Psalms 95

1. O COME, let us sing unto the LORD : Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation. 2 Let us come before his presence with thanks-giving, Let us make a joyful noise unto him with psalms. 3 For the LORD is a great God, And a great King above all gods. 4 In his hand are the deep places of the earth ; The heights of the mountains are his also. 5 The sea is his, and he made it ; And his hands formed the dry land. 6 O come, let us worship and bow down ; Let us kneel before the LORD our Maker : 7 For he is our God,

And we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. To-day, Oh that ye would hear his voice !

8. Harden not your heart, as at Meribah, As in the day of Massah in the wilderness : 9 When your fathers tempted me, Proved me, and saw my work. 10 Forty years long was I grieved with that generation, And said, It is a people that do err in their heart, And they have not known my ways : 11 Wherefore I sware in my wrath, That they should not enter into my rest.

THIS Psalm is one of a series intended for the temple worship. Both the joyfulness of its opening verses and its general character, in which it resembles the eighty-first Psalm, would render it suitable for some of the great national feasts. As to the date of its composition nothing certain can be said. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in making a quotation from the Psalm, uses the expression “in David,” but this is evidently only equivalent to saying “in the Psalms.” In the Hebrew it has no inscription. P.

We may think of this Psalm, as we sing it in our daily worship, as prophetic of a better worship still, even of the perpetual adoration of that heavenly city, wherein the apostle saw no temple, “for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.” Housman.

It consists of two very distinct parts : The first is an invitation to a joyful public acknowledgment of God’s mercies (vs. 1-7). The second (beginning with the last member of v. 7 to the end) is a warning to the people against the unbelief and disobedience through which their fathers had perished in the wilderness. P.

1. Come, let us sing unto Jehovah, let us shout unto the rock of our salvation. The first verb properly means go, but is constantly used like come in other languages, as a formula of invitation, in summoning others to participate in some act of the speaker. The two verbs in this verse are those commonly applied to the vocal expression of joy and triumph. The rock of our salvation, the strong ground of our confidence, the basis upon which our hope of safety rests. A.

2. Go to meet. Such is the proper and strict rendering of the word. “Come before” does not sufficiently express the forwardness, the ready alacrity, which are really denoted by the verb. P.

3-7. The adorableness of God is based upon a threefold fact : He is exalted above all gods as King, above all things as Creator, above His people as Shepherd and Leader. D.—He is called King of kings, and Lord of lords, having none above Him : “A great King above all gods ;” needing no license from any when to act, nor direction how to act, nor assistance in His action. He owes not any of those to any person ; He was not ordered by any other to create, and therefore receives not orders from any other to rule over what He hath created. He received not His power and wisdom from another, and therefore is not subject to any for the rule of His government. He only made His own subjects, and from Himself hath the sole authority ; His own will was the cause of their being, and His own will is the director of their actions. He is not determined by His creatures in any of His motions, but determines the creatures in all. His actions are not regulated by any law without Him, but by a law within Him, the law of His own nature. It is impossible He can have any rule without Himself, because there is nothing superior to Himself. Charnock.

This being a Gospel Psalm, it is the Lord Jesus whom we are here taught to praise; he is a great God; the Mighty God is one of His titles, and God over all, blessed forevermore. As Mediator He is a great King above all gods; by Him kings reign, and angels, principalities, and powers are subject to Him; by Him, as the Eternal Word, all things were made, and it was fit He should be the Restorer and Reconciler of all, who was the Creator of all (Col. 1 : 16, 20). To Him all power is given both in heaven and in earth, and into His hand all things are delivered. H.

4. The untrodden heights of the mountains are all the Lord’s. These are His fastnesses and treasure-houses, where He stores the tempest and the rain; whence also He pours the icterrents and looses the avalanches. The granite peaks are His, and His the precipices and the beetling crags. Strength is the main thought which strikes the mind when gazing on those vast ramparts of cliff which front the raging sea, or peer into the azure sky, piercing the clouds, but it is to the devout mind the strength of God. S.

5. The Psalmist names the lowest known localities and the highest, to give definiteness to the conception that God holds all alike in His great hand. “The sea and the dry land,” another comprehensive grouping, to signify all there is of the earth’s surface. Honor ye the glorious Maker of all! C.

The sea is His. We thank God for the sea. Without it earth would be barrenness, and waste, and without inhabitants. Not an acre could be cultivated and not a creature live. This great wide sea holds large place, and is appointed to high functions in the physical and moral economy of our globe. It must temper our climate, refresh our soil, furnish a way for the going and coming of the nations, bear the traffic of the world, and bind the distant and dissevered tribes of man into a common brotherhood. It has a higher mission. Man is to be trained, disciplined, educated. He is here not simply to contend with elements and adverse conditions, and so become courageous and strong, but he is here to be made intelligent, virtuous, and happy. He is here to see God and serve Him; and nowhere can he see God in such awful grandeur and sublimity as on the sea. No lessons of human weakness and dependence are so impressed upon men as by the ocean. This liquid wonder, with its wide acres of barrenness, on which no cities can be built, no roadways projected, no foot of traveller pass, with a volume of water outweighing the solid land of our globe, laid away in depths still unfathomed, with light and life penetrating to its profoundest deep, its liquid tombs, its unseen storehouse, in which the spoils of the ages are gathered, abides in all generations one of the grandest revelations of the Creator’s handiwork and a perpetual symbol of the Infinite. Beadle.

6,7. Most of the Psalms are direct addresses to God. The rest of them are devout meditations upon the Divine Word, and the blessedness of those who receive it into their hearts, or varied expressions of spiritual life arising from the most intimate and inspiring relations with God, and suitable to the sanctuary. The central and ruling idea of the whole is worship in its most comprehensive sense, and is here embodied in a single impressive sentence. De Witt.

6. O come. Again the invitation to lowliest adoration and worship, called forth afresh by the remembrance of God’s revelation to and covenant with Israel. Our Maker, and (v. 7) our God, thus asserting the personal covenant relationship of God to His people; and here, as so often elsewhere, God’s majesty as seen in creation is linked with His love as seen in redemption. P.

Let us worship. Worship comes of reverence, the most august and profound of man’s capacities, because it reaches instantly from his humblest self-distrust to the loftiest sufficiency, laying the trembling arm of his infirmity on the Almighty throne. Without worship manhood is dwarfed, for it ignores the only supreme intelligence, the only irresistible power, the only infinite love, the Highest, the Greatest, the Best One; and he who ought to open out on every side of him, by every breathing pore of his constitution, and every thirsty passion of his immortality, toward the boundless realm that encompasses, invites, and waits to transfigure him, shrinks self-limited. F. D. H.

Worship should be the homage of the soul; its true seat, therefore, is the inner sanctuary of the spirit; and, whatever the place or the mode of worship, the act itself should correspond with the essence of God, who is Spirit. Our Lord said literally, God is Spirit; not simply a Spirit, but Spirit itself. This infinite Spirit is the Father of our spirits; and, with the love of a Father for every one of His children alike, He desires from every one the same simple, affectionate, grateful devotion. The truest worship is the communion of our spirits with God. J. P. T.—Spiritual worship is enlightened; it is the result of knowledge; it perceives and rejoices in its object; it takes hold of a promise, or fixes on a precept; it must be the result of faith, for faith sees the great Invisible; it must be the kindling of the Holy Spirit. Lessey.—There is no worship where there is no joy. For worship is something more than either the fear of God or the love of Him. It is delight in Him. F. W. Faber.

6. Bow down.** Adoration is the expression by an outward, but much more by an inward, act of man’s sincere conviction that his first duty to Almighty God is submission; and thus it is distinct from many other acts of the soul which are sometimes apt to be mistaken for it. Thanksgiving, praise, and prayer for blessings, all three differ from adoration in this, that in each of them the soul is less prostrate, more able to bear the thought of self, than in pure and simple adoration. Pure adoration has no heart for self; it lies silent at the foot of the throne, conscious only of two things—the insignificance of self, the greatness of God. H. P. L.

All passions earnestly desire to be freely exercised, especially our holy affections of love, joy, and admiration of Almighty God. In expressing such affections, we naturally desire communion with many. Methinks when we are singing the praises of God in great assemblies with joyful and fervent spirits, I have the liveliest foretaste of heaven upon earth, and could almost wish that our voices were loud enough to reach through all the world, and to heaven itself. Nothing comforts me more in my greatest sufferings, nor seems more fit for me, while I wait for death, than singing Psalms of praise to God; nor is there any exercise in which I had rather end my life. Should I not, then, willingly go to the heavenly choir, where God is praised with perfect love, and joy, and harmony? Had I more of a praising frame of soul, I should long more for that life of praise. I never find myself more willing to be there than when I most joyfully speak or sing the praises of God. Baxter.

We do not only need to worship, we need to perform public and congregational worship. It is of the very nature of all spiritual profits and pleasures that the more and the more widely they are shared, the more they multiply. We need each other in the worship of God. For one thing, we need all community of worship can do for us to keep our religion, which is our life, from the blight of individualism. Our religion is not only and entirely a private matter between each of us and his God. There are priceless results of religion and of worship that we cannot get by ourselves, and our fellow-men cannot get without us. Cable.

7. The Gospel Church is His flock, Christ is the great and good Shepherd of it; we, as Christians, are led by His hand into the green pastures, by Him we are protected and well provided for, to His honor and service we are entirely devoted as a peculiar people, and therefore to Him must be glory in the churches (whether it be in the world or no) throughout all ages (Eph. 3 : 21).

7-II. The latter part of this Psalm, which begins in the middle of a verse, is an exhortation to those that sing Gospel Psalms to live Gospel lives and to hear the voice of God’s Word; otherwise, how can they expect that He should hear the voice of their prayers and praises? H.

7. To-day if ye will hear His voice.** Here is the same solemn strain of warning and expostulation breaking in upon the very joy and gladness of the temple worship, as we have already observed in chap. 81 : 6. Psalms like these seem to have had a double purpose. They were not only designed to be the expression of public devotion, the utterance of a nation’s supplications and thanksgivings, but they were intended also to teach, to warn, to exhort. Hence, too, the prophetic character which marks them. The Psalmist, like every true preacher, comes as an ambassador from above, speaking not his own words, but the words which God has given him, the words which God Himself has uttered. The warning here rests, as in chaps. 78 and 81, on the example of their fathers in the desert.

To-day, the present moment, as critical and decisive, the day of grace which may be lost. P.—Often as they were faithless, the “to-day” sounded ever anew; for the gifts and calling of God are “without repentance.” Tholuck.

This Psalm is twice quoted in the Epistle to the Hebrews, as a warning to the Jewish Christians at Jerusalem, in the writer’s day, that they should not falter in the faith, and despise God’s promises, as their forefathers had done in the wilderness, lest they should fail of entering into His rest; see Heb. 3 : 7, where v. 7 of this Psalm is introduced with the words, “As the Holy Ghost saith, To-day if ye will hear His voice,” and Heb. 4 : 7, it is said, “Again, He limiteth a certain day, saying in David, To-day.” Wordsworth.—“To-day,” in the hour of grace, in the day of mercy, we are tried as to whether we have an ear for the voice of our Creator. Nothing is said of to-morrow, “He limiteth a certain day,” He presses for immediate attention, for our own sakes He asks instantaneous obedience. The Holy Ghost saith, To-day! S.

O that ye would hear His voice! That ye would be so wise, and do so well for yourselves; like that, If thou hadst known (Luke 19 : 42); that is, O that thou hadst known! Christ’s voice must be heard to-day. While He is speaking to you see that you attend to Him, for this day of your opportunities will not last always; improve it, therefore, while it is called to-day. H.—There is no time yours but the present time, no day yours but the present day; therefore, do not please and feed yourselves with hopes of time to come: that you will repent, but not yet; and lay hold on mercy, but not yet. T. Brooks.—If we put off repentance another day, we have a day more to repent of, and a day less to repent in. W. Mason.—He that hath promised pardon on our repentance hath not promised to preserve our lives till we repent. Quarles.—You cannot repent too soon, because you do not know how soon it may be too late. T. Fuller.

8. God Himself is here abruptly introduced as speaking.** A.—Harden not your heart. The measure for the Divine estimate of man lies in the uprightness and purity of the attitude of the heart toward God. The Old Testament calls the highest degree of sin obduracy, or hardening of the heart. This is the condition in which a man, by continually cherishing sin, has [in a sense] lost the ability to withstand it; and it is added, that God can glorify Himself on such a one only by punishment. For it is God’s ordinance, that as the power to do good grows by its exercise, so also sin is punished by continued sinning. This hardening is both a Divine act and at the same time the sinner’s own act, so that the two expressions are interchangeable. Oehler.

No matter what fears and anxieties may alarm the soul; no matter what convictions of guilt may harass the conscience; no matter what service may be rendered by the feet, the hands, or the lips, if the heart continue shut to the holy influence of Divine realities, there is, there can be no obedience to a single Divine command. Whatever reason, then, there is in the commands of the living God, why they should now be obeyed, there is all that, why the sinner should no longer harden his heart. Whatever there is in the beaming glories of the Godhead, whatever there is in the claims of a creating God, of an all-providing God, of a redeeming God, whatever there is in the majesty and authority of a reigning God, why His voice should be heard and obeyed to-day, it all combines to enforce the exhortation, “To-day, harden not your hearts.” To harden the heart is death to every right feelfeeling, to every holy affection. So long as you harden your heart, you hear not the voice, you break every command of Him that speaketh from heaven. N. W. Taylor.

8,9. The special point of the exhortation is, Do not make your heart hard by resisting this kind and earnest appeal. God speaks in love; do not repel His kindness and deaden your own moral sensibilities to the ruin of your souls. The example of their fathers in the wilderness is brought before them to augment the force of this appeal. The Hebrew words suggest these historical allusions, and it were better that our English version should do the same, thus: “Harden not your heart as at Meribah, as in the day of Massah in the wilderness.” These names were significant, Meribah meaning strife; Massah, temptation, with reference to their trying and proving God as if to see how much abuse He would bear. C.—The aggravation of this sin was that they saw God’s work; they saw what He had done for them in bringing them out of Egypt; in the bread He rained from heaven for them, and the water out of the rock that followed them, than which they could not have more unquestionable evidences of God’s presence with them; with them even seeing was not believing, because they hardened their hearts, though they had seen what Pharaoh got by hardening his heart. H.

10, 11. “I said, a people wanderers in heart are they,” the words being an allusion to their wandering over the wilderness. That is, they are not only wanderers over barren hills and dreary wastes, but worse yet, wanderers in heart from truth and duty, from their greatest, best Friend, the God of their broken covenant. “They have not known My ways,” not that they have had no means of knowing, but that they had no heart to know. So far as “they knew God they glorified Him not as God,” and therefore became only the more lost to virtue and alien from God. Hence God swore in His wrath that that generation should never enter Canaan, their promised land of rest. C.

The curse was not causeless, and it did come. We have an account of its actual fulfilment (Num. 26 : 64, 65). The “rest” from which they were excluded was the land of Canaan. Their lives were spent in wandering. It is termed “God’s rest,” as there He was to finish His work of bringing Israel into the land promised to their fathers, and fix the symbol of His presence in the midst of them, dwelling in that land in which His people were to rest from their wanderings, and to dwell in safety under His protection. We are by no means warranted to conclude that all who died in the wilderness came short of everlasting happiness. The curse denounced on them went only to their exclusion from the earthly Canaan. John Brown.

11. They shall not; literally, “if they shall enter,” this elliptical form of the oath being equivalent to a strong negative. My rest, strictly “place of settlement,” as the abode of God, but used also of the land of promise (Deut. 12 : 9), as a place of rest after the wandering in the wilderness. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (4 : 6-9) argues, from the use of the word “to-day” in v. 7, that the language of the Psalm is applicable not merely to the times of the law, but also to the Gospel dispensation; and from the reference to God’s rest here, “in David” (i.e., in the Book of Psalms), that Canaan was not the true rest. Joshua, he says, did not bring the people into God’s rest, otherwise this warning would have no application. P.—The older generation died in the wilderness, and therefore through their disobedience forfeited the privilege of entering into God’s rest. If now, many centuries after Moses, Israel is invited in the Davidic Psalter, with the significant call, “To-day if ye will hear His voice!” and with a reference to the warning example of the fathers, to submissive adoration of Jehovah, it follows that, now as formerly, the obedience of faith has to expect the gracious reward of entering into God’s rest, a reward which the disobedient in those days forfeited, and that, consequently, the occupation of Canaan was not yet the final rest. This is the connection of the wider train of thought which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews develops from this passage in the Psalm. D.

Catching up this word rest—God’s rest—contained in the Divine utterance of judgment (as given by the Psalmist), the inspired writer goes on (Heb. 4 : 1) to discourse of the relation in which believers under the Gospel stand to it. He reminds them that they had succeeded to the heritage of promise given in former ages to God’s people concerning it; it had come down as an entail of blessing to them, and might now, precisely as of old, be either appropriated by faith or forfeited by unbelief. Not only does he thus connect believers under the Gospel with believers under the law in respect to the promised rest, but the promise itself he connects with the very commencement of the world’s history, with that rest of God which He is said to have taken, when He ceased from all His works which He created and made (Gen. 2 : 2). This was emphatically God’s rest, the only thing expressly characterized as such in the history of the Divine dispensations; and the apostle points to it as a noteworthy thing, that while the works from which God is thus said to have rested were finished at the creation of the world, the promise of the land of Canaan should somehow, thousands of years afterward, have been associated with it. Yet he does not (as is too commonly supposed) simply identify the two; while both he and the Psalmist speak of exclusion from Canaan as involving for ancient Israel exclusion from an interest in God’s rest, they both also conceive the possibility of having an inheritance in Canaan, and yet wanting a participation in the rest of God. On this account the Psalmist had plied his contemporaries when they were in Canaan with the admonition to beware, lest by provoking God they should still lose their interest in God’s rest. And now, again, the writer of this epistle, laying hold of the words of the Psalmist repeats the same warning, and calls upon Christians to take good heed, that by steadfastly adhering to the faith and obedience of the Gospel, they should secure their entrance into that rest of God which remains for them, as it has remained for God’s people in every age, the blessed result and consummation of a life of faith. P. F.

Rest, not annihilation, as now for many the Gospel of despair announces; not yet unceasing song and praise, as a childish imagination loves to conceive of heaven; but a condition, a region, a personal enjoyment of rest in the deepest and holless sense of the term. Sabbath rest, this is the signification of the original word, such as that which, according to the Divine record, God enjoyed when the work of creation was complete. Godlike Sabbath rest, that is undoubtedly and unspeakably blessed rest, from which the eye looks back with calm serenity upon the finished work. It is an unwearied, active rest, like that of the Father, who in His rest yet works, since heavenly joy without some occupation would cease to be heaven. It is, finally, a rest that cannot be disturbed, like that of God Himself, raised above all the trouble and turmoil of this vain world: “And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.” Thus, the longer we contemplate it, the clearer does heaven appear before our eyes as the land of perfect rest. And the rest remaineth. After all the inquietude and the short-lived rest of this life, it is as surely to be expected, as for the faithful Israelites something better was yet in store than the earthly Canaan into which Joshua had led them. Yea, verily, this remains, whatever else fades or removes from earth. Van O.—Perfect beings in a perfect world, rejoicing in their native element, having no weakness within, and no resisting force without, to check the outflow and expression of their loving natures; their activity, therefore, being easy, natural, and necessary, as light is to the sun, and fragrance to the flowers of spring, activity to them is rest. Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord, for they rest, not from their works, but only from their labors. It would be a labor for them not to work. To hush their music and to stop their action would be to them intolerable toil; they would be “weary with forbearing and could not stay.” So they “rest,” yet they rest not day nor night. Stanford.

The rest of a soul in God, though infinitely removed from the agitations of the world, and its conflicting and distressing reasonings, is, nevertheless, a state in which the thoughts are active; seeking after God, apprehending Him, appropriating and enjoying Him. The seraphs that adore and burn are intellectual creatures; and we conceive of the saints in heaven as knowing, learning, and putting forth those mental exertions which tend to the perpetual advancement and expansion of their powers. A heaven in which there is no intellectual activity would be no heaven for a rational creature; and it is a gross, though common abuse of the term rest, to apply it to a drowsy, listless, unimproving eternity; though heaven is a rest, it is neither a dream nor a sleep. J. W. A.—Rest is not inaction, but liberty; not idleness, but willing and joyous movement forward. Rest is the perfect harmony and fulness of all the energies and affections of the soul, acting together by Him who fills all with His peace. And here we have splendid outlines of what the Christian life hereafter will be. “This is life eternal;” life is action. Heaven will indeed be “rest,” but not the rest of doing nothing. It will be intense, ceaseless, glorious work for God, every faculty free, every energy in play, every condition harmonized and every breath thanksgiving. There shall be no night there, because there will be no need of any other repose or recovery or recreation than simply to live in a climate like that, a climate created by the face of the Lord, who is the Everlasting Light. Day and night “they serve Him.” Limitation, weariness, failure, suffering, sin are ended. The discords of our cross-purposing and jarring plans, with too much self-seeking in them, our jangling tempers and noisy passions, will be still. A few more of these twilights fading down the walls of the outer heavens that we see, and then the darkest and weakest mind among us will be able to comprehend what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height. F. D. H.

Material and Moral Uses of the Sea (v. 5).

The sea is as essential to the life of the world as the blood is to the life of the human body. Instead of being a waste and desert, it is the thing which keeps the earth itself from becoming a waste and desert. It is the world’s fountain of life and health and beauty; and if it were taken away, the grass would perish from the mountains, the forests would crumble on the hills, the harvests would become powder on the plains, and the solid globe itself, scarred and blasted on every side, would swing in the heavens as silent and dead as on the first morning of creation. If it were not for the sea, the entire belt of the tropics would be a desert of perpetual fire, and the entire polar regions would be a desert of perpetual frost. One third of the whole earth’s surface would be unendurable with heat, another with cold, and only the remaining third would be fit for human habitation; whereas now, under these tempering influences of the ocean, the whole width of the world, with few exceptions, is given to man for his dwelling; and wherever he goes he finds a thousand forms of vegetable and animal life, which the same genial influence has made to wait upon him and be subservient to him. The sea is a perpetual source of health to the world. Without it, there could be no drainage for the lands. The process of death and decay, which is continually going on in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, would soon make the whole surface of the earth one vast receptacle of corruption, whose stagnant mass would breed a pestilence, sweeping away all the life of a continent. The winds would not purify it; for, having no place to deposit the burden, it would only accumulate in their hands, and filling their breath with its poisonous effluvia, it would make them swift ministers of death, carrying the sword of destruction into every part of the world at once. The sea furnishes the great natural pathways of the world. Perhaps the first impression in looking upon the sea is that it is a great barrier between the nations; that it puts the continents much further asunder than they would otherwise be; and that thus it acts as an unsocalizing force, hindering the intercourse of the world. The truth lies in just the opposite direction. Instead of a barrier, the sea is a road across the barrier; instead of putting the ends of the earth farther apart, it brings them nearer together; instead of being an unsocializing and an alienating force between them, it is the surest means of their acquaintance, and the most effectual bond of their fellowship. It does, indeed, draw a decisive boundary around a nation, and keep its main population in on every side. But this is, in itself, a blessing. For boundaries are necessary to give individuality to nations, as they are to give individuality to men. There must be an outline to their personality; and the firmer that outline is drawn, the greater vigor of character and the deeper intensity of life they are likely to possess. The sea, therefore, first defines a nation to itself, fills it up with the influence and reaction of its own proper life; and then, when it has reached a certain height and fulness, opens the door and lets it forth to find the life of other nations, and feel the brotherhood of the world. Hence, other things being equal, the strongest nations in civilized history have always been the insular or peninsular ones, like England, Italy, and Greece, which, using the sea in the beginning as a separation from other lands, and making it a boundary, a barrier, and a defence, have by it been able so to compress and compact their own energies that they have, at last, become strong enough to burst the ocean barrier that surrounded them, and then to employ the sea itself as an arm of power to reach and subsidize the ends of the earth. Thus that which was at first a wall to bar all further progress, becomes a path of such breadth and permanence and ease of tread as could not have been constructed by all the art and all the strength of man. Hence the ocean has been the great educator of the world. It has furnished the prime stimulus of national energy, and has determined in the beginning and for all time the paths in which all great history must run.

Another office of the sea is to furnish an inexhaustible storehouse of power for the world. The two greatest available powers known to man are those of running water and steam; and both these come out of the sea. And as these two are the greatest, so they are the most enduring powers; they will last until the rains cease to fall from the clouds, until the forests are hewn from the mountains, and the treasures of coal are all dug from the depths of the earth. A further office of the sea is to be a vast storehouse of life. The sea has a whole world of life in itself. It spreads its table, first of all, for its own children, and these other gifts which it makes to the lands, royal and munificent as they are, are but the superfluities and remainders that are left from its table and wardrobe, after all its own inhabitants are housed and nourished, and clothed and fed. It is said that the life in the sea far exceeds all that exists out of it. There are more than twenty-five thousand distinct species of living beings that inhabit its waters. It is one of the noble uses of the sea that it furnishes the dwelling-place for such an inconceivable immensity of life. It is even more full of God’s goodness than it is of His power; for in every drop of inhabited sea water there is literally a whole continent of happy beings that draw their existence from God, wait upon Him for food, and receive their daily sustenance at His hand.

The last use of the sea may be called the geological one. It brings into sight the impressive element of time, and sends us back to that gigantic history of the past when the forces of the sea, which are now in comparatively feeble play, were set to their Titanic task, and wrought out those stupendous results which belong to the very framework of nature itself, and which will endure till the very substance of the globe is dissolved. God has appointed the sea to be the architect of the world. It has quarried the materials and brought them to their place, and then with its building tool and dressing hammer it has given them shape, and piled them, layer above layer, for the walls of the great house of life. There is the clearest evidence that every part of the known earth has been, successively and for unnumbered ages, under the dominion of the sea. When the cooling crust of the globe had become one unbroken sphere of granite rock, then the waters were let in upon it by Jehovah’s hand, to join, with fire and frost and moving ice, and all the forces of the volcano and the earthquake, in tearing asunder this quarry of the continents; disintegrating, grinding, pulverizing, and sifting, till the sands and limes and clays and various earths were separated from their rocky prison, assorted each after its kind, carried a thousand miles by mighty currents, spread out over the bottom of the deep, cemented firmly in their place by pressure, heat, and inward chemistry, piled story above story, till they were many thousands and many ten thousands of feet in thickness; and so the great house of the world being built and finished and furnished beneath the sea, with endless stores of all things needful—coal, and iron, and marble, and copper, and gold—it felt the uplifting hand of God, and rose into the sky, parting the ocean from pole to pole, a mighty continent, with mountain, and valley, and river, and plain, soon green and golden, from side to side, with grass and grain, and forest and flower; a house not made with hands, high as the heavens, deep as the centre, wide as the firmament, bright as the light; a glorious habitation, waiting for the footstep, the eye, and the voice of its great coming master—man.

“The sea is His,” says the Psalmist; and we may take the emphasis of that assertion as if it meant that in some sense He claimed exclusive possession of the sea; that He gave the land to man, but in a manner reserved the ocean as His own domain. And it is so. Man’s dominion is the solid land. There he rears his habitation, hews down the forests, upturns the hills, fills the valleys, spreads his waving harvests, lays his roads of stone and iron like net-work across a whole continent, plants cities that last for thousands of years. All that is within the compass of the land is given to his dominion, and he shall subdue its strength and appropriate its treasure, and scatter the refuse of it as the dust beneath his feet. But there man’s empire stops. God has given the land to man, but the sea He has reserved to Himself: “the sea is His, and He made it.” He has given man “no inheritance in it; no, not so much as to set his foot on.” If he enters its domain, he enters it as a pilgrim and a stranger. He may pass over it, but he can have no abiding place upon it. He cannot build his house, nor so much as pitch his tent within it. He cannot mark it with his lines, nor subdue it to his uses, nor rear his monuments upon it. Its vastness, loneliness, and the impossibility of its subjugation by man set it apart from the secular aspect that belongs to the rest of the world, and consecrate it as the peculiar possession and dwelling-place of the Most High. Like some vast builded temple, it perpetually speaks of Him and for Him. It bodies forth His immensity. It represents eternity. Girded round all the lands, as death is girded around all life, it seems to bring the unseen world to our vision, and to sound and shine with the glory and the awfulness of that state which is beyond the grave. Travelling out into its vastness, we seem to be moving beyond the boundaries of space and time. Sailing on, day after day, without any apparent progress, never reaching the horizon that is before, never leaving the horizon that is behind, it is as if we had lost all connection with the earth which we inhabit, and were voyaging upon the infinite expanse of the skies, travelling to some world that lies beyond the stars of heaven. We look at the stars by night, and they seem to be nearer to us, and to be gazing upon us with longing eyes, and with a more fixed and solemn earnestness.

We look at the track of the ship, and it is a wake of sparkling fires, as if our bark had left at length the seas of earth behind it, and were sailing over the ocean of the firmament. We have forgotten time; we are thinking of eternity. We have forgotten man; we are thinking of God. The bondage of the senses is dissolved, and the things that are beyond them come breaking into our being. We feel as if we saw the very fields of immensity and eternity, and held within our grasp the lines that bound us to another life. And it is this which gives the sea its mystery and might; that it is fraught with these Divine elements; that it is charged with these spiritual suggestions; that it is the symbol of eternity and infinity, and crowds upon us, with irresistible majesty, the vision of that life unseen, and those worlds unknown, for which our souls are made, and to which the feet of every one of us are swiftly and irreversibly travelling. There is a sea within us which responds to the sea without. Deep call-eth unto deep, and it is the answer and the yearning of these inward waves, in reply to that outward call, which makes our hearts to swell, our eyes to grow dim with tears, and our whole being to lift and vibrate with such strong emotion when we stand upon the shore and look out upon the deep, or sit in the stern of some noble ship and feel ourselves cradled on the pulsations of its mighty bosom. There is a life within us which calls to that sea without, a conscious destiny which only its magnitude and its motion can symbolize and utter.

And so, by its material uses and its spiritual voices, does the sea ever speak to us to tell us that its builder and maker is God. He hewed its channels in the deep, and drew its barriers upon the sand, and cast its belted waters around the world. He fitted it to the earth and the sky, and poised them skilfully the one against the other when He “measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance.” He gave the sea its wonderful laws, and armed it with its wonderful powers, and set it upon its wonderful work.

“O’er all its breadth His wisdom walks, On all its waves His goodness shines.”

Let us give thanks, therefore, for the sea. Let us remember Him that gave it such vast dominion, and made it to be not only the dwelling-place of His awful presence, but the beautiful garment of His love and the mighty instru-

ment of His goodness. Let it speak to us of His unfathomable fulness. Let it teach us that He has made nothing in vain. Let it remind us that the powers of destruction and death are under His control, and that behind the cloud of darkness and terror that often invests them, they are working out immeasurable results of blessing and life for the future time, for distant regions and for coming generations. Let it lead us to confide in Him who “ruleth the raging of the seas, who stilleth the noise of their waves and the tumult of the people;” who has all the

forces of the world at His control, and all the ages of time at His command; who knows how to build His kingdom beneath the sea of human opposition, as He built the continents beneath the ocean waters; who makes all the powers of dislocation and decay yield to that kingdom some element of strength or richness; and who, when the appointed hour shall come, will lift it irresistibly above the waves, and set its finished beauty beneath the heavens, with the spoils of all time gathered upon its walls, and the nations of the saved walking in its glory. Swain.