Psalms 22

Series 3. (Psalms 22:1-31; Psalms 23:1-6; Psalms 24:1-10.)Atonement and its Results. We have now come to the final series of these psalms, the Leviticus part, in which, as in that book, the heart of atonement is laid bare to us, which is indeed, though in so strange a manner, the heart of God Himself: God in His holiness; God in His wondrous love. In both respects the first psalm here declares Him; and the joy of this sounds out to the ends of the earth. In the second psalm, the present ministry of love is dwelt upon, the great Shepherd of the sheep, having been brought again from the dead through the blood of the everlasting covenant, those led of Him find overflowing blessing. In the third psalm, the end is reached: not heaven, for these psalms contemplate, as we know, the earthly people, but what is nearest it on earth, the entrance into Jehovah’s house, and standing in His holy place. With this the whole series of Messianic psalms here naturally closes.

Psalms 22:1-31

The concord of divine righteousness and grace through the work of a Unique Sufferer. To the chief musician, concerning the Hind of the Dawn; a psalm of David.
The twenty-second psalm is in some respects the most remarkable in the whole book of Psalms. The absorption of the psalmist into the person of Him whom he represents is so complete that from hence arise the difficulties of interpreters,with whom the mere human element has darkened all the glory of the divine. Let the meaning of the first six verses of the psalm be really grasped, there is but One to whom it can refer: David himself is as entirely out of the question as any other. If it be the essence of atonement that is here before us, is it David or any other, save the Christ of God who could make atonement for my sins? Here to look round for any partial anticipation or suggestive circumstances is entirely out of place: the fact here is unique in human history. If the psalm be David’s, David is lifted entirely off his feet here, is taken out of all his surroundings, by the power of that Spirit who, he tells us, spake by him, and whose word was on his tongue.

And this is an instructive warning, that the Spirit of God is not bound by the limits of the human instrument He is pleased to use. The New Testament applies the psalm thus in the most positive and exclusive way to the Lord Himself; and His adoption of the opening words, with the way in which these are connected in Scripture, and the connection of the psalm itself here with the surrounding psalms, all these unite to fix the interpretation in such a way as that none shall be able to take from it its rightful meaning, except as wresting it manifestly. It is a keystone in the divine foundation upon which the whole structure of truth is built; and God has taken care to have an immovable foundation. It shows us, as already said, the very essence of atonement, the concord of divine righteousness and grace in the work of the Cross,which it is the very glory of the gospel to proclaim, but which is the result of unique suffering. The foundation of peace is laid in the lowest depths of darkness, that it may support a structure reaching to heaven itself, and giving access to God in confidence and joy of faith. May we enter into all the fullness of what is here opened to us! The title of this psalm is noteworthy. Aijeleth Shahar, which our common version leaves untranslated, means the “hind of the dawn,” a very peculiar expression, of which, apart from its context here, one might well doubt the significance. It refers, however, as Delitzsch remarks, according to traditional definition to “the early light preceding the dawn of the morning; whose first rays are likened to the horns of a hind.” He adds that “there is a determination of the time to this effect, found both in the Jerusalem and in the Babylonian Talmud, ‘from the hind of the morning’s dawn till the east is lighted up.’” Nor is the application which is so simple to us as Christians, strange to Jewish exposition. As Delitzsch says again, “Even the synagogue, so far as it recognizes a suffering Messiah, hears Him speak here; and takes the ‘hind of the morning’ as a name of the Shechina (Israel’s glory-cloud), and as a symbol of the dawning redemption.” “And the Targum recalls the lamb of the morning sacrifice, which was offered as soon as the watchman on the pinnacle of the temple cried out, The first rays of the morning burst forth.’” Certain it is that this psalm points to the true meeting-place of the darkness and the dawn; and the added figure of the hind, while not directly speaking of sacrifice, suggests naturally the suffering of one chased by the hunters, the picture of meek innocence exposed to the fury of such persecutors as the psalm images by dogs and lions. And yet in a mystery which invites our reverent inquiry, that which is thus connected with the darkness, is no less identified with the uprise of the blessed day. How many tender and wonderful associations are there here for us! And to whom alone do they lead us as the subject of contemplation in this most precious scripture, indited by the Holy Ghost?

1. There are twenty-one verses in the first part of the psalm, which gives us the atoning work itself: a number surely significant, especially when we compare it with the thirty-six verses of the trespass-offering psalm, the sixty-ninth. The trespass-offering, as we have seen when looking at it, is the governmental offering, as the idea of restitution in it shows, and that according to a precise estimate of the injury made; and thirty-six -the number of the books of the Old Testament, or “law,” -gives us, as 3 x 12 (the divine and governmental numbers), “God in government.” The present psalm speaks of the sin-offering, in which the divine nature is in question, not the divine government; and 21 is naturally 3 x 7, the emphatic expression of a divine and perfect work. It does not follow from this, however, that the subdivision of these twenty-one verses will correspond with this; and, in fact, it does not. There is much else to be expressed, as we shall find; and the minor divisions here are five in number, the verses standing respectively to these as 3.5.3.7.3; the threes guiding us to the divine aspect of what is here, as we might suppose. Every feature is perfect, we may be sure. If we are not able to discern it, let us not charge God with what is due to our shortsightedness, and nothing else. This first division of the psalm is best characterized by one word which at the same time reveals the depth into which the Lord has descended for us, and along with this His glory who could descend there, charged with the fulfillment of all the divine counsels, with the revelation in that utter darkness of all the glory of God; standing where no foot but His could stand, and laying there the foundations of new creation, never to be disturbed; giving the creature steadfast happiness and God His rest. “Alone” He did this: in human weakness, yet in divine strength, “alone” in a place where no foot had trodden before, which none will tread again. To Him only could there be such desolation; the very height of His essential majesty made but part of the infinite horror, which no soul beside could have room for but His own. Let us bow our heads -let us challenge the deepest reverence of our hearts -while we gaze but at the outside of that into which we can never enter, even within but its outer margin; which it is the glory of His work to have made it impossible for us ever to enter. (a) In the first three verses the meaning of what follows is declared to us: the nature of the suffering as distinguishing it from all other; the cause of it. The Sufferer Himself puts and answers the question, Why is this? And it is strange, indeed, how little has been understood of what is so clearly put before us. Yet not to understand it is to miss the full meaning of atonement itself. The cry here the Lord made His own, as all know, in the hour of His agony upon the Cross, a time exceptional wholly in its character, and not to be confounded with any other in His earthly history. Nowhere else was He the sin-bearer.

Not thus in that blessed life of His, which such a shadow would have changed how sorrowfully for us, did He stand in our place, our Substitute, but “bare our sins in His own body on the tree.” (1 Peter 2:14.) Surely, one would imagine, this for Christians scarcely could need statement, much less emphasis; and yet it does need. For what does it mean or imply, this bearing of sin? Joy, peace, communion, the light of God’s countenance? Or darkness, agony, the awful horror of being “made a curse”? Could these things go on together? Or are they so near akin that one could be confounded with the other? Here, then, from lips that could not possibly mistake, and in the hour of His greatest need, when rejected, scorned, abused, crucified by man, He needed all the enjoyment of that favor of God, in the sense of which He had walked continually; -here, in the presence of those who in the malice of their hearts were saying, “There is no salvation for Him with God”: here, beyond their uttermost thoughts, as if to justify all that they had done against Him, is His own testimony that God had forsaken Him! Yet He had said beforetime to His enemies, And He that sent Me is with Me; the Father hath not left Me alone: for I do always the things that please Him." (John 8:29.) Now was the time which He had seemed to have before Him then: they had with bold and insulting hands “lifted up the Son of Man” (ver. 28); they had, as it were, with their judgment pronounced upon Him, offered Him up to God for His ratification of their deed. “Let Him deliver Him,” they said, “if He will have Him”: and the heavens had darkened, not (as, after all, they had dreaded) in anger against them, but, as His own voice now interpreted it for them, in sign that God had forsaken Him! Yet the voice asked, “Why?” Did He expect, then, some answer from that God who had forsaken Him? But answer had not come: they at least heard none. Still the awful burden hung upon the tree. He had saved others: yes, they knew that! Nevertheless now the hands hung powerless. He could not save Himself. Yet why could not He who had saved others save Himself? Had they not some interest in that unanswered question of His? They might have turned back to this twenty-second psalm, and found the answer: He had left the key in the lock, where they (and we) might find it. But it is true that God had forsaken Him: the Mighty One; His Mighty One; and power there was not on His side. Plenty of power against Him, and the battle was not to be gained by might at all. Yet it was the crisis of the conflict which had been going on incessantly, ever since man fell away from God. Here was the battle of battles, the sum of all battles, -the strife between good and evil in its fiercest. And here, too, was once more the good apparently prostrate, defeated, heaven uttering no sound, blood flowing again like Abel’s (if so much better than Abel’s), which had cried so long unavenged. But here triumph is defeat: the rule of the battle, “they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” Goodness is to conquer by submission and without encouragement; -conquer, not with extraneous aid, but by itself as goodness simply; trusting in a God who gives no sign. Power can do nothing here for another reason, and a deeper one. Power can create a world or a universe; it cannot cancel sin, cannot act as if God were indifferent to sin, cannot take up the sinner and justify him, or bless him while unjustified. Power in God cannot act, nor love act, as if these were His sole attributes, or could act alone. If God act, He must act with all that He is; nay, if He justify, here it is for righteousness to pronounce: it is its place to do so; questions of righteousness can only be settled by righteousness, and it is written, “He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to Jehovah.” (Proverbs 17:15.) But thus the cry goes up, even from the lips of a Job, -a wail which has no answer: “How shall man be just with God?” (Job 9:2) Here One, standing in the place of men, cries with like result. In this awful place heaven is sealed to Him: there is no answer, nor escape from the full exaction of penalty. This is in effect Job’s question, though taken up by Another, who, if there be escape, will surely find it. The conflict is real; the agony is intense: to find no way but that the cup must be drunk forces from Him the sweat as it were of great drops of blood, and an angel has to come from heaven to strengthen Him. But to strengthen Him for what? Only to go forward from the “day” in which still He could cry “Abba, Father!” into the awful “night” beyond.

Even in the garden already, as to the drinking of the cup, He cried and was not heard; and the cross also, as we know, had its “daytime” as well as its “night,” when the darkness fell upon it. And there no angel comes! No habitant of heaven comes into the “void” of that “raging deep,” where out of darkness light is to be made to shine, but as yet is no ray of it. There is no answer from God: who else, then, can give it? Listen! It is His own voice amid the still unrelieved darkness, -His voice giving answer to Himself, and proclaiming God in that desolation where He is not, and justifying Him in that awful abandonment which is the supreme agony of His soul. “But Thou art holy!” This, then, is the answer “why”: it is not something apart from this; it is not what remains true, spite of there being none. It is the answer itself; the solution of the mystery; that which gives intelligence as to what is here, and alone gives any proper intelligence. It is because of the holiness of God that Christ is in that darkness of which the “darkness over all the land” is but the external sign. It is because “He is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look at iniquity” (Habakkuk 1:13); and because upon Him who is here the true Sin-offering has been laid the iniquity of us all. Thus, and thus alone, it is that He “dwelleth amid the praises of Israel”: these two things together more clearly reveal the deeper reality here than the blood on the mercy-seat on the day of atonement did for Israel bow the tent of meeting could remain among them in the midst of their uncleanness (Leviticus 16:16). Yet here is what corresponds, as is plain, with this. How blessed to think of this lone Sufferer in the outside place contemplating the worship of glowing hearts with which God should encircle Himself forever! Here was Job’s question answered for faith forever: man blessed, God glorified for evermore. How plain that only One could fulfill the meaning of this psalm; as only One could stand in the place which is indicated by it. (b) But the nature of this place is further to be made plain, and put in contrast with any other, that any; of even the comparatively righteous among men, had ever occupied. “Our fathers trusted in Thee,” the Voice goes on: “they trusted, and Thou didst deliver them.” There was no similarity in this forsaking of God to the experience of any in times before this. “They cried unto Thee and were delivered; they trusted in Thee, and were not confounded.” Yet it had been no strange thing for faith to have its martyrs. If being forsaken of God simply meant the being given up to death at the will of their enemies, there was an abundant record of such martyrs, those “of whom the world was not worthy.” To reduce the cross of Christ to this is simply to take out of it that which constitutes true atonement. If this were being made sin," then not a martyr that ever died but was made sin -or a sin-offering -also. For it is not here a question of the dignity of the Sufferer, but of the place in which He suffered, and this the psalm itself affirms to be perfectly and utterly exceptional. Just this being forsaken of God was for Him the unspeakable difference. Exceptional it was not for man to suffer and die. Every form of death that one can imagine, perhaps, man has undergone. “But I,” says this unique Sufferer, “am a worm, and not a man”: gone down to a depth far below that of any man whatever. The word (tolaath) applies especially to the coccus from which the scarlet dye of the tabernacle was obtained, of course by its death: in that way, how significant of the One before us! But only as suffering under the judgment of sin could this be true of Him: indeed the word is used (Isaiah 1:18) for the color of sin, and that of a heinous kind; and thus the application is still clearer: “He was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21.) No act of man could make Him sin for man, -no suffering from men could make atonement with God: that was what was wrought by what passed between. God and His burdened soul within that curtained chamber, never to be penetrated by any foot but His, and from which no cry emerges but that one pregnant one, the meaning of which is here revealed as far as may be for the satisfaction of our conscience and the adoring worship of our hearts. What man wrought could only naturally bring judgment upon man. What He wrought with God, and God through Him, brings out from the smitten Rock the river of divine, omnipotent grace. The “reproach of men” pursued Him into this place which He had taken for men, “despised” even “of the people” (Israel) to whom specially He had been sent. Yea, He was the common mockery of all who saw Him. The gospels distinctly note this wagging of the head on the part of those passing by, and the very words of the psalm used by the chief priests with the scribes and elders in their derision of Him. Outwardly it would seem as if it were the government of God that furnished them with this reproach: in fact it was their hardness and unconsciousness of their own desert, as well as of the holiness and mercy of God, which blinded them to the meaning of the scriptures they were so manifestly fulfilling. (c) Three verses now show us the inmost heart of the Sufferer, and bring us back to the anguish above all others that He is experiencing. From His birth as Man, God has been His sufficiency and strength. Continuously He has been dependent upon Him. Now in the time of His sore distress, it is for Him that His soul craves. Perfect dependence upon the All-sufficient God: this is the perfection of manhood, and the absolute guarantee of an unstained and spotless life. What leads astray but our own wisdom?

What is sin but the working of our own wills? If dependence upon Him were complete, for care, for guidance, for all good, what room would there be for evil or for error? Clearly it would be impossible. Faith, then, is the great work, of necessity; working by love which is implied in confidence such as this. And here was One in whom faith and love were in full possession everywhere, to whom God was all, and who, not having Him, had nothing. Yet in the hour of His distress He cried, and got no answer.
(d) We have now, in seven verses, the completeness of His suffering at the hands of man. As to it all, though we may go over it and give, as it were, the items, who can estimate the reality for Him who had not His like in capacity for sorrow, as for apprehension of all that can exist in the human heart? Yet this, after all, was not even part of the peculiar agony which really characterizes the psalm of atonement. Nothing here enters into the cry with which it begins: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” We are called first to realize the strength of the adversaries. They are bulls, with their horned front and reckless rush; strong beasts fed up on the fat pastures of Bashan, -men whom “fullness of bread” had filled with pride and insolence. That Caiaphas, the Sadducee, the unconscious prophet, inspired consciously only with the instinct of self-preservation, yet with eyes as dull to eternity as keen to present things, was a type of many more like this. How these would eye this Man of another sphere and another law, so unintelligible to such as they were! And if He were this to them, how terrible indeed would they be to Him, so fallen as they were and debased, that from being men they had become mere beasts of pasture! But the figure changes, and we have instead of the bull the lion. The bull will crush what is in its way or toss out of it; but the lion devours. It is the picture of strength, but along with this of ferocity and rapaciousness, -“like a lion tearing and roaring.” His enemies pursue him with a wrath that will be satisfied with nothing less than His destruction. There is a specific hatred toward Him, the opposition of those, not blind, but who “have both seen and hated both Himself and His Father.” And He who meets all this, in what condition is He to endure it? He is come from the agony of the garden; He is facing the worse agony of the Cross. Their “hour” is that of the “power of darkness,” and of the forsaking of God. What strength can there be to oppose, when the Father’s hand itself is giving Him the cup? His “heart is melted like wax” in the sacrificial fire of wrath against sin. Thus His strength fails, His tongue cleaves to His jaws: He is as one already in the dust of death, but in fact alive to realize it, and that it is the hand of God. God, and not man, has placed Him where He is. Then there is the exercise resulting from the floods of iniquity permitted to assail Him. How perfectly man was revealed in the presence of the Cross! “dogs,” heartless, shameless, unclean and offal-feeding, hunting in packs like “the assembly of evil-doers” here: gathered by the spectacle of distress unequaled, for which they had no pity, and from which there was no escape: hands and feet pierced, nailed with insufferable agony to the tree of shame!
Exposed -every bone to be counted -to such eyes as these, that gaze and stare and blench not: not ashamed in the presence of their Judge and Maker. Parting among them the garments they have stripped from Him, and casting the lot -in Israel sacred to Jehovah (Proverbs 16:33) -to decide the ownership of that seamless priestly robe which marks Him as what He is, “the Mediator between God and men,” upon whom all the blessing of man depends. But this is, of course, to make the Gospels interpret the psalm, or at least give fullness to the interpretation. Does it not, however, answer well to that final number which stands opposite the verse, -this complete stripping of Christ, in the very insanity of passion and unbelief, of all that shows Him to be and to be qualified to be -man’s tender and compassionate Saviour? The meaning of the priestly robes has been elsewhere looked at. (Exodus 28:1-43 notes.) But on the day of atonement it was not in the garments of glory and beauty, but in the simple white linen robe of unstained purity, that the high-priest entered the holiest of all. So Christ, in the power of His own perfection, (tested and brought out in the awful place to which He stooped for man) entered the heavens, never to be closed henceforth for us. Was it not, in fact, then, a sign of the most solemn character, men divesting Christ of His raiment, holding Him up thus stripped to the scorn of men? And what more suited to the deed than as it were taking the lot which belonged to God -the sign of His sovereignty even in what man calls “accident” -to dishonor and degrade with it Him for whom God had decreed the highest honor? Thus the story of the human side of the Cross ends. Man has told himself fully out in it. What more, alas, could be said of him? (e) Thus all has been gone through before God, and it is seen, indeed, how the high-priest enters the holiest in the white seamless robe of perfect righteousness. The time is come for hearing that hitherto unheard prayer; and He is “heard,” as it is expressed in the epistle to the Hebrews, “for His piety.” (Hebrews 5:7.) He has gone into the place of utmost probation under the burden and penalty of sin not his own, resigning Himself into the hands of God to suffer according to His will what none beside Himself could suffer. We are permitted to hear now His final appeal to God, and to rejoice in His announcement of the answer, which was made upon the Cross and recorded for us in the gospel of John, where (as in Matthew and Mark the cry of abandonment shows the Lord’s entrance into the darkness), the words “It is finished” show His emergence from it. Righteousness now claims His deliverance from the place, where God has been glorified by unfailing obedience on the part of Him who went into it for others, and for the glory of God Himself. “God has been glorified in Him; and if God be glorified in Him, God will also glorify Him in Himself, and will straightway glorify Him.” (John 13:32.) After the words that speak of the exhaustion of the special “cup,” He has indeed to die: for death is part of that which is upon man, which it is given Him by submission to it to lift off. This also is necessary, therefore, for atonement to be complete. But, for His soul, what is death, when He can once more cry, “Father,” and commit His spirit in peace to Him? -when He can Himself now take power into His hands again, even in dismissing it?*
Once more, then, in this psalm, the appeal is made: “But Thou, Jehovah, be not far from Me!” After all that man has done or can do, and without making light of this, (though it be for man himself that this is so unutterably grave), still Where is God? is the question of questions. To this, therefore, He returns, pleading that God, His strength shall appear in His behalf Power He refused for Himself to save Him from this place; “by might can none prevail” when in it. But the victory reached, power at last comes to be necessarily and fully on the Victor’s side. “Rescue my soul from the sword; my only one from the power of the dog.” This is the deliverance in full, for it involves all else, though it be the outward enemies that are contemplated. “My soul,” as we see by its use elsewhere (Numbers 23:10), is the equivalent in Hebrew of “myself,” and “my only one” answers to it in the parallel, though some would give it as “my solitary one,” and see in it another reference to what is indeed the controlling thought in all this first part of the psalm. Outcast, however is the Speaker to be no longer: He has been tried to the utmost; He has committed Himself and all that with which He is identified into the hands of God; the decision is to be from Him; all power is with Him: now from the very horns of the aurochs He is answered. 2. The first part of the psalm is ended: the work is completed, and accepted by God as complete. Blessed be God, He who was alone in the sorrow is not alone in the joy that springs from it: He will never be alone again. The corn of wheat for this has fallen into the ground and died. We are now to see the fruit of it: God’s grace is to flow out in widening circles, and the knowledge of the Lord to cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. In what follows there seem to be three parts: in the first, the Lord is in the midst of the congregation,which at first that of a remnant, widens into the nation of Israel, revived and converted to God; in the second, the “great congregation” gathers in from the whole world.

In both there utters itself the voice that cried once in forsaken sorrow and was not heard; while the joy that fills all hearts, and the praise that goes up to God on every side spring out of the blessed fact that at last He was heard. The work of the Spirit to maintain the truth, and a generation for the Lord as the fruit of it, is given in the third part. (a) In the time of His bitterest distress we have learned how the Lord’s heart still could turn to the thought of Jehovah dwelling amid the praises of His people, and we remember that the day of atonement, which is so linked with this precious psalm, emphasizes the same thing. It is no wonder, therefore, that now, immediately His prayer is heard, He is found declaring Jehovah’s Name among His brethren, and praising in the midst of the congregation. The apostle John it is who gives us the beginning of this in the message entrusted to Mary Magdalene and His after appearance among the gathered disciples. Suited it is that a woman should be the first to have made to her the glorious announcement of His resurrection and its results: “Go and tell my brethren that I ascend unto my Father and unto your Father, and to my God and your God.” Here is relationship established and the Divine Name declared; declared in relationship, the name of Father, with just that necessary distinction preserved between Himself and His people, -“my Father and your Father,” not “our Father,” which reminds us of His infinite glory who has been pleased to take us into such kinship with Himself, while it intimates also that it is through Him that this place is given to us. Here is the value of His work told out, and in terms which embrace all the people of God, although saints of the present period are the “first-born ones” (Hebrews 12:23) in this relationship. Blessed it is to know that the greatest blessings are also the widest: just like fresh air and sunlight which, from God’s side at least, are free to all. And so the apostle argues that “both He that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one, for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren.” (Hebrews 2:11.) How sweet and wonderful to be of the number of those of whom, because of their origin, He is “not ashamed”! The “assembly” here, as being an assembly of this character, has had no fulfillment, except in Christian times. In Judaism there was no gathering of such a nature: the children of God were scattered abroad by the necessity of a legal system which could give no nearness to God in that it could purge no conscience, give no abiding-place to the worshiper before God. Under the new covenant, however, Israel will be an assembly of this character, an assembly of righteous ones in which the ungodly shall no more stand; and to Israel now the psalm goes on. Those who have but “feared” Jehovah hitherto are now to praise Him, all Jacob’s seed to glorify Him, all Israel’s seed to reverence Him. For the way of the Lord is being prepared after Isaiah’s manner, -the mountains leveled, the valleys filled. The lowly are to find wondrous exaltation; and the very grace of God is to make Him feared.

Blessed, indeed, is the self-abasement produced by the knowledge of the marvelous salvation of the Cross. And so it must be: he who treats this grace lightly can but lightly know it. For this is, indeed, the subject-matter of this song of praise. It is the song of those who have learned the mystery of this strangely afflicted One, and have found in His afflictions the judgment of sin before a holy God; yet have found, too, in the answer of God to Him the way discovered by which the righteousness of God is declared, and His love at the same time made known. Christ risen was, in fact, this answer; and the gospel now to go forth to the ends of the earth. Christ risen and exalted is now the Revealer of God in His full glory, -all the “glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” (b) Israel brought thus to God, her fruit has the seed in itself for the nations of the earth. The grace shown to her is “life from the dead” to these. Thus the glorious Voice is heard in a wider sphere. The “great congregation” of millennial nations becomes the sphere in which Christ fulfills His “vows” of glorifying Jehovah. Yet we cannot but notice that there are lacking apparently the fullness and intimacy of that first declaration of Jehovah’s Name which takes place within the smaller circle. Nor is it difficult to account for this.

Israel will be entirely a congregation of the righteous, as we have so often been assured; but we have been equally assured that such will not be the condition of the nations beyond. With many here there will be still but a forced semblance of worship, -obedience rendered because it dare not be withheld; sin will be restrained, and yet not banished; and the final outbreak,when Satan is let loose, will be a terrible one. Hence not yet can there be an unchecked flow of blessing, such as eternity has in store for all the redeemed. And the words here seem to indicate a certain lack of response, as a whole, which acts necessarily as a restraint upon the communications of His love: “I will make good my vows before them that fear Him.” Yet there is abundant blessing for those who do respond, while its limitation to a certain character -always, of course, true is yet here insisted on with an emphasis which is obvious. “The humble shall eat and be full; they shall praise Jehovah that fear Him.” The reference is, doubtless, as Delitzsch observes, to the peace-offering which accompanied vows; and here Messiah’s vows furnish forth, indeed, a royal banquet upon which, in communion, the humble feed to fullest satisfaction. “Your heart shall live for aye,” becomes thus the assurance of the Entertainer to the guests, -an assurance full of blessing. And this is the voice of recall to man, so long a wanderer: “all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to Jehovah: and all the families of the nations shall worship before Thee.” And so shall come the universal kingdom, the creature in the creature-place with God, -just to keep which is perfect blessing. For this the pride and self-satisfaction of man may well come down: “the fat upon the earth have eaten and worship.” What are they, apart from Him, but “those going down to the dust”? and on account of which He went Himself to the grave: He “who did not preserve alive His own soul.”* This joy and worship of men under condemnation, and who owe their all to His blessed work, is indeed a recompense of love like His, -“the fruit of the travail of His soul.”
(c) The closing part here shows the provision God has made for the perpetual preservation of this upon the earth. Alas, be the work all that it really is, and its fruit ever so necessary and glorious for men, yet except there be a corresponding work of the Spirit, and in sovereign power, there will be no effect. But God has purposed to glorify His Son, and that He should be the Firstborn among many brethren. The announcement of this suitably ends the psalm of atonement. “A seed shall serve Him: it shall be counted to the Lord for a generation.” Literally, “the generation”: that, I suppose, which is indeed such: a people begotten of God, although the full expression of that thought waits for the New Testament. But they are reckoned as His: He owns them such; and with them it lies to maintain the testimony of the grace they have experienced: “they shall come and shall declare His righteousness to a people that shall be born, because He has done this.” This again comes very near the language of the New Testament. The apostle Paul it is that has taught us that a central truth of the gospel is “the righteousness of God.” It is this which the sinner dreads, which the gospel reveals to be for him through the work of the Cross. The righteousness of God as against sin that Cross proclaims (Romans 3:25-26); and equally as against a world that knows not the Father, by His being taken out of it, to be seen by them no more. (John 16:10.) But this involves the answer of the psalm before us, and the acceptance of that work to fulfill which He hung upon the tree. And thus Divine righteousness it is that has a gospel for us. (Romans 1:16-17.) Justification can be by righteousness alone, and the justification of the ungodly only by penalty in fact endured. (Romans 3:21-24.) Then, Christ dying for the ungodly, the acceptance of the sinner on the ground of this is really righteousness: “He was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him.” (2 Corinthians 5:21.) Thus the psalm of atonement, though it comes too early for God to speak fully out, touches in its closing strain the very keynote of the gospel.