whom all the lustre of His radiance is gathered, does He beckon us to Himself. The highest, most loving, most beseeching form of that wonderful invitation, “Seek ye My face,” is the call of Him in whose face we see the glory of God as we see it nowhere besides: “Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden.” So He speaks to the whole world. So He speaks to each of us. So He speaks to me by Christ, who is the dearest utterance of His love and the express image of His person. A. M.
The knowledge of God begins by looking unto Jesus. It grows by abiding in His presence and keeping up communion with Him. As soon as we come to Him we receive something of His Spirit, and are able to understand a little. As we stay with Him and walk with Him we receive more and more of His Spirit, and are able to understand more and more; for the two processes go on hand in hand. The more we see of the Divine in Him, the more we receive of the Divine in ourselves; and, conversely, the more we receive of the Divine in ourselves, the more we see of the Divine in Him. By equal steps, step by step, no one can tell which is the first. J. M. Gibson.
When does God say, “Seek ye My face”? He says it especially in the way and at the time that our heart is most disposed to hear it. In your first real trouble His heart begins to touch your heart in a secret way, and His living presence is pleading, “Seek ye My face.” The world cannot help you and comfort you. The deeper instincts of your heart spring up in the day of trouble toward God, and God sees it, for you are palpitating within yourself to meet His face. J. Pulsford.—Such is the experience of those who seek and find God. Their aching heart seizes upon some precious words of Divine invitation and promise; they think of them as the words of God; and then their heart goes out in trustful, grateful response—“Thy face, Lord, will I seek.” C.—Note the firm and decisive resolution shining through the very brevity of the words. The original gives that brevity even more strongly. Three words suffice to hold the law which the man has made for the pole-star of his life. Fixed resolves need short professions. What a contrast that clear, self-conscious, firm resolution is to the hesitations and indecisions so common among us! How few of us could honestly crystallize the aims that guide our life into any single sentence! A. M.
If you would make a call effectual, you must receive it into the innermost recesses of your soul and recognize and feel the nature of the claim which He who speaks has upon you to whom He calls. Remember that it is the right of an absolute Sovereign. But it is not in sovereignty only, it is in love He has called you. All you have to do is to let yourselves be placed within those majestic influences of His powerful affection, that you may be drawn in and toward the centre. Another most important part of the right reception of the call lies in the quickness, the instantaneousness of the obedience: “When Thou saidst.” The appeal and the reply are coeval. There is a “Now or never” in God’s calls. God’s calls and invitations are not always such things as we should have expected. They often fall strangely. Upon our faithfulness to each one in succession depend the vividness and the power with which the other will fall. There is one thing which appears to characterize every call; i.e., a call to action. There is always something to be done, and to do the act is to accept the call. J. V.
God pours upon a man a spirit of grace and supplication, a praying disposition; He puts in motives, suggests arguments and pleas to God; all which you shall find come in readily and of themselves, and that likewise with a quickening heat and enlargement of affection, and with a longing and restlessness of spirit to be alone, to pour out the soul to God, and to vent and form those motions and suggestions into a prayer, till you have laid them together and made a prayer of them. And this is a speaking to the heart. Observe such times when God doth thus and neglect them not, then to strike while the iron is hot; thou hast then His ear. T. Goodwin.—God is never better pleased than when His people importune Him in His own words, and urge Him with arguments taken from His own promises. T. Brooks.
9. We have in v. 8 God’s voice to the heart and the heart’s echo to that voice, and here the heart’s cry to God, founded on both the Divine voice and the human echo. What God has been saying to him in days that are no more, and what he has been saying to God, are planted like the two piers of an arch, that from them may rise heavenward the prayer and the hope, “Hide not Thy face far from me;” “Leave me not, neither forsake me, O God of my salvation.” A. M.—"Thy face, Lord, will I seek, in obedience to Thy command; therefore hide not Thy face from me; let me never want the reviving sense of Thy favor; love me and let me know that Thou lovest me; put not Thy servant away in anger." He owns he had deserved God’s displeasure, but begs that however God might correct him He would not cast him away from His presence. H.
Love works in believing hearts toward its beloved object. It cannot bear distance from Christ. The dread of it makes the soul plead and fills the mouth with arguments, lest the heart should lose the sweet sense and comfort of His love. “Thou hast been my help.” Past experiences of love and power are remembered, and pleaded for present help and future hope. God’s precious promises of faithfulness and truth cannot be forgotten. Past mercies are recalled. “Forsake me not.” Why? Because “Thou art the God of my salvation.” To whom should we go, but to Thee, O Jesus? Forsake not the work of Thine own hands; the soul for whom Thou didst toil, suffer, and die. Recall my wandering steps. Revive my drooping spirit. Bring near Thy salvation in present peace and love. Such are the pleadings of loving hearts, springing from the faith which worketh by love. It ever hath God in Christ for its object, His faithfulness and truth its support, His promises its pleas, His glory its aim, and the comforting sense of His love its portion and heaven. W. Mason.
10. For my father and my mother have left me, and Jehovah will take me in. Parents are here put for the nearest friends, whose loss or desertion is frequently complained of in the Psalms as one of the most painful signs of desolation. The first clause may also be translated, when my father and my mother have left me, then the Lord will take me in. The last expression is applied to the compassionate reception of strangers or wanderers into one’s house. The case described is an ideal one, and may be thus expressed in paraphrase. “The kindness of the nearest earthly friends may cease by death or desertion (for the verb to leave may comprehend both); but the Lord’s compassions cannot fail.” A.—This verse simply expresses, in a well-known proverbial form, the thought that even were he forsaken by all who loved him most tenderly God would never give him up. The force and beauty of such an appeal depend upon the feeling that a parent’s love is the strongest bond that can bind man to man, yet incomparably weaker than that which binds him to God. Cook.
Why both named—father and mother, too? Partly because it can hardly be imagined that both of them should forsake their child, though one should hap to be unkind. Partly, because the father’s love being commonly with more providence, the mother’s with more tenderness; both together do better express than alone either would do, the abundant love of God toward us, who is infinitely dear over us, beyond the care of the most provident father, beyond the affection of the tenderest mother. R. Sanderson.
The excellence of the Hebrew devotional hymns has never been surpassed. Heathenism, Christianity, with all their science, arts, literature, bright and many-colored, have little that approaches these. They are the despair of imitators; still the uttered prayer of the Christian world. Tell us of Greece, whose air was redolent of song; its language such as Jove might speak; its sages, heroes, poets, honored in every clime—they have no Psalm of prayer and praise like these Hebrews, the devoutest of men, who saw God always before them, ready to take them up when father and mother let them fall.” Theodore Parker.
11,12. He wanders about presently like a hunted deer; but God can so guide him that he may escape all dangers. That is what he asks. Cunning spies follow all his steps, and would rejoice if they saw what they planned and wished come to pass. Should he slide into the way of sin leading to destruction, that would be to God’s dishonor, just as on the other hand it is a point of honor with God not to allow His servant to fall. Hence he prays that he may be led in God’s way; for oneness of one’s own will with the Divine renders one invulnerable. D.—Righteous David saw many who were waiting to triumph in his mistakes; hence the more they watched, the more he prayed: “Teach me Thy way, O Lord, and lead me in a plain path, because of mine enemies.” It may be rendered, because of mine observers. Men are merciless in their censures of Christians; they have no sympathy for their infirmity: while God weighs them in more equal scales, and says, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” While a saint is a dove in the eyes of God, he is only a raven in the estimation of sinners. W. Secker.
The expression is not “Show me Thy way,” but “Teach me Thy way.” Showing may be an instantaneous act, but teaching is a process. We learn gradually; we learn by study; we learn by effort; we learn by discipline. It is no little thing you ask, and it is no little submission and work and faith that you commit yourself to, when you say to God, “Teach me Thy way.” J. V.—While in the general we set God’s will before us as our rule, we may lawfully pray that he will by hints of providence direct us in the way of our duty, and give us indications what His mind is. Thus He guides His people and leads them in a plain path. H.
The leading of God when we are in the way, is to be looked for by us in and through His ordinary providence. If you are in the way of duty, of faith and of prayer, be sure that somehow through the common incidents of your life He will guide your feet into the right path. W. M. Taylor.—God’s rule is the same in providence that it is in grace. By any and by all means He will draw us; force us, never. Surely we may see this in the word “lead.” No one is compelled to follow a guide. The plain fact is, that Divine Providence is to us just what we suffer it to be. Bishop Thorold.
13. The words “I had fainted” are not in the original. The sentence is a broken one, such as one utters under strong emotion, suggesting possibilities, but leaving the hearer or reader to supply them for himself. “O had I not believed to see the goodness of Jehovah in the land of the living”—and then he breaks off, and we are left to imagine what dreadful thing would have happened. “Unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord.” God’s goodness is often a matter of faith rather than of sight. We are prone to take it for granted that God’s goodness must always come into our lives like ripened fruit; whereas, as a fact, it often comes into them like a seed which takes time to grow. “Light is sown for the righteous.” And we shall find that the richest developments of God’s goodness are of this character. V.
It is not hard to believe in the Divine goodness when all things are joyous. The hard thing is to believe in it just as firmly and quietly when all things seem against us. The goodness of God is just as surely and as richly revealed in the dark things of providence as in the bright things. We write some things as “prosperous” and some as “adverse.” God writes “goodness” over all. J. R. M.
Unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. A cordial made up of three sovereign ingredients—a hope to see; and to see the goodness of God; and the goodness of God in the land of the living. R. Baker.—His goodness sets His mighty power a-work for His suffering saints. His goodness sets His all-sufficiency, His fulness, abroach for them, so that it runs freely upon them; and never more freely than when they are under the cross. D. Clarkson.—They have an invisible Friend always near them. He supports them by His power under all their trials and conflicts, revives their spirits with the consolations of His Word; and when He brings them out of their troubles, then how sweetly do they sing of Him! How many a joyful Psalm, what a rich treasury of experience, did the pen of David indite to the glory of his God and the comfort of his Father’s children in after ages! He believed, therefore he spake. Unless he had believed he had fainted. Faith will support when all things else fail. It looks to the Word, and trusts in an almighty, faithful, covenant-keeping God. Faith consults not flesh and blood, but the Word of grace and truth. As faith is the support of the soul, God’s Word is the warrant of faith, and Jesus the object, author, strength, and finisher of faith. W. Mason.
In the land of the living. That means the land which is the sphere of sight and touch; the land where the goodness of God or its withdrawal concerns us more immediately. It is the land where not only you live, trying to serve God in your living, and receiving the goodness of God with a thankful and humble heart, but where the wicked live in rebellion against God; where sin, and its family of falsehoods, murders, cruelties, extortions, and oppressions live and thrive; where the purpose of God is working itself out through this complexity of factors known as life, slowly seeking an adjustment and a triumphant result out of the clashing of human wills, the conflict of selfish interests, the struggle between ignorance and knowledge, and between good and evil. It is this problem which troubles us. A good man is not usually disturbed about God’s goodness beyond this world. He takes it for granted, indeed, that there every cloud will be dispelled and every hard question settled. It is God’s goodness in the land of the living which sometimes puzzles him. The land of the living meant to the Psalmist, as we see by reading the rest of this Psalm, hosts that encamped against him; enemies and foes that pressed on to eat up his flesh; the being forsaken by his nearest of kin, and at the mercy of false witnesses and of such as breathe out cruelty. In such a land as this, if a man attempts to live by sight only, he will inevitably be discouraged and beaten. Life is a problem which sense cannot resolve. On its face it seems constantly to contradict the goodness of God. The goodness of God in the land of the living is the hard question which has persisted in coming to the surface from the time that men began to think about God. And yet the fact of such goodness visible in the world and in human life is assumed by the Psalmist. He has faith in it. He believed to see it in the land of the living. Just in this steady hold lies the secret of escape from faintness and despair; just in this believing to see where we cannot see. Faith hears a voice of love through the thunder. To faith the word which sounds “disaster” means “goodness.” V.
The land of the living. Alas! what a land of the living is this, in which there are more dead than living, where the earth is fuller of graves than houses; where life lies trembling under the hand of death; and where death hath power to tyrannize over life! No, my soul, there only is the land of the living where there are none but the living; where life is not passive, nor death active; where life sits crowned, and where death is swallowed up in victory. R. Baker.—There is living grace for the living day? A living Saviour, and a living, quickening Spirit, to meet the living soul? A living Providence, “full of eyes before and behind,” to watch working and growing souls? A living love of God filling all the world like the light of the longest summer day? Trust to the living things, above all to the living Lord, for because He lives you shall live also. Raleigh.
14. In view of the truth that the goodness of God is an immutable, eternal, universal fact in this land of the living with all its confusion and contradiction, only one counsel is possible; and that the Psalmist gives us along with a promise: “Wait on the Lord! Be brave! He shall strengthen thine heart.” To wait on the Lord is to serve Him. In all the confusion and sorrow we are to be constant to duty. We are called to serve God under all circumstances whatsoever. We are to trust Him to adjust the circumstances to the service. Do you hold it as a mark of God’s goodness that He calls and permits you to serve Him? Then believe that the service is good all through. You are serving God, and God will take care that service shall be a good and a wholesome thing, both in itself and in its fruits, whether it be service in the dark or in the light, in calm or in storm. V.
Take courage. True courage in its finer elements includes strength of heart; strength to endure, as well as attack; to pursue and achieve, as well as to attempt; to sacrifice self altogether, if need be, on behalf of any controlling conviction. A thorough consent of judgment, conscience, imagination, affection, all vitalized and active; with a certain invincible firmness of will, as the effect of such a consent—this is implied in a really abounding and masterful courage. It is not impatient. It is not imperious. It is not the creature of fractious and vehement will-power in man. It is never allied with a passionate selfishness. It is associated with great convictions; has its roots in profound moral experiences; is nourished by thoughts of God and the hereafter. It is as sensitive and gentle in spirit as it is persistent and highly resolved. It forms the base of sympathies, generosities, rather than of defiance. Such courage as this is everywhere at home.
and is naturally master of all situations. And wherever it is shown it has in it something of the morally superlative. Men recognize a force which emergencies cannot startle, nor catastrophes overbear; which possesses immeasurable calmness and strength; with which no intellectual faculties or acquired accomplishments can be compared, but from which all such take a value and splendor not their own. R. S. S.