Psalms 129

Subsection 4. (Psalms 129:1-8; Psalms 130:1-8; Psalms 131:1-3.)The lessons of experience. The fourth subsection drops apparently below this; only, in fact, to secure a deeper blessing. We go back once more from the summer days which the last series pictured. to learn from sorrow and adversity the lessons of those various changes by which men learn the fear of God (Psalms 55:19). And for this self must be known; pride humbled, the world seen in divine light, and the soul weaned from all that makes it up. That is what is found in the present series. Psalms 129:1-8 first shows us the overruling hand of God in sorrow and evil. Then the hundred and thirtieth shows us sin discovered, and its remedy by one that cries out of the depths; then the hundred and thirty-first gives the moral result in a weaned soul.

Psalms 129:1-8

An over-ruling Hand. A song of the ascents. The first psalm here carries us behind the outward disorder of things, to show us God accomplishing His will through all. He may be acting with the enemies of His people, but He is not Himself an enemy. Israel may look back through the time of her long afflictions, and see how men have inflicted these on her; yet they have never really prevailed. They have not done what they intended; and they have done what they never intended. They have been as plowers plowing on the back, -painful and humiliating work enough; but it means none the less sowing and harvest; and the plow is set aside even before this. He who uses it for good, sets it aside too, to have the good. So the psalmist prophesies and prays for the destruction of the wicked at the hands of the righteous God. He sees their cords cut asunder, and prays that they may be turned back in shame who hate Zion; and hate thus the purposes of grace with which it is identified. As grass upon the house-tops, withering be fore men think enough of it to pluck it up; which never has a handful for the mower, nor a bosomful for the binder, -so let them be under the ban of God apart from Jehovah’s blessing. So indeed must the evil, as evil, find its doom from God.