Psalms 67

Psalms 67:1-7

Complete blessing and rest. To the chief musician on stringed instruments. A psalm-song. The sixty-seventh psalm is a bright and beautiful seventh: the number being emphasized as that of the verses also, of which the central one again, by its three lines instead of two, is marked out as the hinge upon which all turns, which is the reign of God upon earth. The grace of God flows through Israel, as the channel of it to the nations; they being the living example of it before the eyes of all. This the first two verses show: “God be gracious unto us” -His people Israel -“make His face to shine upon us, that Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy salvation among all nations.” There follows the prediction of praise from all the earth: “Peoples shall praise Thee, O God: all the peoples shall praise Thee.” And then we have the subject-matter of their praise, the joyfulness of what it is, freed from the misery of self-will and from the wills of others, to serve God and be subject to Him. This is true blessedness at any time. How strange that it should take so long to learn it; yea, that the world should have at last to be brought by judgment into subjection! But it is the proof which all history gives of the reality of the fall. Simple it is, that creature-blessedness is found just in being creatures, -in letting God be God. “Thou shalt judge the peoples righteously, and lead the races upon earth.” How necessarily that last expression fixes our thoughts upon Shepherd care, and upon the good Shepherd," in whose hands the sceptre is. The next two verses are a good example of the fullness of meaning which the numerical structure brings out of the text. The fifth verse is but an exact repetition of the third, and its character as a third is evident. Praise belongs to the sanctuary; and in this verse there is nothing but praise. Yet precisely the same words come before us now as a fifth, and no possible division of the psalm could make both verses thirds. A fifth is most akin, by reason of its fundamental suggestion of “man with God”; and this can only be aright when God becomes enthroned in the heart, the object of his praise. Thus the fifth verse indicates that Immanuel (“God with us”) has become the real characteristic of the new condition of humanity, although this is only beginning and not perfected, in the millennium itself. But it is no longer to take a people out of the Gentiles that God is working, but to produce that condition which the new earth will see accomplished, when “the tabernacle of God shall be with men.” The sixth verse, as such, speaks of the limitation and control of evil; and evil may be, as we know, either moral or physical. The last is also a check upon the first -a means of restraint, of which we all are conscious. Now the previous verse has shown us, in the winning of man’s heart to God, the power which has come in to bring about the eradication of physical evil. This therefore is now passing away: the earth is yielding her increase; the curse is removed from the ground; -the blessing of God is operative in antagonism to it. The last verse gives the general result summed up: God is blessing Israel; all the ends of the earth shall fear Him now!