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Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms

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Title: Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms

Author: Alexander Maclaren


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7925]
                Most recently updated: August 3, 2012

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7925

Credits: Produced by Charles Franks, Chew-Hung, Lee, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE: PSALMS ***




Produced by Charles Franks, Chew-Hung, Lee, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team.










EXPOSITIONS OF HOLY SCRIPTURE

PSALMS

by

ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D. D., Litt. D.





VOLUME I: PSALMS _I to XLIX_


CONTENTS


BLESSEDNESS AND PRAISE (Psalm i. 1, 2; cl. 6)

A STAIRCASE OF THREE STEPS (Psalm v. 11, 12)

ONE SAYING FROM THREE MEN (Psalm x. 6; xvi. 8; xxx. 6)

MAN'S TRUE TREASURE IN GOD (Psalm xvi. 5, 6)

GOD WITH US, AND WE WITH GOD (Psalm xvi. 8, 11)

THE TWO AWAKINGS (Psalm xvii. 15; lxxiii. 20)

SECRET FAULTS (Psalm xix. 12)

OPEN SINS (Psalm xix. 13)

FEASTING ON THE SACRIFICE (Psalm xxii. 26)

THE SHEPHERD KING OF ISRAEL (Psalm xxiii. 1-6)

A GREAT QUESTION AND ITS ANSWER (Psalm xxiv. 3)

THE GOD WHO DWELLS WITH MEN (Psalm xxiv. 7-10)

GUIDANCE IN JUDGMENT (Psalm xxv. 8, 9)

A PRAYER FOR PARDON AND ITS PLEA (Psalm xxv. 11)

GOD'S GUESTS (Psalm xxvii. 4)

'SEEK YE'--'I WILL SEEK' (Psalm xxvii. 8, 9)

THE TWO GUESTS (Psalm xxx. 5)

'BE ... FOR THOU ART' (Psalm xxxi. 2, 3, R.V.)

'INTO THY HANDS' (Psalm xxxi. 5)

GOODNESS WROUGHT AND GOODNESS LAID UP (Psalm xxxi. 19)

HID IN LIGHT (Psalm xxxi. 20)

A THREEFOLD THOUGHT OF SIN AND FORGIVENESS (Psalm xxxii. 1, 2)

THE ENCAMPING ANGEL (Psalm xxxiv. 7)

STRUGGLING AND SEEKING (Psalm xxxiv. 10)

NO CONDEMNATION (Psalm xxxiv. 22)

SKY, EARTH, AND SEA: A PARABLE OF GOD (Psalm xxxvi. 5-7)

WHAT MEN FIND BENEATH THE WINGS OF GOD (Psalm xxxvi. 8, 9)

THE SECRET OF TRANQUILLITY (Psalm xxxvii. 4, 5, 7)

THE BITTERNESS AND BLESSEDNESS OF THE BREVITY OF LIFE (Psalm xxxix. 6,
12)

TWO INNUMERABLE SERIES (Psalm xl. 5, 12)

THIRSTING FOR GOD (Psalm xlii. 2)

THE PSALMIST'S REMONSTRANCE WITH HIS SOUL (Psalm xliii. 5)

THE KING IN HIS BEAUTY (Psalm xlv. 2-7, R.V.)

THE PORTRAIT OF THE BRIDE (Psalm xlv. 10-15, R.V.)

THE CITY AND RIVER OF GOD (Psalm xlvi. 4-7)

THE LORD OF HOSTS, THE GOD OF JACOB (Psalm xlvi. 11)

A SONG OF DELIVERANCE (Psalm xlviii. 1-14)

TWO SHEPHERDS AND TWO FLOCKS (Psalm xlix. 14; Rev. vii. 17)




BLESSEDNESS AND PRAISE


    'Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,
    nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the
    scornful.  2. But his delight is in the law of the Lord.'
    --PSALM i. 1, 2.

    'Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the
    Lord.'--PSALM cl. 6.

The Psalter is the echo in devout hearts of the other portions of divine
revelation. There are in it, indeed, further disclosures of God's mind
and purposes, but its especial characteristic is--the reflection of the
light of God from brightened faces and believing hearts. As we hold it
to be inspired, we cannot simply say that it is man's response to God's
voice. But if the rest of Scripture may be called the speech of the
Spirit of God _to_ men, this book is the answer of the Spirit of God
_in_ men.

These two verses which I venture to lay side by side present in a very
remarkable way this characteristic. It is not by accident that they
stand where they do, the first and last verses of the whole collection,
enclosing all, as it were, within a golden ring, and bending round to
meet each other. They are the summing up of the whole purpose and issue
of God's revelation to men.

The first and second psalms echo the two main portions of the old
revelation--the Law and the Prophets. The first of them is taken up with
the celebration of the blessedness and fruitful, stable being of the man
who loves the Law of the Lord, as contrasted with the rootless and
barren life of the ungodly, who is like the chaff. The second is
occupied with the contemplation of the divine 'decree' by which the
coming King is set in God's 'holy hill of Zion,' and of the blessedness
of 'all they who put their trust in Him,' as contrasted with the swift
destruction that shall fall on the vain imaginations of the rebellious
heathen and banded kings of earth.

The words of our first text, then, may well stand at the beginning of
the Psalter. They express the great purpose for which God has given His
Law. They are the witness of human experience to the substantial, though
partial, accomplishment of that purpose. They rise in buoyant triumph
over that which is painful and apparently opposed to it; and in spite of
sorrow and sin, proclaim the blessedness of the life which is rooted in
the Law of the Lord.

The last words of the book are as significant as its first. The closing
psalms are one long call to praise--they probably date from the time of
the restoration under Ezra and Nehemiah, when, as we know, 'the service
of song' was carefully re-established, and the harps which had hung
silent upon the willows by the rivers of Babylon woke again their
ancient melodies. These psalms climb higher and higher in their
rapturous call to all creatures, animate and inanimate, on earth and in
heaven, to praise Him. The golden waves of music and song pour out ever
faster and fuller. At last we hear this invocation to every instrument
of music to praise Him, responded to, as we may suppose, by each, in
turn as summoned, adding its tributary notes to the broadening river of
harmony--until all, with gathered might of glad sound blended with the
crash of many voices, unite in the final words, 'Let every thing that
hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.'

I. We have here a twofold declaration of God's great purpose in all His
self-revelation, and especially in the Gospel of His Son.

Our first text may be translated as a joyful exclamation, 'Oh! the
blessedness of the man--whose delight is in the law of the Lord.' Our
second is an invocation or a command. The one then expresses the purpose
which God secures by His gift of the Law; the other the purpose which He
summons us to fulfil by the tribute of our hearts and songs--man's
happiness and God's glory.

His purpose is Man's blessedness.

That is but another way of saying, God is love. For love, as we know it,
is eminently the desire for the happiness of the person on whom it is
fixed. And unless the love of God be like ours, however it may transcend
it, there is no revelation of Him to our hearts at all. If He be love,
then He 'delights in the prosperity' of His children.

And that purpose runs through all His acts. For perfect love is
all-pervasive, and even with us men, it rules the whole being; nor does
he love at all who seeks the welfare of the heart he clings to by fits
and starts, by some of his acts and not by others. When God comes forth
from the unvisioned light, which is thick darkness, of His own eternal,
self-adequate Being, and flashes into energy in Creation, Providence, or
Grace, the Law of His Working and His Purpose are one, in all regions.
The unity of the divine acts depends on this--that all flow from one
deep source, and all move to one mighty end. Standing on the height to
which His own declarations of His own nature lift our feebleness, we can
see how the 'river of God that waters the garden' and 'parts' into many
'heads,' gushes from one fountain. One of the psalms puts what people
call the 'philosophy' of creation and of providence very clearly, in
accordance with this thought--that the love of God is the source, and
the blessedness of man the end, of all His work: 'To Him that made great
lights; for His mercy endureth for ever. To Him that slew mighty kings;
for His mercy endureth for ever.'

Creation, then, is the effluence of the loving heart of God. Though the
sacred characters be but partially legible to us now, what He wrote, on
stars and flowers, on the infinitely great and the infinitely small, on
the infinitely near and the infinitely far off, with His creating hand,
was the one inscription--God is love. And as in nature, so in
providence. The origination, and the support, and the direction of all
things, are the works and the heralds of the same love. It is printed in
starry letters on the sky. It is graven on the rocks, and breathed by
the flowers. It is spoken as a dark saying even by sorrow and pain. The
mysteries of destructive and crushing providences have come from the
same source. And he who can see with the Psalmist the ever-during mercy
of the Lord, as the reason of creation and of judgments, has in his
hands the golden key which opens all the locks in the palace chambers of
the great King. He only hath penetrated to the secret of things
material, and stands in the light at the centre, who understands that
all comes from the one source--God's endless desire for the blessedness
of His creatures.

But while all God's works do thus praise Him by testifying that He seeks
to bless His creatures, the loftiest example of that desire is, of
course, found in His revelation of Himself to men's hearts and
consciences, to men's spirits and wills. That mightiest act of love,
beginning in the long-past generations, has culminated in Him in whom
'dwelleth the whole fulness of the Godhead bodily,' and in whose work is
all the love--the perfect, inconceivable, patient, omnipotent love of
our redeeming God.

And then, remember that this is not inconsistent with or contradicted by
the sterner aspects of that revelation, which cannot be denied, and
ought not to be minimised or softened. _Here_, on the right hand, are
the flowery slopes of the Mount of Blessing; _there_, on the left, the
barren, stern, thunder-riven, lightning-splintered pinnacles of the
Mount of Cursing. Every clear note of benediction hath its low minor of
imprecation from the other side. Between the two, overhung by the hopes
of the one, and frowned upon and dominated by the threatenings of the
other, is pitched the little camp of our human life, and the path of our
pilgrimage runs in the trough of the valley between. And yet--might we
not go a step farther, and say that above the parted summits stretches
the one overarching blue, uniting them both, and their roots deep down
below the surface interlace and twine together? That is to say, the
threatenings and rebukes, the acts of retributive judgment, which are
contained in the revelation of God, are no limitation nor disturbance of
the clear and happy faith that all which we behold is full of blessing,
and that all comes from the Father's hand. They are the garb in which
His Love needs to array itself when it comes in contact with man's sin
and man's evil. The love of God appears no less when it teaches us in
grave sad tones that 'the wages of sin is death,' than when it proclaims
that 'the gift of God is eternal life.'

Love threatens that it may never have to execute its threats. Love warns
that we may be wise in time. Love prophesies that its sad forebodings
may not be fulfilled. And love smites with lighter strokes of
premonitory chastisements, that we may never need to feel the whips of
scorpions.

Remember, too, that these sterner aspects both of Law and of Gospel
point this lesson--that we shall very much misunderstand God's purpose
if we suppose it to be blessedness for us men _anyhow_, irrespective
altogether of character. Some people seem to think that God loves us so
much, as they would say--so little, so ignobly, as I would say--as that
He only desires us to be happy. They seem to think that the divine love
is tarnished unless it provides for men's felicity, whether they are
God-loving and God-like or no. Thus the solemn and majestic love of the
Father in heaven is to be brought down to a weak good nature, which only
desires that the child shall cease crying and be happy, and does not
mind by what means that end is reached. God's purpose _is_ blessedness;
but, as this very text tells us, not blessedness anyhow, but one which
will not and cannot be given by God to those who walk in the way of
sinners. His love desires that we should be holy, and 'followers of God
as dear children'--and the blessedness which it bestows comes from
pardon and growing fellowship with Him. It can no more fall on
rebellious hearts than the pure crystals of the snow can lie and sparkle
on the hot, black cone of a volcano.

The other text that I have read sets forth another view of God's
purpose. God seeks our praise. The glory of God is the end of all the
divine actions. Now, that is a statement which no doubt is irrefragable,
and a plain deduction from the very conception of an infinite Being. But
it may be held in such connections, and spoken with such erroneous
application, and so divorced from other truths, that instead of being
what it is in the Bible, good news, it shall become a curse and a lie.
It may be so understood as to describe not our Father in heaven, but an
almighty devil! But, when the thought that God's purpose in all His acts
is His own glory, is firmly united with that other, that His purpose in
all His acts is our blessing, then we begin to understand how full of
joy it may be for us. His glory is sought by Him in the manifestation of
His loving heart, mirrored in our illuminated and gladdened hearts. Such
a glory is not unworthy of infinite love. It has nothing in common with
the ambitious and hungry greed of men for reputation or self-display.
That desire is altogether ignoble and selfish when it is found in human
hearts; and it would be none the less ignoble and selfish if it were
magnified into infinitude, and transferred to the divine. But to say
that God's glory is His great end, is surely but another way of saying
that He is love. The love that seeks to bless us desires, as all love
does, that it should be known for what it is, that it should be
recognised in our glad hearts, and smiled back again from our brightened
faces. God desires that we should know Him, and so have Eternal Life; He
desires that knowing Him, we should love Him, and loving should praise,
and so should glorify Him. He desires that there should be an
interchange of love bestowing and love receiving, of gifts showered down
and of praise ascending, of fire falling from the heavens and sweet
incense, from grateful hearts, going up in fragrant clouds acceptable
unto God. It is a sign of a Fatherly heart that He '_seeketh_ such to
worship Him'. He desires to be glorified by our praise, because He loves
us so much. He commences with an offer, He advances to a command. He
gives first, and then (not till then) He comes seeking fruit from the
'trees' which are 'the planting of the Lord, that He might be
glorified.' His plea is not 'the vineyard belongs to Me, and I have a
right to its fruits,' but 'what could have been done more to My
vineyard, that I have not done in it?--judge between Me and My
vineyard.' First, He showers down blessings; then, He looks for the
revenue of praise!

II. We may also take these passages as giving us a twofold expression of
the actual effects of God's revelation, especially in the Gospel, even
here upon earth.

The one text is the joyful exclamation built upon experience and
observation. The other is a call which is answered in some measure even
by voices that are often dumb in unthankfulness, often broken by sobs,
often murmuring in penitence.

God does actually, though not completely, make men blessed here. Our
text sums up the experience of all the devout hearts and lives whose
emotions are expressed in the Psalms. He who wrote this psalm would
preface the whole book by words into which the spirit of the book is
distilled. It will have much to say of sorrow and pain. It will touch
many a low note of wailing and of grief. There will be complaints and
penitence, and sighs almost of despair before it closes. But this which
he puts first is the note of the whole. So it is in our histories.
They will run through many a dark and desert place. We shall have
bitterness and trials in abundance, there will be many an hour of
sadness caused by my own evil, and many a hard struggle with it. But
high above all these mists and clouds will rise the hope that seeks the
skies, and deep beneath all the surface agitations of storms and
currents there will be the unmoved stillness of the central ocean of
peace in our hearts. In the 'valley of weeping' we may still be
'blessed' if 'the ways' are in our hearts, and if we make of the very
tears 'a well,' drawing refreshment from the very trials. With all its
sorrows and pains, its fightings and fears, its tribulations in the
world, and its chastenings from a Father's hand, the life of a Christian
is a happy life, and 'the joy of the Lord' remains with His servants.

More than twenty centuries have passed since that psalm was written. As
many stretched dim behind the Psalmist as he sang. He was gathering up
in one sentence the spirit of the past, and confirming it by his own
life's history. And has any one that has lived since then stood up and
said--'Behold! I have found it otherwise. I have waited on God, and He
has not heard my cry. I have served Him, and that for nought. I have
trusted in Him, and been disappointed. I have sought His face--in vain.
And I say, from my own experience, that the man who trusts in Him is
_not_ blessed'? Not one, thank God! The history of the past, so far as
this matter is concerned, may be put in one sentence 'They looked unto
Him and were lightened, and their faces were not ashamed,' and as for
the present, are there not some of us who can say, 'This poor man cried,
and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles'?

Brethren! make the experiment for yourselves. Test this experience by
your own simple affiance and living trust in Jesus Christ. We have the
experience of all generations to encourage us. What has blessed them is
enough for you and me. Like the meal and the oil, which were the
Prophet's resource in famine, yesterday's supply does not diminish
to-morrow's store. We, too, may have all that gladdened the hearts and
stayed the spirits of the saints of old. 'Oh! taste and see that God is
good.' 'Blessed is the man that trusteth in Him.'

So, too, God's gift produces man's praise.

What is it that He desires from us? Nothing but our thankful recognition
and reception of His benefits. We honour God by taking the full cup of
salvation which He commends to our lips, and by calling, while we drink,
upon the name of the Lord. Our true response to His Word, which is
essentially a proffer of blessing to us, is to open our hearts to
receive, and, receiving, to render grateful acknowledgment. The echo of
love which gives and forgives, is love which accepts and thanks. We have
but to lift up our empty and impure hands, opened wide to receive the
gift which He lays in them--and though they be empty and impure, yet
'the lifting up of our hands' is 'as the evening sacrifice'; our sense
of need stands in the place of all offerings. The stained thankfulness
of our poor hearts is accepted by Him who inhabits the praises of
eternity, and yet delights in the praises of Israel. He bends from
heaven to give, and all He asks is that we should take. He only seeks
our thankfulness--but He does seek it. And wherever His grace is
discerned, and His love is welcomed, there praise breaks forth, as
surely as streams pour from the cave of the glacier when the sun of
summer melts it, or earth answers the touch of spring with flowers.

And that effect is produced, notwithstanding all the complaints and
sighs and tears which sometimes choke our praise. It _is_ produced even
while these last; the psalms of thanksgiving are not all reserved for
the end of the book. But even in those which read like the very sobs of
a broken heart, there is ever present some tone of grateful
acknowledgment of God's mercy. He sends us sorrow, and He wills that we
should weep--but they should be tears like David's, who, at the lowest
point of his fortunes, when he plaintively besought God, 'Put Thou my
tears into Thy bottle'--could say in the same breath, 'Thy vows are upon
me, O God: I will render praises unto Thee.' God works on our souls that
we may have the consciousness of sin, and He wills that we should come
with broken and contrite hearts, and like the king of Israel wail out
our confessions and supplications--'Have mercy upon me, O God! according
to Thy loving-kindness.' But, like him, we should even in our lowliest
abasement, when our hearts are bruised, be able to say along with our
contrition, 'Open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy
praise.' Our sorrows are never so great that they hide our mercies. The
sky is never so covered with clouds that neither sun nor stars appear
for many days. And in every Christian heart the low tones of lamentation
and confession are blended with grateful praise. So it is even in the
darkest moments, whilst the blast of misfortune and misery is as a storm
against the wall.

But a brighter hope even for our life here rises from these words, if we
think of the place which they hold in the whole book. They are the last
words. Whatever other notes have been sounded in its course, all ends in
this. The winter's day has had its melancholy grey sky, with many a
bitter dash of snow and rain--but it has stormed itself out, and at
eventide, a rent in the clouds reveals the sun, and it closes in
peaceful clearness of light.

The note of gladness heard at the beginning, 'Oh! the blessedness of the
man that delights in the law of the Lord,' holds on persistently, like a
subdued and almost bewildered undercurrent of sweet sound amid all the
movements of some colossal symphony, through tears and sobs, confession
and complaint, and it springs up at the close triumphant, like the ruddy
spires of a flame long smothered, and swells and broadens, and draws all
the intricate harmonies into its own rushing tide. Some of you remember
the great musical work which has these very words for its theme. It
begins with the call, 'All that hath life and breath, praise ye the
Lord,' and although the gladness saddens into the plaintive cry of a
soul sick with hope deferred, 'Will the night soon pass?' yet, ere the
close, all discords are reconciled, and at last, with assurance firmer
for the experience of passing sorrows, loud as the voice of many waters
and sweet as harpers harping with their harps, the joyful invocation
peals forth again, and all ends, as it does in a Christian man's life,
and as it does in this book, with 'Praise ye the Lord.'

III. We have here also a twofold prophecy of the perfection of Heaven.

Whilst it is true that both of these purposes are accomplished here and
now, it is also true that their accomplishment is but partial, and that
therefore for their fulfilment we have to lift our eyes beyond this
world of imperfect faith, of incomplete blessedness, of interrupted
praise. Whether the Psalmist looked forward thus we do not know. But for
us, the very shortcomings of our joys and of our songs are prophetic of
the perfect and perpetual rapture of the one, and the perfect and
perpetual music of the other. We know that He who has given us so much
will not stay His hand until He has perfected that which concerns us. We
know that He who has taught our dumb hearts to magnify His name will not
cease till 'out of the lips of babes and sucklings, He has perfected
praise.' We know that the pilgrims in whose hearts are the ways are
blessed, and we are sure that a fuller blessedness must belong to those
who have reached the journey's end.

And so these words give us a twofold aspect of that future on which our
longing hopes may well fix.

It is the perfection of man's blessedness. Then the joyous exclamation
of our first text, which we have often had to strive hard not to
disbelieve, will be no more a truth of faith but a truth of experience.
Here we have had to trust that it was so, even when we could scarce
cleave to the confidence. There, memory will look back on our wanderings
through this great wilderness, and, enlightened by the issue of them
all, will speak only of Mercy and Goodness as our angel guides all our
lives. The end will crown the work. Pure unmingled consciousness of
bliss will fill all hearts, and break into the old exclamation, which we
had sometimes to stifle sobs ere we could speak on earth. When He says,
'Come in! ye blessed of My Father,' all our tears and fears, and pains
and sins, will be forgotten, and we shall but have to say, in wonder and
joy, 'Blessed are they that dwell in Thy house; they will be still
praising Thee.'

It is the perfection of God's praise. We may possibly venture to see in
these wonderful words of our text a dim and far-off hint of a
possibility that seems to be pointed at in many parts of Scripture--that
the blessings of Christ's mighty work shall, in some measure and manner,
pass through man to his dwelling-place and its creatures. Dark shadows
of evil--the mystery of pain and sorrow--lie over earth and all its
tribes. 'We look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness.' And the statements of Scripture which represent creation
as suffering by man's sin, and participant in its degree in man's
redemption, seem too emphatic and precise, as well as too frequent, and
in too didactic connections, to be lightly brushed aside as poetic
imagery. May it not be that man's transgression

  'Broke the fair music that all creatures made
   To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed,'

and that man's restoration may, indeed, bring back all that hath life
and breath to a harmonious blessedness--according to the deep and
enigmatical words, which declare that 'the creature itself also shall be
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory
of the children of God'? Be that as it may, at all events our second
text opens to us the gates of the heavenly temple, and shows us there
the saintly ranks and angel companies gathered in the city whose walls
are salvation and its gates praise. They harmonise with that other later
vision of heaven which the Seer in Patmos beheld, not only in setting
before us worship as the glad work of all who are there, but in teaching
the connection between the praises of men, and the answering hymns of
angels. The harps of heaven are hushed to hear _their_ praise who can
sing, 'Thou hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood,' and, in answer to
that hymn of thanksgiving for unexampled deliverance and resorting
grace, the angels around the throne break forth into new songs to the
Lamb that was slain--while still wider spread the broadening circles of
harmonious praise, till at last 'every creature which is in heaven, and
on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all
that are in them,' join in the mighty hymn of 'Blessing, and honour, and
glory, and power, unto Him that sitteth upon the throne, and to the Lamb
for ever and ever.' Then the rapturous exclamation from human souls
redeemed,--'Oh! the blessedness of the men whom Thou hast loved and
saved,' shall be answered by choral praise from everything that hath
breath.

And are you dumb, my friend, in these universal bursts of praise? Is
that because you have not chosen to take the universal blessing which
God gives? You have nothing to do but to receive the things that are
freely given to you of God--the forgiveness, the cleansing, the life,
that come from Christ by faith. Take them, and call upon the name of the
Lord, And can you refuse His gifts and withhold your praise? You can be
eloquent in thanks to those who do you kindnesses, and in praise of
those whom you admire and love, but your best Friend receives none of
your gratitude and none of your praise. Ignoble silence and dull
unthankfulness--with these you requite your Saviour! 'I tell you that,
if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out!'




A STAIRCASE OF THREE STEPS


    'All those that put their trust in Thee ... them also that love Thy
    name ... the righteous.'--PSALM v. 11, 12.

I have ventured to isolate these three clauses from their context,
because, if taken in their sequence, they are very significant of the
true path by which men draw nigh to God and become righteous. They are
all three designations of the same people, but regarded under different
aspects and at different stages. There is a distinct order in them, and
whether the Psalmist was fully conscious of it or not, he was
anticipating and stating, with wonderful distinctness, the Christian
sequence--faith, love, righteousness.

These three are the three flights of stairs, as it were, which lead men
up to God and to perfection, or if you like to take another metaphor,
meaning the same thing, they are respectively the root, the stalk, and
the fruit of religion. 'They that put their trust in Thee ... them also
that love Thy Name ... the righteous.'

I. So, then, the first thought here is that the foundation of all is
trust.

Now, the word that is employed here is very significant. In its literal
force it really means to 'flee to a refuge.' And that the literal
signification has not altogether been lost in the spiritual and
metaphorical use of it, as a term expressive of religious experience, is
quite plain from many of the cases in which it occurs. Let me just
repeat one of them to you. 'Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful to
me, for my soul trusteth in Thee; yea, in the shadow of Thy wings will I
make my refuge.' There the picture that is in the words is distinctly
before the Psalmist's mind, and he is thinking not only of the act of
mind and heart by which he casts himself in confidence upon God, but
upon that which represents it in symbol, the act by which a man flees
into some hiding-place. The psalm is said in the superscription to have
been written when David hid in a cave from his persecutor. Though no
weight be given to that statement, it suggests the impression made by
the psalm. In imagination we can see the rough sides of the cavern that
sheltered him arching over the fugitive, like the wings of some great
bird, and just as he has fled thither with eager feet and is safely
hidden from his pursuers there, so he has betaken himself to the
everlasting Rock, in the cleft of which he is at rest and secure. To
trust in God is neither more nor less than to flee to Him for refuge,
and there to be at peace. The same presence of the original metaphor,
colouring the same religious thought, is found in the beautiful words
with which Boaz welcomes Ruth, when he prays for her that the God of
Israel may reward her, 'under the shadow of whose wings thou hast come
to trust.'

So, as a man in peril runs into a hiding-place or fortress, as the
chickens beneath the outspread wing of the mother bird nestle close in
the warm feathers and are safe and well, the soul that trusts takes its
flight straight to God, and in Him reposes and is secure.

Now, it seems to me that such a figure as that is worth tons of
theological lectures about the true nature of faith, and that it tells
us, by means of a picture that says a great deal more than many a
treatise, that faith is something very different from a cold-blooded act
of believing in the truth of certain propositions; that it is the flight
of the soul--knowing itself to be in peril, and naked, and unarmed--into
the strong Fortress.

What is it that keeps a man safe when he thus has around him the walls
of some citadel? Is it himself, is it the act by which he took refuge,
or is it the battlements behind which he crouches? So in faith--which is
more than a process of a man's understanding, and is not merely the
saying, 'Yes, I believe all that is in the Bible is true; at any rate,
it is not for me to contradict it,' but is the running of the man, when
he knows himself to be in danger, into the very arms of God--it is not
the running that makes him safe, but it is the arms to which he runs.

If we would only lay to heart that the very essence of religion lies in
this 'flight of the lonely soul to the only God,' we should understand
better than we do what He asks from us in order that He may defend us,
and how blessed and certain His defence is. So let us clear our minds
from the thought that anything is worth calling trust which is not thus
taking refuge in God Himself.

Now, I need not remind you, I suppose, that all this is just as true
about us as it was about David, and that the emotion or the act of his
will and heart which he expresses in these words of my text is neither
more nor less than the Christian act of faith. There is no difference
except a difference of development; there is no difference between the
road to God marked out in the Psalms, and the road to God laid down in
the Gospels. The Psalmist who said, 'Trust ye in the Lord for ever,' and
the Apostle who said, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt
be saved,' were preaching identically the same doctrine. One of them
could speak more fully than the other could of the Person on whom trust
was to be rested, but the trust itself was the same, and the Person on
whom it rested was the same, though His Name of old was Jehovah, and His
Name to-day is 'Immanuel, God with us.'

Nor need I do more than point out how the context of the words that I
have ventured to detach from their surroundings is instructive: 'Let all
those that put their trust in Thee rejoice because Thou defendest them.'
The word for defending there continues the metaphor that lies in the
word for 'trust,' for it means literally to cover over and so to
protect. Thus, when a man runs to God for His refuge, God

  'Covers his defenceless head
   With the shadow of His wings.'

And the joy of trust is, first, that it brings round me the whole
omnipotence of God for my defence, and the whole tenderness of God for
my consolation, and next, that in the very exercise of trust in such
defence, so fortified and vindicated by experience, there is great
reward. All who thus flee into the refuge shall find refuge whither they
flee, and shall be glad.

II. Then the next thought of my texts, which I do not force into them,
but which results, as it seems to me, distinctly from the order in which
they occur in the context, is that love follows trust.

'All those that put their trust in Thee--they also that love Thee.' If I
am to love God, I must be quite sure that God loves me. My love can
never be anything else than an answer to His. It can only be secondary
and derived, or I would rather say reflected and flashed back from His.
And so, very significantly, the Psalmist says, 'Those that love Thy
Name,' meaning by 'Name,' as is always meant by it, the revealed
character of God. If I am to love God, He must not hide in the darkness
behind His infinity, but must come out and give me something about Him
that I know. The three letters G O D mean nothing, and there is no power
in them to stir a man's heart. It must be the knowledge of the acts of
God that brings men to love Him. And there is no way of getting that
knowledge but through the faith which, as I said, must precede love. For
faith realises the fact that God loves. 'We have known and believed the
love that God hath to us.' The first step is to grasp the great truth of
the loving God, and through that truth to grasp the God that loves. And
then, and not till then, does there spring up in a man's heart love
towards Him. But it is only the faith that is set on Him who hath
declared the Father unto us that gives us for our very own the grasp of
the facts, which facts are the only possible fuel that can kindle love
in a human heart. 'We love Him because He first loved us,' and we shall
never know that He loves us unless we come to the knowledge through the
road of faith. So John himself tells us when he says, in the words that
I have already quoted, 'We have known and believed.' He puts the
foundation last, 'We have known,' because 'we have believed' 'the love
that God hath to us.'

And so faith is the only possible means by which any of us can ever
experience, as well as realise, the love that kindles ours. It is the
possession of the fact of redemption for my very own and of the
blessings which accompany it, and that alone, that binds a man to God in
the bonds of love that cannot be broken, and that subdues and unites all
vagrant emotions, affections, and desires in the mighty tide of a love
that ever sets towards Him. As surely as the silvery moon in the sky
draws after it the heaped waters of the ocean all round the world, so
God's love draws ours. They that believe contemplate, and they that
believe experience the effects of that divine love, which must be
experienced ere our answering love can be flashed back to heaven.

Students of acoustics tell us that if you have two stringed instruments
in adjacent apartments, tuned to the same pitch, a note sounded on one
of them will be feebly vibrated upon the other as soon as the waves of
sound have reached the sensitive string. In like manner a man's heart
gives off a faint, but musical, little tinkle of answering love to God
when the deep note of God's love to him, struck on the chords of heaven
up yonder, reaches his poor heart.

Love follows trust. So, brethren, if we desire to be warmed, let us get
into the sunshine and abide there. If we desire to have our hearts
filled with love to God, do not let us waste our time in trying to pump
up artificial emotions or to persuade ourselves that we love Him better
than we do, but let us fix our thoughts and fasten our refuge-seeking
trust on Him, and then that shall kindle ours.

III. Lastly, righteousness follows trust and love.

The last description here of the man who begins as a believer and then
advances to being a lover is _righteous_. That is the evangelical order.
That is the great blessing and beauty of Christianity, that it goes an
altogether different way to work to make men good from that which any
other system has ever dreamed of. It says, first of all, trust, and that
will create love and that will ensure obedience. Faith leads to
righteousness because, in the very act of trusting God, I come out of
myself, and going out of myself and ceasing from all self-admiration and
self-dependence and self-centred life is the beginning of all good and
has in it the germ of all righteousness, even as to live for self is the
mother tincture out of which we can make all sins.

And faith leads to righteousness in another way. Open the heart and
Christ comes in. Trust Him and He fills our poor nature with 'the law of
the Spirit of life that was in Christ Jesus,' and that 'makes me free
from the law of sin and death.' Righteousness, meaning thereby just what
irreligious men mean by it--viz. good living, plain obedience to the
ordinary recognised dictates of morality, going straight--that is most
surely attained when we cease from our own works and say to Jesus
Christ, 'Lord, I cannot walk in the narrow path. Do Thou Thyself come to
me and fill my heart and keep my feet.' They that trust and love are
'found in Him, not having their own righteousness, but that which is of
God by faith.'

And love leads to righteousness because it brings the one motive into
play in our hearts which turns duty into delight, toil into joy, and
makes us love better to do what will please our beloved Lover than
anything besides. Why did Jesus Christ say,'My yoke is easy and My
burden is light'? Was it because He diminished the weight of duties or
laid down an easier slipshod morality than had been enjoined before? No!
He intensified it all, and His Commandment is far harder to flesh and
blood than any commandments that were ever given. But for all that, the
yoke that He lays upon our necks is, if I may so say, padded with
velvet; and the burden that we have to draw behind us is laid upon
wheels that will turn so easily that the load is diminished, inasmuch as
for Duty He substitutes Himself and says to us, 'If ye love Me, keep My
Commandments.'

So, dear brethren! here is a very easily applied, and a very
far-reaching test for us who call ourselves Christians: Does our love
and does our trust culminate in practical righteousness? We are all
tempted to make too much of the emotions of the religious life, and too
little of its persistent, dogged obedience. We are all too apt to think
that a Christian is a man that believes in Jesus Christ. 'Justification
by faith alone without the works of the law' used to be the watchword of
the Evangelical Church. It might be so held as to be either a blessed
truth or a great error, and many of us make it an error instead of a
blessing.

On the other hand, there is only one way by which righteousness can be
attained, and that is: first by faith and then by love. Here are three
steps: 'we have known and believed the love that God hath to us'; that
is the broad, bottom step. And above it 'we love Him because He first
loved us,' that is the central one. And on the top of all, 'herein is
our love made perfect that we keep His Commandments.' They that trust
are they also who love Thy Name, and they who trust through love are,
and only they are, the righteous.




ONE SAYING FROM THREE MEN


    'The wicked hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved.'
    --PSALM x. 6.

    'Because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.'
    --PSALM xvi. 8.

    'And in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved.'
    --PSALM xxx. 6.

How differently the same things sound when said by different men! Here
are three people giving utterance to almost the same sentiment of
confidence. A wicked man says it, and it is insane presumption and
defiance. A good man says it, having been lulled into false security by
easy times, and it is a mistake that needs chastisement. A humble
believing soul says it, and it is the expression of a certain and
blessed truth. 'The wicked saith in his heart, I shall not be moved.' A
good man, led astray by his prosperity, said, 'I shall not be moved,'
and the last of the three put a little clause in which makes all the
difference, '_because He is at my right hand_, I shall never be moved.'
So, then, we have the mad arrogance of godless confidence, the mistake
of a good man that needs correction, and the warranted confidence of a
believing soul.

I. The mad arrogance of godless confidence.

The 'wicked' man, in the psalm from which our first text comes, said a
good many wrong things 'in his heart.' The tacit assumptions on which a
life is based, though they may never come to consciousness, and still
less to utterance, are the really important things. I dare say this
'wicked man' was a good Jew with his lips, and said his prayers all
properly, but in his heart he had two working beliefs. One is thus
expressed: 'As for all his enemies, he puffeth at them. He hath said in
his heart, I shall not be moved.' The other is put into words thus: 'He
hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten, He hideth His face. He will
never see it.'

That is to say, the only explanation of a godless life, unless the man
is an idiot, is that there lie beneath it, as formative principles and
unspoken assumptions, guiding and shaping it, one or both of these two
thoughts: either 'There is no God,' or 'He does not care what I do, and
I am safe to go on for evermore in the present fashion.' It might seem
as if a man with the facts of human life before him, could not, even in
the insanest arrogance, say, 'I shall not be moved, for I shall never be
in adversity.' But we have an awful power--and the fact that we
exercise, and choose to exercise, it is one of the strange riddles of
our enigmatical existence and characters--of ignoring unwelcome facts,
and going cheerily on as though we had annihilated them, because we do
not reflect upon them. So this man, in the midst of a world in which
there is no stay, and whilst he saw all round him the most startling and
tragical instances of sudden change and complete collapse, stands
quietly and says, 'Ah! _I_ shall never be moved'; 'God doth not require
it.'

That absurdity is the basis of every life that is not a life of
consecration and devotion--so far as it has a basis of conviction at
all. The 'wicked' man's true faith is this, absurd as it may sound when
you drag it out into clear, distinct utterance, whatever may be his
professions. I wonder if there are any of us whose life can only be
acquitted of being utterly unreasonable and ridiculous by the
assumption, 'I shall never be moved'?

Have you a lease of your goods? Do you think you are tenants at will or
owners? Which? Is there any reason why any of us should escape, as some
of us live as if we believed we should escape, the certain fate of all
others? If there is not, what about the sanity of the man whose whole
life is built upon a blunder? He is convicted of the grossest folly,
unless he be assured that either there is no God, or that He does not
care one rush about what we do, and that consequently we are certain of
a continuance in our present state.

Do you say in your heart, 'I shall never be moved'? Then you must be
strong enough to resist every tempest that beats against you. Is that
so? 'I shall never be moved'--then nothing that contributes to your
well-being will ever slip from your grasp, but you will be able to hold
it tight. Is that so? 'I shall never be moved'--then there is no grave
waiting for you. Is that so? Unless these three assumptions be
warranted, every godless man is making a hideous blunder, and his
character is the sentence pronounced by the loving lips of Incarnate
Truth on the rich man who thought that he had 'much goods laid up for
many years,' and had only to be merry--'Thou fool! Thou fool!'

If an engineer builds a bridge across a river without due calculation of
the force of the winds that blow down the gorge, the bridge will be at
the bottom of the stream some stormy night, and the train piled on the
fragments of it in hideous ruin. And with equal certainty the end of the
first utterer of this speech can be calculated, and is foretold in the
psalm, 'The Lord is King for ever and ever.... The godless are perished
out of the land.'

II. We have in our second text the mistake of a good man who has been
lulled into false confidence.

The Psalmist admits his error by the acknowledgment that he spoke 'in my
prosperity'; or, as the word might be rendered, 'in my _security_.' This
suggests to us the mistake into which even good men, lulled by the quiet
continuance of peaceful days, are certain to fall, unless there be
continual watchfulness exercised by them.

It is a very significant fact that the word which is translated in our
Authorised Version 'prosperity' is often rendered 'security,' meaning
thereby, not safety, but a belief that I am safe. A man who is
prosperous, or at ease, is sure to drop into the notion that 'to-morrow
will be as this day, and much more abundant,' unless he keeps up
unslumbering watchfulness against the insidious illusion of permanence.
If he yields to the temptation, in his foolish security, forgetting how
fragile are its foundations, and what a host of enemies surround him
threatening it, then there is nothing for it but that the merciful
discipline, which this Psalmist goes on to tell us he had to pass
through by reason of his fall, shall be brought to bear upon him. The
writer gives us a page of his own autobiography. 'In my security I said,
I shall never be moved.' 'Lord! by Thy favour Thou hast made my mountain
to stand strong. Thou didst hide Thy face.' What about the security
then? What about 'I shall never be moved' then? 'I was troubled. I cried
to Thee, O Lord!'--and then it was all right, his prayer was heard, and
he was in 'security'--that is, safety--far more really when he was
'troubled' and sore beset than when he had been, as he fancied, sure of
not being moved.

Long peace rusts the cannon, and is apt to make it unfit for war. Our
lack of imagination, and our present sense of comfort and well-being,
tend to make us fancy that we shall go on for ever in the quiet jog-trot
of settled life without any very great calamities or changes. But there
was once a village at the bottom of the crater of Vesuvius, and great
trees, that had grown undisturbed there for a hundred years, and green
pastures, and happy homes and flocks. And then, one day, a rumble and a
rush, and what became of the village? It went up in smoke-clouds. The
quiescence of the volcano is no sign of its extinction. And as surely as
we live, so sure is it that there will come a 'to-morrow' to us all
which shall _not_ be as this day. No man has any right to calculate upon
anything beyond the present moment, and there is no basis whatever,
either for the philosophical assertion that the order of nature is
fixed, and that therefore there are no miracles, or for the practical
translation of the assertion into our daily lives, that we may
reasonably expect to go on as we are without changes or calamities.
There is no reason capable of being put into logical shape for believing
that, because the sun has risen ever since the beginning of things, it
will rise to-morrow, for there will come a to-morrow when it will _not_
rise. In like manner, the longest possession of our mercies is no reason
for forgetting the precarious tenure on which we hold them all.

So, Christian men and women! let us try to keep vivid that consciousness
which is so apt to get dull, that nothing continueth in one stay, and
that we _shall_ be moved, as far as the outward life and its
circumstances are concerned. If we forget it, we shall need, and we
shall get, the loving Fatherly discipline, which my second text tells us
followed the false security of this good man. The sea is kept from
putrefying by storms. Wine poured from vessel to vessel is purified
thereby. It is an old truth and a wholesome one, to be always
remembered, 'because they have no changes therefore they fear not God .'

III. Lastly, we have the same thing said by another man in another key.
'Because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.' The prelude to
the assertion makes all the difference. Here is the warranted confidence
of a simple faith.

The man who clasps God's hand, and has Him standing by his side, as his
Ally, his Companion, his Guide, his Defence--that man does not need to
fear change. For all the things which convict the arrogant or mistaken
confidences of the other men as being insanity or a lapse from faith
prove the confidence of the trustful soul to be the very perfection of
reason and common sense.

We may be confident of our power to resist anything that can come
against us, if He be at our side. The man that stands with his back
against an oak-tree is held firm, not because of his own strength, but
because of that on which he leans. There is a beautiful story of some
heathen convert who said to a missionary's wife, who had felt faint and
asked that she might lean for a space on her stronger arm, 'If you love
me, lean hard.' That is what God says to us, 'If you love Me, lean
hard.' And if you do, because He is at your right hand, you will not be
moved. It is not insanity; it is not arrogance; it is simple faith, to
look our enemies in the eyes, and to feel sure that they cannot touch
us, 'Trust in Jehovah; so shall ye be established.' Rest on the Lord,
and ye shall rest indeed.

In like manner the man who has God at his right hand may be sure of the
unalterable continuance of all his proper good. Outward things may come
or go, as it pleases Him, but that which makes the life of our life will
never depart from us as long as He stands there. And whilst He is there,
if only our hearts are knit to Him, we can say, 'My heart and my flesh
faileth, but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. I
shall not be moved. Though all that can go goes, He abides; and in Him I
have all riches.' Trust not in the uncertainty of outward good, but in
the living God, who giveth us richly all things to enjoy.

The wicked man was defiantly arrogant, and the forgetful good man was
criminally self-confident, when they each said, 'I shall not be moved.'
We are only taking up the privileges that belong to us if, exercising
faith in Him, we venture to say, 'Take what Thou wilt; leave me Thyself;
I have enough.' And the man who says, 'Because God is at my right hand,
I shall not be moved,' has the right to anticipate an unbroken
continuance of personal being, and an unchanged continuance of the very
life of his life. That which breaks off all other lives abruptly is no
breach in the continuity, either of the consciousness or of the
avocations of a devout man. For, on the other side of the flood, he does
what he does on this side, only more perfectly and more continually. 'He
that doeth the will of God abideth for ever,' and it makes comparatively
little difference to him whether his place be on this or on the other
side of Jordan. We 'shall not be moved,' even when we change our station
from earth to heaven, and the sublime fulfilment of the warranted
confidence of the trustful soul comes when the 'to-morrow' of the skies
is as the 'to-day' of earth, only 'much more abundant.'




MAN'S TRUE TREASURE IN GOD


    'The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup; Thou
    maintainest my lot. The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places;
    yea, I have a goodly heritage.'--PSALM xvi. 5, 6.

We read, in the law which created the priesthood in Israel, that 'the
Lord spake unto Aaron, Thou shalt have no inheritance in their land,
neither shalt thou have any part among them. I am thy part and thine
inheritance among the children of Israel' (Numbers xvii. 20). Now there
is an evident allusion to that remarkable provision in this text. The
Psalmist feels that in the deepest sense he has no possession amongst
the men who have only possessions upon earth, but that God is the
treasure which he grasps in a rapture of devotion and self-abandonment.
The priest's duty is his choice. He will 'walk by faith and not by
sight.'

Are not all Christians priests? and is not the very essence and
innermost secret of the religious life this--that the heart turns away
from earthly things and deliberately accepts God as its supreme good,
and its only portion? These first words of my text contain the essence
of all true religion.

The connection between the first clause and the others is closer than
many readers perceive. The 'lot' which 'Thou maintainest,' the 'pleasant
places,' the 'goodly heritage,' all carry on the metaphor, and all refer
to God as Himself the portion of the heart that chooses and trusts Him.
'Thou maintainest my lot'--He who is our inheritance also guards our
inheritance, and whosoever has taken God for his possession has a
possession as sure as God can make it. 'The lines are fallen to me in
pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage'--the heritage that is
goodly is God Himself. When a man chooses God for his portion, then, and
then only, is he satisfied--'satisfied with favour, and full of the
goodness of the Lord.' Let me try to expand and enforce these thoughts,
with the hope that we may catch something of their fervour and their
glow.

I. The first thought, then, that comes out of the words before us is
this: all true religion has its very heart in deliberately choosing God
as my supreme good.

'The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and of my cup.' The two words
which are translated in our version 'portion' and 'inheritance' are
substantially synonymous. The latter of them is used continually in
reference to the share of each individual, or family, or tribe in the
partition of the land of Canaan. There is a distinct allusion,
therefore, to that partition in the language of our text; and the two
expressions, part or 'portion,' and 'inheritance,' are substantially
identical, and really mean just the same as if the single expression had
stood--'The Lord is my Portion.'

I may just notice in passing that these words are evidently alluded to
in the New Testament, in the Epistle to the Colossians, where Paul
speaks of God 'having made us meet for our portion of the inheritance of
the saints in light.'

And then the 'portion of my cup' is a somewhat strange expression. It is
found in one of the other Psalms, with the meaning 'fortune,' or
'destiny,' or 'sum of circumstances which make up a man's life.' There
may be, of course, an allusion to the metaphor of a feast here, and God
may be set forth as 'the portion of my cup,' in the sense of being the
refreshment and sustenance of a man's soul. But I should rather be
disposed to consider that there is merely a prolongation of the earlier
metaphor, and that the same thought as is contained in the figure of the
'inheritance' is expressed here (as in common conversation it is often
expressed) by the word 'cup,' namely, 'that which makes up a man's
portion in this life.' It is used with such a meaning in the well-known
words, 'My cup runneth over,' and in another shape in 'The cup which My
Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?' It is the sum of
circumstances which make up a man's 'fortune.' So the double metaphor
presents the one thought of God as the true possession of the devout
soul.

Now, how do we possess God? We possess things in one fashion and persons
in another. The lowest and most imperfect form of possession is that by
which a man simply keeps other people off material good, and asserts the
right of disposal of it as he thinks proper. A blind man may have the
finest picture that ever was painted; he may call it his, that is to
say, nobody else can sell it, but what good is it to him? A lunatic may
own a library as big as the Bodleian, but what use is it to him? Does
the man who collects the rents of a mountain-side, or the poet or
painter to whom its cliffs and heather speak far-reaching thoughts, most
truly possess it? The highest form of possession, even of things, is
when they minister to our thought, to our emotion, to our moral and
intellectual growth. We possess even them really, according as we know
them and hold communion with them. But when we get up into the region of
persons, we possess them in the measure in which we understand them, and
sympathise with them, and love them. Knowledge, intercourse, sympathy,
affection--these are the ways by which men can possess men, and spirits,
spirits. A disciple who gets the thoughts of a great teacher into his
mind, and has his whole being saturated by them, may be said to have
made the teacher his own. A friend or a lover owns the heart that he or
she loves, and which loves back again; and not otherwise do we possess
God.

Such ownership must be, from its very nature, reciprocal. There must be
the two sides to it. And so we read in the Bible, with equal frequency:
the Lord is the inheritance of His people, and His people are the
inheritance of the Lord. He possesses me, and I possess Him--with
reverence be it spoken--by the very same tenure; for whoso loves God has
Him, and whom He loves He owns. There is deep and blessed mystery
involved in this wonderful prerogative, that the loving, believing heart
has God for its possession and indwelling Guest; and people are apt to
brush such thoughts aside as mystical. But, like all true Christian
mysticism, it is intensely practical.

We have God for ours, first, in the measure in which our minds are
actively occupied with thoughts of Him. We have no merely mystical or
emotional possession of God to preach. There is a real, adequate
knowledge of Him in Jesus Christ. We know God, His character, His heart,
His relations to us, His thoughts of good concerning us, sufficiently
for all intellectual and for all practical purposes.

I wish to ask you a plain question: Do you ever think about Him? There
is only one way of getting God for yours, and that is by bringing Him
into your life by frequent meditation upon His sweetness, and upon the
truths that you know about Him. There is no other way by which a spirit
can possess a spirit, that is not cognisable by sense, except only by
the way of thinking about him, to begin with. All else follows that.
That is how you hold your dear ones when they go to the other side of
the world. That is how you hold God, who dwells on the other side of the
stars. There is no way to 'have' Him, but through the understanding
accepting Him, and keeping firm hold of Him. Men and women that from
Monday morning to Saturday night never think of His name--how do they
possess God? And professing Christians that never remember Him all the
day long--what absurd hypocrisy it is for them to say that God is
theirs!

Yours, and never in your mind! When your husband, or your wife, or your
child, goes away from home for a week, do you forget them as utterly as
you forget God? Do you have them in any sense if they never dwell in the
'study of your imagination,' and never fill your thoughts with sweetness
and with light?

And so again when the heart turns to Him, and when all the faculties of
our being, will, hope, and imagination, and all our affections and all
our practical powers, when they all touch Him, each in its proper
fashion, then and then only can we in any reasonable and true sense be
said to possess God.

Thought, communion, sympathy, affection, moral likeness, practical
obedience, these are the way--and not by mystical raptures only--by
which, in simple prose fact, it is possible for the finite to grasp the
infinite, and for a man to be the _owner_ of God.

Now there is another consideration very necessary to be remembered, and
that is that this possession of God involves, and is possible only by, a
deliberate act of renunciation. The Levite's example, that is glanced at
in my text, is always our law. You must have no part or inheritance
amongst the sons of earth if God is to be your inheritance. Or, to put
it into plain words, there must be a giving up of the material and the
created if there is to be a possession of the divine and the heavenly.
There cannot be _two_ supreme, any more than there can be two
pole-stars, one in the north and the other in the south, to both of
which a man can be steering. You cannot stand with

  'One foot on land, and one on sea,
   To one thing constant never.'

If you are to have God as your supreme good, you must empty your heart
of earth and worldly things, or your possession of Him will be all
words, and imagination, and hypocrisy. Brethren! I wish to bring that
message to your consciences to-day.

And what is this renunciation? There must be, first of all, a fixed,
deliberate, intelligent conviction lying at the foundation of my life
that God is best, and that He and He only is my true delight and desire.
Then there must be built upon that intelligent conviction that God is
best, the deliberate turning away of the heart from these material
treasures. Then there must be the willingness to abandon the outward
possession of them, if they come in between us and Him. Just as
travellers in old days, that went out looking for treasures in the
western hemisphere, were glad to empty their ships of their less
precious cargo in order to load them with gold, you must get rid of the
trifles, and fling these away if ever they so take up your heart that
God has no room there. Or rather, perhaps, if the love of God in any
real measure, howsoever imperfectly, once gets into a man's soul, it
will work there to expel and edge out the love and regard for earthly
things. Just as when the chemist collects oxygen in a vessel filled with
water, as it passes into the jar it drives out the water before it; the
love of God, if it come into a man's heart in any real sense, in the
measure in which it comes, will deliver him from the love of the world.
But between the two there is warfare so internecine and endless that
they cannot co-exist: and here, to-day, it is as true as ever it was
that if you want to have God for your portion and your inheritance you
must be content to have no inheritance amongst your brethren, nor part
amongst the sons of earth.

Men and women! are you ready for that renunciation? Are you prepared to
say, 'I know that the sweetness of Thy presence is the truest sweetness
that I can taste; and lo! I give up all besides and my own self'?


  'O God of good, the unfathomed Sea!
   Who would not yield himself to Thee?'


And remember, that nothing less than these is Christianity--the
conviction that the world is second and not first; that God is best,
love is best, truth is best, knowledge of Him is best, likeness to Him
is best, the willingness to surrender all if it come in contest with His
supreme sweetness. He that turns his back upon earth by reason of the
drawing power of the glory that excelleth, is a Christian. The
Christianity that only trusts to Christ for deliverance from the
punishment of sin, and so makes religion a kind of fire insurance, is a
very poor affair. We need the lesson pealed into our ears as much as any
generation has ever done, 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' A man's real
working religion consists in his loving God most and counting His love
the sweetest of all things.

II. Now let me turn to the next point that is here, viz. that this
possession is as sure as God can make it. 'Thou maintainest my lot.'
Thou art Thyself both my heritage and the guardian of my heritage. He
that possesses God, says the text, by implication, is lifted above all
fear and chance of change.

The land, the partition of which amongst the tribes lies at the bottom
of the allusive metaphor of my text, was given to them under the
sanction of a supernatural defence; and the law of their continuance in
it was that they should trust and serve the unseen King. It was He,
according to the theocratic theory of the Old Testament, and not
chariots and horses, their own arm and their own sword, that kept them
safe, though the enemies on the north and the enemies on the south were
big enough to swallow up the little kingdom at a mouthful.

And so, says the Psalmist allusively, in a similar manner, the Divine
Power surrounds the man who chooses God for his heritage, and nothing
shall take that heritage from him.

The lower forms of possession, by which men are called the owners of
material goods, are imperfect, because they are all precarious and
temporary. Nothing really belongs to a man if it can be taken from him.
What we may lose we can scarcely be said to have. They _are_ mine, they
_were_ yours, they _will be_ somebody else's to-morrow. Whilst we have
them we do not have them in any deep sense; we cannot retain them, they
are not really ours at all. The only thing that is worth calling mine is
something that so passes into and saturates the very substance of my
soul that, like a piece of cloth dyed in the grain, as long as two
threads hold together the tint will be there. That is how God gives us
Himself, and nothing can take Him out of a man's soul. He, in the
sweetness of His grace, bestows Himself upon man, and guards His own
gift in the heart, which is Himself. He who dwells in God and God in him
lives as in the inmost keep and citadel. The noise of battle may roar
around the walls, but deep silence and peace are within. The storm may
rage upon the coasts, but he who has God for his portion dwells in a
quiet inland valley where tempests never come. No outer changes can
touch our possession of God. They belong to another region altogether.
Other goods may go, but this is held by a different tenure. The life of
a Christian is lived in two regions: in the one his life has its roots,
and its branches extend to the other. In the one there may be whirling
storms and branches may toss and snap, whilst in the other, to which the
roots go down, may be peace. Root yourselves in God, making Him your
truest treasure, and nothing can rob you of your wealth.

We here in this commercial community see many examples of great fortunes
and great businesses melting away like yesterday's snow. And surely the
certain alternations of 'booms' and bad times might preach to some of
you this lesson: Set not your hearts on that which can pass, but make
your treasure that which no man can take from you.

Then, too, there is the other thought. God will help us so that no
temptations shall have power to make us rob _ourselves_ of our treasure.
None can take it from us but ourselves, but we are so weak and
surrounded by temptations so strong that we need Him to aid us if we are
not to be beguiled by our own treacherous hearts into parting with our
highest good. A handful of feeble Jews were nothing against the gigantic
might of Assyria, or against the compacted strength of civilised Egypt;
but there they stood, on their rocky mountains, defended, not by their
own strength, but by the might of a present God. And so, unfit to cope
with the temptations round us as we are, if we cast ourselves upon His
power and make Him our supreme delight, nothing shall be able to rob us
of that possession and that sweetness.

And there is just one last point that I would refer to here on this
matter of our stable possession of God. It is very beautiful to observe
that this psalm, which, in the language of my text, rises to the very
height of spiritual and, in a good sense, mystical devotion, recognising
God as the One Good for souls, is also one of the psalms which has the
clearest utterance of the faith in immortality. Just after the words of
my text we read these others, in which the Old Testament confidence in a
life beyond the grave reaches its very climax: 'Thou wilt not leave my
soul in Sheol, neither wilt Thou suffer Thine holy one to see
corruption. Thou wilt show me the path of life; in Thy presence is
fulness of joy; at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.'

That connection teaches us that the measure in which a man feels his
true possession of God here and now, is the measure in which his faith
rises triumphant over the darkness of the grave, and grasps, with
unfaltering confidence, the conviction of an immortal life. The more we
know that God is our portion and our treasure, the more sure, and calmly
sure, we shall be that a thing like death cannot touch a thing like
that, that the mere physical fact is far too small and insignificant a
fact to have any power in such a region as that; that death can no more
affect a man's relation to God, whom he has learned to love and trust,
than you can cut thought or feeling with a knife. The two belong to two
different regions. Thus we have here the Old Testament faith in
immortality shaping itself out of the Old Testament enjoyment of
communion with God, with a present God. And you will find the very same
process of thought in that seventy-third psalm, which stands in some
respects side by side with this one as attaining the height of mystical
devotion, joined with a very clear utterance of the faith in
immortality: 'Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon
earth that I desire beside Thee! Thou wilt guide me with Thy counsel,
and afterwards receive me to glory.'

So Death himself cannot touch the heritage of the man whose heritage is
the Lord. And his ministry is not to rob us of our treasures as he robs
men of all treasures besides (for 'their glory shall not descend after
them'), but to give us instead of the 'earnest of the inheritance'--the
bit of turf by which we take possession of the estate--the broad land in
all the amplitude of its sweep, into our perpetual possession. 'Thou
maintainest my lot.' Neither death nor life 'shall separate us from the
love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.'

III. And then the last thought here is that he who thus elects to find
his treasure and delight in God is satisfied with his choice. 'The
lines'--the measuring-cord by which the estate was parted off and
determined--'are fallen in pleasant places; yea!'--not as our Bible has
it, merely 'I have a _goodly_ heritage,' putting emphasis on the fact of
possession, but--'the heritage is goodly to _me_,' putting emphasis on
the fact of subjective satisfaction with it.

I have no time to dwell upon the thoughts that spring from these words.
Take them in the barest outline. No man that makes the worse choice of
earth instead of God, ever, in the retrospect, said: 'I have a goodly
heritage.' One of the later Roman Emperors, who was among the best of
them, said, when he was dying: 'I have been everything, and it profits
me nothing.' No creature can satisfy your whole nature. Portions of it
may be fed with their appropriate satisfaction, but as long as we feed
on the things of earth there will always be part of our being like an
unfed tiger in a menagerie, growling for its prey, whilst its fellows
are satisfied for the moment. You can no more give your heart rest and
blessedness by pitching worldly things into it, than they could fill up
Chat Moss, when they made the first Liverpool and Manchester Railway, by
throwing in cartloads of earth. The bog swallowed them and was none the
nearer being filled.

No man who takes the world for his portion ever said, 'The lines are
fallen to me in pleasant places.' For the make of your soul as plainly
cries out 'God!' as a fish's fins declare that the sea is its element,
or a bird's wings mark it out as meant to soar. Man and God fit each
other like the two halves of a tally. You will never get rest nor
satisfaction, and you will never be able to look at the past with
thankfulness, nor at the present with repose, nor into the future with
hope, unless you can say, 'God is the strength of my heart, and my
portion for ever.' But oh! if you do, then you have a goodly heritage, a
heritage of still satisfaction, a heritage which suits, and gratifies,
and expands all the powers of a man's nature, and makes him ever capable
of larger and larger possession of a God who ever gives more than we can
receive, that the overplus may draw us to further desire, and the
further desire may more fully be satisfied.

The one true, pure, abiding joy is to hold fellowship with God and to
live in His love. The secret of all our unrest is the going out of our
desires after earthly things. They fly forth from our hearts like Noah's
raven, and nowhere amid all the weltering flood can find a
resting-place. The secret of satisfied repose is to set our affections
thoroughly on God. Then our wearied hearts, like Noah's dove returning
to its rest, will fold their wings and nestle fast by the throne of God.
'All the happiness of this life,' said William Law, 'is but trying to
quench thirst out of golden _empty_ cups.' But if we will take the Lord
for 'the portion of our cup,' we shall never thirst.

Let me beseech you to choose God in Christ for your supreme good and
highest portion; and having chosen, to cleave to your choice. So shall
you enter on possession of good that truly shall be yours, even 'that
good part, which shall not be taken away from' you.

And, lastly, remember that if you would have God, you must take Christ.
He is the true Joshua, who puts us in possession of the inheritance. He
brings God to you--to your knowledge, to your love, to your will. He
brings you to God, making it possible for your poor sinful souls to
enter His presence by His blood; and for your spirits to possess that
divine Guest. 'He that hath the Son, hath the Father'; and if you trust
your souls to Him who died for you, and cling to Him as your delight and
your joy, you will find that both the Father and the Son come to you and
make their home in you. Through Christ the Son you will receive power to
become sons of God, and 'if children, then heirs, heirs of God,' because
'joint heirs with Christ.'




GOD WITH US, AND WE WITH GOD


    'I have set the Lord always before me: because He is at my right
    hand, I shall not be moved.... 11. In Thy presence is fulness of
    joy; at Thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.'
    --PSALM xvi. 8, 11.


There are, unquestionably, large tracts of the Old Testament in which
the anticipation of immortality does not appear, and there are others in
which its presence may be doubtful. But here there can be no hesitation,
I think, as to the meaning of these words. If we regard them carefully,
we shall not only see clearly the Psalmist's hope of immortal life, but
shall discern the process by which he came to it, and almost his very
act of grasping at it; for the first verse of our text is manifestly the
foundation of the second; and the facts of the one are the basis of the
hopes of the other. That is made plain by the 'therefore' which, in one
of the intervening verses, links the concluding rapturous anticipations
with the previous expressions.

If, then, we observe that here, in these two verses which I have read,
there is a very remarkable parallelism, we shall get still more
strikingly the connection between the devout life here and the
perfecting of the same hereafter. Note how, even in our translation, the
latter verse is largely an echo of the former, and how much more
distinctly that is the case if we make a little variation in the
rendering, which brings it closer to the original. 'I have set the Lord
always _before me_,' says the one,--that is the present. 'In Thy
_presence_ is fulness of joy,' says the other,--that is the consequent
future. And the two words, which are rendered in the one case 'before
me' and in the other case 'in Thy presence,' are, though not identical,
so precisely synonymous that we may take them as meaning the same thing.
So we might render 'I have set the Lord always before _my_ face':
'Before _Thy_ face is fulness of joy.' The other clause is, to an
English reader, more obviously parallel: 'Because He is at _my right
hand_ I shall not be moved'--shall be steadied here. 'At _Thy right_
hand are pleasures for evermore'--the steadfastness here merges into
eternal delights hereafter.

So then, we have two conditions set before us, and the link between them
made very plain. And I gather all that I have to say about these words
into two statements. First, life here may be God's presence with us, to
make us steadfast. And secondly, if so, life hereafter will be our
presence with God to make us glad. That is the Psalmist's teaching, and
I will try to enforce it.

I. First, then, life here may be God's presence with us, to make us
steadfast.

Mark the Psalmist's language. 'I have set the Lord always _in front of_
me--before my face.' Emphasis is placed on 'set' and 'always.' God is
ever by our sides, but we may be very far away from Him, 'though He be
not far off from every one of us,' and if we are to have Him blazing,
clear and unobscured above and beyond all the mists and hubbub of earth,
we shall need continual effort in order to keep Him in our sight. 'I
have set the Lord'--He permits me to put out my hand, as it were, and
station Him where I want Him, that I may always have Him in my sight,
and be able to look at Him and be calm and blessed.

You cannot do that, if you let the world, and wealth, and business, and
anxieties, and ambitions, and cares, and sorrows, and duties, and family
responsibilities, jostle and hustle Him out of your minds and hearts.
You cannot do it if, like John Bunyan's man with the muckrake, you keep
your eyes always down on the straw at your feet, and never lift them to
the crown above. How many men in Manchester walk its streets from year's
end to year's end, and never look up to the sky except to see whether
they must take their umbrellas with them or not? And so all the
magnificence and beauty of the daily heavens, and the nightly gemming of
the empty places with perpetually burning stars, are lost to them! So,
God is blazing there in front of us, but unless we set ourselves to it,
we shall never see Him. You have to look, by a conscious effort, over
and away from the things that are 'seen and temporal' if you want to see
the things that are 'unseen and eternal.'

But if you disturb the whole tenor of your being by agitations and
distractions and petty cares, or if you defile it by sensual and fleshly
lusts, and animal propensities gratified, and poor, miserable, worldly
ambitions and longings filling up your souls, then God can no more be
visible before your face than the blessed sun can mirror himself in a
storm-tossed sea or in a muddy puddle. The heart must be pure, and the
heart must be still, and the mind must be detached from earth, and glued
to Heaven, and the glasses of the telescope must be sedulously cleansed
from dust, if we are to be blessed with the vision of God continuously
before our face.

Then note, still further, that if thus we have made God present with us,
by realising the fact of His presence, when He comes, He comes with His
hands full. 'I have set the Lord always before me,' says the Psalmist.
And then he goes on to say, 'Because He is at my right hand.' Not only
in front of you, then, David, to be looked at, but at your side! What
for? What do we summon some one to come and stand beside us for? In
order that from his presence there may come help and succour and courage
and confidence. And so God comes to the right hand of the man who
honestly endeavours through all the confusions and bustles of life to
realise His sweet and calming presence. Where He comes He comes to help;
not to be a spectator, but an ally in the warfare; and whoever sets the
Lord before him will have the Lord at his right hand.

And then, note, still further, the steadfastness which God brings. I
have spoken of the effort which brings God. I speak now of the
steadfastness which He brings by His coming. The Psalmist's anticipation
is a singularly modest one. 'Because He is at my right hand I
shall'--What? Be triumphant? No! Escape sorrows? No! Have my life filled
with serenity? No! 'I shall not be moved.' That is the best I can hope
for. To be able to stand on the spot, with steadfast convictions, with
steadfast purposes, with steadfast actions--continuously in one
direction; 'having overcome all, to stand'--that is as much as the best
of us can desire or expect, in this poor struggling life of ours.

What a profound consciousness of inward weakness and of outward
antagonism there breathes in that humble and modest hope, as being the
loftiest result of the presence of Omnipotence for our aid: 'I shall not
be moved'! When we think of our inner weakness, when we remember the
fluctuations of our feelings and emotions, when we compare the ups and
downs of our daily life, or when we think of the larger changes covering
years, which affect all our outlooks, our thoughts, our plans; and how

  'We all are changed by still degrees,
   All but the basis of the soul,'

it is much to say, 'I shall not be moved.' And when we think of the
obstacles that surround us, of the storms that dash against us, how we
are swept by surges of emotion that wash away everything before their
imperious onrush, or swayed by blasts of temptation that break down the
strongest defences, or smitten by the shocks of change and sorrow that
crush the firmest hearts, it is much to say, in the face of a world
pressing upon us with the force of the wind in a cyclone, that our poor,
feeble reed shall stand upright and 'not be moved' in the fiercest
blast. 'What went ye out for to see?' 'A reed shaken with the
wind'--that is humanity. 'Behold! I have made thee an iron pillar and
brazen walls, and they shall fight against thee, but they shall not
prevail'--that is weak man, stiffened into uprightness, and rooted in
steadfastness by the touch of the hand of a present God.

And, brother! there is nothing else that will stay a man's soul. The
holdfast cannot be a part of the chain. It must be fastened to a fixed
point. The anchor that is to keep the ship of your life from dragging
and finding itself, when the morning breaks, a ghastly wreck upon the
reef, must be outside of yourself, and the cable of it must be wrapped
round the throne of God. The anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast,
which will neither break nor drag, can only be firm when it 'enters into
that within the veil.' God, and God only, can thus make us strong! So,
dear friends, let us see to it that we fasten our aims and purposes, our
faith and love, our submission and obedience, upon that mighty Helper
who will be with us and make us strong, that we may 'stand fast in the
Lord and in the power of His might.'

II. Now, secondly, notice how, if so, life hereafter will be our
presence with God, to make us glad.

I have already pointed out briefly the connection between these two
portions of my text, and I need only remark here that the link which
holds them together is very obvious. If a man loves God, and trusts Him,
and 'walks with Him,' after the fashion described in our former verse,
then there will spring up, irrepressible and unconquerable, a conviction
in that man's soul that this sweet and strong communion, which makes so
much of the blessedness of life, must last after death. Anything is
conceivable rather than that a man who walks with God shall cease to be!
Rather, when he 'is not' any more 'found' among men, it is only because
'God took him.' Thus the emotions and experiences of a truly devout soul
are (apart from the great revelation in Jesus Christ which hath brought
'life and immortality to light') the best evidence and confirmation of
the anticipation of immortal life. It cannot be, unless our whole
intellectual faculties are to be put into utter confusion, that such an
experience as that of the man who loves God, and tries to trust Him, and
walk before Him, is destined to be brought to nothingness with the mere
dissolution of this earthly frame. The greatness and the smallness, the
achievements and the failures, of the religious life as we see it here,
all bear upon their front the mark of imperfection, and in their
imperfection prophesy and proclaim a future completion. Because it is so
great in itself, and because, being so great, its developments and
influence are so strangely and sadly checked, the faith that knits a man
to Christ demands eternity for its duration, and infinitude for its
perfection. Thus, he that says 'I have set the Lord always before me,'
goes on to say, with an undeniable accuracy of inference, 'Therefore
Thou wilt not leave my soul in the under world.' God is not going to
forget the soul that clave to Him, and anything is believable sooner
than that.

Our texts not only assert this connection and base the confidence of
immortality on the present experiences of the spirit that trusts in God,
but also give the outline, at least, of the correspondences between the
imperfections of the present and the perfectnesses of the future. And I
cast this into two or three words before I close.

This is the first of them. If you will turn your faces to God, amidst
all the flaunting splendours and vain shows and fleeting possessions of
this present, His face will dawn on you yonder. We can say but little of
what is meant by such a hope as that. But only this we can say, that
there will be, as yet unimaginable, new wealths of revelation of the
Father, and to match them, as yet unimaginable new inlets of
apprehension and perception upon our parts, so that the sweetest,
clearest, closest, most satisfying vision of God that has ever dawned on
sad souls here, shall be but 'as in a glass darkly' compared with that
face to face sight. We live away out on the far-off outskirts of the
system where those great planets plough along their slow orbits, and
turn their languid rotations at distances that imagination faints in
contemplating, and the light and the heat and the life that reach them
are infinitesimally small. We shall be shifted into the orb that is
nearest the sun; and oh! what a rapture of light and life and heat will
come to our amazed spirits: 'I have set the Lord always before me.'
Twilight though the light has been, I have tried to keep it. I shall be
of the sons of light close to the Throne and shall see Thy face. I shall
be satisfied when I wake out of this sleep of life into Thy likeness.

Then, again, if you will keep God at your right hand here, He will set
you on His hereafter. Keep Him here for your Companion, for your Ally,
for your Advocate, to breathe strength into you by the touch of His
hand, as some feeble man, leaning upon a stronger arm, may be upheld. If
you will do that, then the place where the favoured servants stand will
be yours; the place where trusted counsellors stand will be yours; the
place where the sheep stand will be yours; the place where the Shepherd
sits will be yours; for He to whom it is said, 'Sit Thou at My right
hand till I make Thine enemies Thy footstool,' says to us, 'Where I am
there shall also My servant be.' Keep God by your sides, and you will be
lifted to Christ's place at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

Lastly, if we let ourselves be stayed by God amidst the struggle and
difficulty, we shall be gladdened by Him with perpetual joys. The
emphasis of the last words of my text is rather on the adjectives than
on the nouns--_full_ joy, _eternal_ pleasure. And how both
characteristics contradict the experiences of earth, even the gladdest,
which we fain would make permanent! For I suppose that no earthly joy is
either central, reaching the deepest self, or circumferential, embracing
the whole being of a man, but that only God can so go into the depths of
my soul as that from His throne there He can flood the whole of my
nature with felicity and peace. In all other gladnesses there is always
in the landscape one bit of sullen shadow somewhere or other,
unparticipant of the light, while all around is blazing. And we need
that He should come to make us blessed.

Joys here are no more lasting than they are complete. As one who only
too sadly proved the truth of his own words, burning out his life before
he was six-and-thirty, has said--

  'Pleasures are like poppies spread,
   You seize the flower, its bloom is shed!
   Or like the snowflake in the river.
   A moment white--then gone for ever.'

Oh! my friend, 'why do ye spend your money for that which is not bread?'
The life of faith on earth is the beginning, and only the beginning, of
that life of calm and complete felicity in the heavenly places.

I have shown you the ladder's foot, 'I have set the Lord always before
me.' The top round reaches the throne of God, and whoever begins at the
bottom, and holds fast the beginning of his confidence firm unto the
end, for him the great promise of the Master will come true, and
Christ's 'joy will remain in him and his joy shall be full.'




THE TWO AWAKINGS


    'I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness.'
    --PSALM xvii. 15.

    'As a dream when one awaketh; so, O Lord, when Thou awakest, Thou
    shalt despise their image.'--PSALM lxxiii. 20.

Both of these Psalms are occupied with that standing puzzle to Old
Testament worthies--the good fortune of bad men, and the bad fortune of
good ones. The former recounts the personal calamities of David, its
author. The latter gives us the picture of the perplexity of Asaph its
writer, when he 'saw the prosperity of the wicked.'

And as the problem in both is substantially the same, the solution also
is the same. David and Asaph both point onwards to a period when this
confusing distribution of earthly good shall have ceased, though the one
regards that period chiefly in its bearing upon himself as the time when
he shall see God and be at rest, while the other thinks of it rather
with reference to the godless rich as the time of their destruction.

In the details of this common expectation, also, there is a remarkable
parallelism. Both describe the future to which they look as an awaking,
and both connect with it, though in different ways and using different
words, the metaphor of an image or likeness. In the one case, the future
is conceived as the Psalmist's awaking, and losing all the vain show of
this dreamland of life, while he is at rest in beholding the appearance,
and perhaps in receiving the likeness, of the one enduring Substance,
God. In the other, it is thought of as God's awaking, and putting to
shame the fleeting shadow of well-being with which godless men befool
themselves.

What this period of twofold awaking may be is a question on which good
men and thoughtful students of Scripture differ. Without entering on the
wide subject of the Jewish knowledge of a future state, it may be enough
for the present purpose to say that the language of both these Psalms
seems much too emphatic and high-pitched, to be fully satisfied by a
reference to anything in this life. It certainly looks as if the great
awaking which David puts in immediate contrast with the death of 'men of
this world,' and which solaced his heart with the confident expectation
of beholding God, of full satisfaction of all his being, and possibly
even of wearing the divine likeness, pointed onwards, however dimly, to
that 'within the veil.' And as for the other psalm, though the awaking
of God is, no doubt, a Scriptural phrase for His ending of any period of
probation and indulgence by an act of judgment, yet the strong words in
which the context describes this awaking, as the 'destruction' and the
'end' of the godless, make it most natural to take it as here referring
to the final close of the probation of life. That conclusion appears to
be strengthened by the contrast which in subsequent verses is drawn
between this 'end' of the worldling, and the poet's hopes for himself of
divine guidance in life, and afterwards of being taken (the same word as
is used in the account of Enoch's translation) by God into His presence
and glory--hopes whose exuberance it is hard to confine within the
limits of any changes possible for earth.

The doctrine of a future state never assumed the same prominence, nor
possessed the same clearness in Israel as with us. There are great
tracts of the Old Testament where it does not appear at all. This very
difficulty, about the strange disproportion between character and
circumstances, shows that the belief had not the same place with them as
with us. But it gradually emerged into comparative distinctness.
Revelation is progressive, and the appropriation of revelation is
progressive too. There is a history of God's self-manifestation, and
there is a history of man's reception of the manifestation. It seems to
me that in these two psalms, as in other places of Old Testament
Scripture, we see inspired men in the very course of being taught by
God, on occasion of their earthly sorrows, the clearer hopes which alone
could sustain them. They stood not where we stand, to whom Christ has
'brought life and immortality to light'; but to their devout and
perplexed souls, the dim regions beyond were partially opened, and
though they beheld there a great darkness, they also 'saw a great
light.' They saw all this solid world fade and melt, and behind its
vanishing splendours they saw the glory of the God whom they loved, in
the midst of which they felt that there _must_ be a place for them,
where eternal realities should fill their vision, and a stable
inheritance satisfy their hearts.

The period, then, to which both David and Asaph look, in these two
verses, is the end of life. The words of both, taken in combination,
open out a series of aspects of that period which carry weighty lessons,
and to which we turn now.

I. The first of these is that to all men the end of Life is an awaking.

The representation of death most widely diffused among all nations is
that it is a sleep. The reasons for that emblem are easily found. We
always try to veil the terror and deformity of the ugly thing by the
thin robe of language. As with reverential awe, so with fear and
disgust, the tendency is to wrap their objects in the folds of metaphor.
Men prefer not to name plainly their god or their dread, but find
roundabout phrases for the one, and coaxing, flattering titles for the
other. The furies and the fates of heathenism, the supernatural beings
of modern superstition, must not be spoken of by their own appellations.
The recoil of men's hearts from the thing is testified by the aversion
of their languages to the bald name--death. And the employment of this
special euphemism of sleep is a wonderful witness to our weariness of
life, and to its endless toil and trouble. Everywhere that has seemed to
be a comforting and almost an attractive name, which has promised full
rest from all the agitations of this changeful scene. The prosperous and
the wretched alike have owned the fatigue of living, and been conscious
of a soothing expectance which became almost a hope, as they thought of
lying still at last with folded hands and shut eyes. The wearied workers
have bent over their dead, and felt that they are blest in this at all
events, that they rest from their labours; and as they saw them absolved
from all their tasks, have sought to propitiate the power that had made
this ease for them, as well as to express their sense of its merciful
aspect, by calling it not death, but sleep.

But that emblem, true and sweet as it is, is but half the truth. Taken
as the whole, as indeed men are ever tempted to take it, it is a
cheerless lie. It is truth for the senses--'the foolish senses,' who
'crown' Death, as 'Omega,' the last, 'the Lord,' because '_they_ find no
_motion_ in the dead.' Rest, cessation of consciousness of the outer
world, and of action upon it, are set forth by the figure. But even the
figure might teach us that the consciousness of life, and the vivid
exercise of thought and feeling, are not denied by it. Death is sleep.
Be it so. But does not that suggest the doubt--'in that sleep, what
dreams may come?' Do we not all know that, when the chains of slumber
bind sense, and the disturbance of the outer world is hushed, there are
faculties of our souls which work more strongly than in our waking
hours? We are all poets, 'makers' in our sleep. Memory and imagination
open their eyes when flesh closes it. We can live through years in the
dreams of a night; so swiftly can spirit move when even partially freed
from 'this muddy vesture of decay.' That very phrase, then, which at
first sight seems the opposite of the representation of our text, in
reality is preparatory to and confirmatory of it. That very
representation which has lent itself to cheerless and heathenish
thoughts of death as the cessation not only of toil but of activity, is
the basis of the deeper and truer representation, the truth for the
spirit, that death is an awaking. If, on the one hand, we have to say,
as we anticipate the approaching end of life, 'The night cometh, when no
man can work'; on the other the converse is true, 'The night is far
spent; the day is at hand.'

We shall sleep. Yes; but we shall wake too. We shall wake just because
we sleep. For flesh and all its weakness, and all its disturbing
strength, and craving importunities--for the outer world, and all its
dissipating garish shows, and all its sullen resistance to our hand--for
weariness, and fevered activity and toil against the grain of our
tastes, too great for our strength, disappointing in its results, the
end is blessed, calm sleep. And precisely because it is so, therefore
for our true selves, for heart and mind, for powers that lie dormant in
the lowest, and are not stirred into full action in the highest, souls;
for all that universe of realities which encompass us undisclosed, and
known only by faint murmurs which pierce through the opiate sleep of
life, the end shall be an awaking.

The truth which corresponds to this metaphor, and which David felt when
he said, 'I shall be satisfied when I awake,' is that the spirit,
because emancipated from the body, shall spring into greater intensity
of action, shall put forth powers that have been held down here and
shall come into contact with an order of things which here it has but
indirectly known. To our true selves and to God we shall wake. Here we
are like men asleep in some chamber that looks towards the eastern sky.
Morning by morning comes the sunrise, with the tender glory of its rosy
light and blushing heavens, and the heavy eyes are closed to it all.
Here and there some lighter sleeper, with thinner eyelids or face turned
to the sun, is half conscious of a vague brightness, and feels the
light, though he sees not the colours of the sky nor the forms of the
filmy clouds. Such souls are our saints and prophets, but most of us
sleep on unconscious. To us all the moment comes when we shall wake and
see for ourselves the bright and terrible world which we have so often
forgotten, and so often been tempted to think was itself a dream.
Brethren, see to it that that awaking be for you the beholding of what
you have loved, the finding, in the sober certainty of waking bliss, of
all the objects which have been your visions of delight in the sleep of
earth.

This life of ours hides more than it reveals. The day shows the sky as
solitary but for wandering clouds that cover its blue emptiness. But the
night peoples its waste places with stars, and fills all its abysses
with blazing glories. 'If light so much conceals, wherefore not life?'
Let us hold fast by a deeper wisdom than is born of sense; and though
men, nowadays, seem to be willing to go back to the 'eternal sleep' of
the most unspiritual heathenism, and to cast away all that Christ has
brought us concerning that world where He has been and whence He has
returned, because positive science and the anatomist's scalpel preach no
gospel of a future, let us try to feel as well as to believe that it is
life, with all its stunted capacities and idle occupation with baseless
fabrics, which is the sleep, and that for us all the end of it is--to
awake.

II. The second principle contained in our text is that death is to some
men the awaking of God.

'When Thou awakest, Thou shalt despise their image.' Closely rendered,
the former clause would read simply 'in awaking,' without any specifying
of the person, which is left to be gathered from the succeeding words.
But there is no doubt that the English version fills the blank correctly
by referring the awaking to God.

The metaphor is not infrequent in the Old Testament, and, like many
others applying to the divine nature, is saved from any possibility of
misapprehension by the very boldness of its materialism. It has a
well-marked and uniform meaning. God 'awakes' when He ends an epoch of
probation and long-suffering mercy by an act or period of judgment. So
far, then, as the mere expression is concerned, there may be nothing
more meant here than the termination by a judicial act in this life, of
the transient 'prosperity of the wicked.' Any divinely-sent catastrophe
which casts the worldly rich man down from his slippery eminence would
satisfy the words. But the emphatic context seems, as already pointed
out, to require that they should be referred to that final crash which
irrevocably separates him who has 'his portion in this life,' from all
which he calls his 'goods.'

If so, then the whole period of earthly existence is regarded as the
time of God's gracious forbearance and mercy; and the time of death is
set forth as the instant when sterner elements of the divine dealings
start into greater prominence. Life here is predominantly, though not
exclusively, the field for the manifestation of patient love, not
willing that any should perish. To the godless soul, immersed in
material things, and blind to the light of God's wooing love, the
transition to that other form of existence is likewise the transition to
the field for the manifestation of the retributive energy of God's
righteousness. Here and now His judgment on the whole slumbers. The
consequences of our deeds are inherited, indeed, in many a merciful
sorrow, in many a paternal chastisement, in many a partial
exemplification of the wages of sin as death. But the harvest is not
fully grown nor ripened yet; it is not reaped in all its extent; the
bitter bread is not baked and eaten as it will have to be. Nor are men's
consciences so awakened that they connect the retribution, which does
befall them, with its causes in their own actions, as closely as they
will do when they are removed from the excitement of life and the deceit
of its dreams. 'Sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily.'
For the long years of our stay here, God's seeking love lingers round
every one of us, yearning over us, besetting us behind and before,
courting us with kindnesses, lavishing on us its treasures, seeking to
win our poor love. It is sometimes said that this is a state of
probation. But that phrase suggests far too cold an idea. God does not
set us here as on a knife edge, with abysses on either side ready to
swallow us if we stumble, while He stands apart watching for our
halting, and unhelpful to our tottering feebleness. He compasses us with
His love and its gifts, He draws us to Himself, and desires that we
should stand. He offers all the help of His angels to hold us up. 'He
will not suffer thy foot to be moved; He that keepeth thee will not
slumber.' The judgment sleeps; the loving forbearance, the gracious aid
wake. Shall we not yield to His perpetual pleadings, and, moved by the
mercies of God, let His conquering love thaw our cold hearts into
streams of thankfulness and self-devotion?

But remember, that that predominantly merciful and long-suffering
character of God's present dealing affords no guarantee that there will
not come a time when His slumbering judgment will stir to waking. The
same chapter which tells us that 'He is long-suffering to us-ward, not
willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance,'
goes on immediately to repel the inference that therefore a period of
which retribution shall be the characteristic is impossible, by the
solemn declaration, '_But_ the day of the Lord shall come as a thief in
the night.' His character remains ever the same, the principles of His
government are unalterable, but there may be variations in the
prominence given in His acts, to the several principles of the one, and
the various though harmonious phases of the other. The method may be
changed, the purpose may remain unchanged. And the Bible, which is our
only source of knowledge on the subject, tells us that the method _is_
changed, in so far as to intensify the vigour of the operation of
retributive justice after death, so that men who have been compassed
with 'the loving-kindness of the Lord,' and who die leaving worldly
things, and keeping worldly hearts, will have to confront 'the terror of
the Lord.'

The alternation of epochs of tolerance and destruction is in accordance
with the workings of God's providence here and now. For though the
characteristic of that providence as we see it is merciful forbearance,
yet we are not left without many a premonition of the mighty final 'day
of the Lord.' For long years or centuries a nation or an institution
goes on slowly departing from truth, forgetting the principles on which
it rests, or the purposes for which it exists. Patiently God pleads with
the evil-doers, lavishes gifts and warnings upon them. He holds back the
inevitable avenging as long as restoration is yet possible--and _His_
eye and heart see it to be possible long after men conclude that the
corruption is hopeless. But at last comes a period when He says, 'I have
long still holden My peace, and refrained Myself, now will I destroy';
and with a crash one more hoary iniquity disappears from the earth which
it has burdened so long. For sixty times sixty slow, throbbing seconds,
the silent hand creeps unnoticed round the dial and then, with whirr and
clang, the bell rings out, and another hour of the world's secular day
is gone. The billows of the thunder-cloud slowly gather into vague form,
and slowly deepen in lurid tints, and slowly roll across the fainting
blue; they touch--and then the fierce flash, like the swift hand on the
palace-wall of Babylon, writes its message of destruction over all the
heaven at once. We know enough from the history of men and nations since
Sodom till to-day, to recognise it as God's plan to alternate long
patience and 'sudden destruction':--

  'The mills of God grind slowly,
   But they grind exceeding small';

and every such instance confirms the expectation of the coming of that
great and terrible day of the Lord, whereof all epochs of convulsion and
ruin, all falls of Jerusalem, and Roman empires, Reformations, and
French Revolutions, and American wars, all private and personal
calamities which come from private wrong-doing, are but feeble
precursors. 'When Thou awakest, Thou wilt despise their image.'

Brethren, do we use aright this goodness of God which is the
characteristic of the present? Are we ready for that judgment which is
the mark of the future?

III. Death is the annihilation of the vain show of worldly life.

The word rendered _image_ is properly shadow, and hence copy or
likeness, and hence image. Here, however, the simpler meaning is the
better. 'Thou shalt despise their shadow.' The men are shadows, and all
their goods are not what they are called, their 'substance,' but their
_shadow_, a mere appearance, not a reality. That show of good which
seems but is not, is withered up by the light of the awaking God. What
He despises cannot live.

So there are the two old commonplaces of moralists set forth in these
grand words--the unsatisfying character of all merely external delights
and possessions, and also their transitory character. They are
non-substantial and non-permanent.

Nothing that is without a man can make him rich or restful. The
treasures which are kept in coffers are not real, but only those which
are kept in the soul. Nothing which cannot enter into the substance of
the life and character can satisfy us. That which we are makes us rich
or poor, that which we own is a trifle.

There is no congruity between any outward thing and man's soul, of such
a kind as that satisfaction can come from its possession. 'Cisterns that
can hold no water,' 'that which is not bread,' 'husks that the swine did
eat'--these are not exaggerated phrases for the good gifts which God
gives for our delight, and which become profitless and delusive by our
exclusive attachment to them. There is no need for exaggeration. These
worldly possessions have a good in them, they contribute to ease and
grace in life, they save from carking cares and mean anxieties, they add
many a comfort and many a source of culture. But, after all, a true,
lofty life may be lived with a very small modicum. There is no
proportion between wealth and happiness, nor between wealth and
nobleness. The fairest life that ever lived on earth was that of a poor
Man, and with all its beauty it moved within the limits of narrow
resources. The loveliest blossoms do not grow on plants that plunge
their greedy roots into the fattest soil. A little light earth in the
crack of a hard rock will do. We need enough for the physical being to
root itself in; we need no more.

Young men! especially you who are plunged into the busy life of our
great commercial centres, and are tempted by everything you see, and by
most that you hear, to believe that a prosperous trade and hard cash are
the realities, and all else mist and dreams, fix this in your mind to
begin life with--God is the reality, all else is shadow. Do not make it
your ambition to get _on_, but to get _up_. 'Having food and raiment,
let us be content.' Seek for your life's delight and treasure in
thought, in truth, in pure affections, in moderate desires, in a spirit
set on God. These are the realities of our possessions. As for all the
rest, it is sham and show.

And while thus all without is unreal, it is also fleeting as the shadows
of the flying clouds; and when God awakes, it disappears as they before
the noonlight that clears the heavens. All things that are, are on
condition of perpetual flux and change. The cloud-rack has the likeness
of bastions and towers, but they are mist, not granite, and the wind is
every moment sweeping away their outlines, till the phantom fortress
topples into red ruin while we gaze. The tiniest stream eats out its
little valley and rounds the pebble in its widening bed, rain washes
down the soil, and frost cracks the cliffs above. So silently and yet
mightily does the law of change work that to a meditative eye the solid
earth seems almost molten and fluid, and the everlasting mountains
tremble to decay.

'Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not?' Are we going to be
such fools as to fix our hopes and efforts upon this fleeting order of
things, which can give no delight more lasting than itself? Even whilst
we are in it, it continueth not in one stay, and we are in it for such a
little while! Then comes what our text calls God's awaking, and where is
it all then? Gone like a ghost at cockcrow. Why! a drop of blood on your
brain or a crumb of bread in your windpipe, and as far as you are
concerned the outward heavens and earth 'pass away with a great'
silence, as the impalpable shadows that sweep over some lone hillside.

  'The glories of our birth and state
     Are shadows, not substantial things;
   There is no armour against fate,
     Death lays his icy hand on kings.'

What an awaking to a worldly man that awaking of God will be! 'As when a
hungry man dreameth, and behold he eateth, but he awaketh and his soul
is empty.' He has thought he fed full, and was rich and safe, but in one
moment he is dragged from it all, and finds himself a starving pauper,
in an order of things for which he has made no provision. 'When he
dieth, he shall carry nothing away.' Let us see to it that not in utter
nakedness do we go hence, but clothed with that immortal robe, and rich
in those possessions that cannot be taken away from us, which they have
who have lived on earth as heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. Let
us pierce, for the foundation of our life's house, beneath the shifting
sands of time down to the Rock of Ages, and build there.

IV. Finally, death is for some men the annihilation of the vain shows in
order to reveal the great reality.

'I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness.'

'Likeness' is properly 'form,' and is the same word which is employed in
reference to Moses, who saw 'the similitude of the Lord.' If there be,
as is most probable, an allusion to that ancient vision in these words,
then the 'likeness' is not that conformity to the divine character which
it is the goal of our hopes to possess, but the beholding of His
self-manifestation. The parallelism of the verse also points to such an
interpretation.

If so, then, we have here the blessed confidence that when all the
baseless fabric of the dream of life has faded from our opening eyes, we
shall see the face of our ever-loving God. Here the distracting whirl of
earthly things obscures Him from even the devoutest souls, and His own
mighty works which reveal do also conceal. In them is the hiding as well
as the showing of His power. But there the veil which draped the perfect
likeness, and gave but dim hints through its heavy swathings of the
outline of immortal beauty that lay beneath, shall fall away. No longer
befooled by shadows, we shall possess the true substance; no longer
bedazzled by shows, we shall behold the reality.

And seeing God we shall be satisfied. With all lesser joys the eye is
not satisfied with seeing, but to look on Him will be enough. Enough for
mind and heart, wearied and perplexed with partial knowledge and
imperfect love; enough for eager desires, which thirst, after all
draughts from other streams; enough for will, chafing against lower
lords and yet longing for authoritative control; enough for all my
being--to see God. Here we can rest after all wanderings, and say, 'I
travel no further; here will I dwell for ever--_I shall be satisfied_.'

And may these dim hopes not suggest to us too some presentiment of the
full Christian truth of assimilation dependent on vision, and of vision
reciprocally dependent on likeness? 'We shall be like Him, for we shall
see Him as He is,'--words which reach a height that David but partially
discerned through the mist. This much he knew, that he should in some
transcendent sense behold the manifested God; and this much more, that
it must be 'in righteousness' that he should gaze upon that face. The
condition of beholding the Holy One was holiness. We know that the
condition of holiness is trust in Christ. And as we reckon up the rich
treasure of our immortal hopes, our faith grows bold, and pauses not
even at the lofty certainty of God without us, known directly and
adequately, but climbs to the higher assurance of God within us,
flooding our darkness with His great light, and changing us into the
perfect copies of His express Image, His only-begotten Son. 'I shall be
satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness,' cries the prophet Psalmist.
'It is enough for the disciple that he be as his master,' responds the
Christian hope.

Brethren! take heed that the process of dissipating the vain shows of
earth be begun betimes in your souls. It must either be done by Faith,
whose rod disenchants them into their native nothingness, and then it is
blessed; or it must be done by death, whose mace smites them to dust,
and then it is pure, irrevocable loss and woe. Look away from, or rather
look through, things that are seen to the King eternal, invisible. Let
your hearts seek Christ, and your souls cleave to Him. Then death will
take away nothing from you that you would care to keep, but will bring
you your true joy. It will but trample to fragments the 'dome of
many-coloured glass' that 'stains the white radiance of eternity.'
Looking forward calmly to that supreme hour, you will be able to say, 'I
will both lay me down in peace and sleep, for Thou, Lord, only makest me
dwell in safety.' Looking back upon it from beyond, and wondering to
find how brief it was, and how close to Him whom you love it has brought
you, your now immortal lips touched by the rising Sun of the heavenly
morning will thankfully exclaim, 'When I awake, I am still with Thee.'




SECRET FAULTS


    'Who can understand his errors? cleanse Thou me from secret faults.'
         PSALM xix. 12.

The contemplation of the 'perfect law, enlightening the eyes,' sends the
Psalmist to his knees. He is appalled by his own shortcomings, and feels
that, beside all those of which he is aware, there is a region, as yet
unilluminated by that law, where evil things nestle and breed.

The Jewish ritual drew a broad distinction between inadvertent--whether
involuntary or ignorant--and deliberate sins; providing atonement for
the former, not for the latter. The word in my text rendered 'errors' is
closely connected with that which in the Levitical system designates the
former class of transgressions; and the connection between the two
clauses of the text, as well as that with the subsequent verse,
distinctly shows that the 'secret faults' of the one clause are
substantially synonymous with the 'errors' of the other.

They are, then, not sins hidden from men, whether because they have been
done quietly in a corner, and remain undetected, or because they have
only been in thought, never passing into act. Both of these pages are
dark in every man's memory. Who is there that could reveal himself to
men? who is there that could bear the sight of a naked soul? But the
Psalmist is thinking of a still more solemn fact, that, beyond the range
of conscience and consciousness, there are evils in us all. It may do us
good to ponder his discovery that he had undiscovered sins, and to take
for ours his prayer, 'Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.'

I. So I ask you to look with me, briefly, first, at the solemn fact
here, that there are in every man sins of which the doer is unaware.

It is with our characters as with our faces. Few of us are familiar with
our own appearance, and most of us, if we have looked at our portraits,
have felt a little shock of surprise, and been ready to say to
ourselves, 'Well! I did not know that I looked like that!' And the bulk
even of good men are almost as much strangers to their inward
physiognomy as to their outward. They see themselves in their
looking-glasses every morning, although they 'go away and forget what
manner of men' they were. But they do not see their true selves in the
same fashion in any other mirror. It is the very characteristic of all
evil that it has a strange power of deceiving a man as to its real
character; like the cuttle-fish, that squirts out a cloud of ink and so
escapes in the darkness and the dirt. The more a man goes wrong the less
he knows it. Conscience is loudest when it is least needed, and most
silent when most required.

Then, besides that, there is a great part of every one's life which is
mechanical, instinctive, and all but involuntary. Habits and emotions
and passing impulses very seldom come into men's consciousness, and an
enormously large proportion of everybody's life is done with the minimum
of attention, and is as little remembered as it is observed.

Then, besides that, conscience wants educating. You see that on a large
scale, for instance, in the history of the slow progress which Christian
principle has made in leavening the world's thinkings. It took eighteen
centuries to teach the Church that slavery was unchristian. The Church
has not yet learned that war is unchristian, and it is only beginning to
surmise that possibly Christian principle may have something to say in
social questions, and in the determination, for example, of the
relations of capital and labour, and of wealth and poverty. The very
same slowness of apprehension and gradual growth in the education of
conscience, and in the perception of the application of Christian
principles to duty, applies to the individual as to the Church.

Then, besides that, we are all biassed in our own favour, and what, when
another man says it, is 'flat blasphemy,' we think, when we say it, is
only 'a choleric word.' We have fine names for our own vices, and ugly
ones for the very same vices in other people. David will flare up into
generous and sincere indignation about the man that stole the poor man's
ewe lamb, but he has not the ghost of a notion that he has been doing
the very same thing himself. And so we bribe our consciences as well as
neglect them, and they need to be educated.

Thus, down below every life there lies a great dim region of habits and
impulses and fleeting emotions, into which it is the rarest thing for a
man to go with a candle in his hand to see what it is like.

But I can imagine a man saying, 'Well, if I do not know that I am doing
wrong, how can it be a sin?' In answer to that, I would say that, thank
God! ignorance diminishes criminality, but ignorance does not alter the
nature of the deed. Take a simple illustration. Here is a man who, all
unconsciously to himself, is allowing worldly prosperity to sap his
Christian character. He does not know that the great current of his life
has been turned aside, as it were, by that sluice, and is taken to drive
the wheels of his mill, and that there is only a miserable little
trickle coming down the river bed. Is he any less guilty because he does
not know? Is he not the more so, because he might and would have known
if he had thought and felt right? Or, here is another man who has the
habit of letting his temper get the better of him. He calls it 'stern
adherence to principle,' or 'righteous indignation'; and he thinks
himself very badly used when other people 'drive him' so often into a
temper. Other people know, and _he_ might know, if he would be honest
with himself, that, for all his fine names, it is nothing else than
passion. Is he any the less guilty because of his ignorance? It is plain
enough that, whilst ignorance, if it is absolute and inevitable, does
diminish criminality to the vanishing point, the ignorance of our own
faults which most of us display is neither absolute nor inevitable; and
therefore, though it may, thank God! diminish, it does not destroy our
guilt. 'She wipeth her mouth and saith, I have done no harm': was she,
therefore, chaste and pure? In all our hearts there are many vermin
lurking beneath the stones, and they are none the less poisonous because
they live and multiply in the dark. 'I know nothing against myself, yet
am I not hereby justified. But he that judgeth me is the Lord.'

II. Now, secondly, let me ask you to look at the special perilousness of
these hidden faults.

As with a blight upon a rose-tree, the little green creatures lurk on
the underside of the leaves, and in all the folds of the buds, and
because unseen, they increase with alarming rapidity. The very fact that
we have faults in our characters, which everybody sees but ourselves,
makes it certain that they will grow unchecked, and so will prove
terribly perilous. The small things of life are the great things of
life. For a man's character is made up of them, and of their results,
striking inwards upon himself. A wine-glassful of water with one drop of
mud in it may not be much obscured, but if you come to multiply it into
a lakeful, you will have muddy waves that reflect no heavens, and show
no gleaming stars.

These secret faults are like a fungus that has grown in a wine-cask,
whose presence nobody suspected. It sucks up all the generous liquor to
feed its own filthiness, and when the staves are broken, there is no
wine left, nothing but the foul growth. Many a Christian man and woman
has the whole Christian life arrested, and all but annihilated, by the
unsuspected influence of a secret sin. I do not believe it would be
exaggeration to say that, for one man who has made shipwreck of his
faith and lost his peace by reason of some gross transgression, there
are twenty who have fallen into the same condition by reason of the
multitude of small ones. 'He that despiseth little things shall fall by
little and little'; and whilst the deeds which the Ten Commandments
rebuke are damning to a Christian character, still more perilous,
because unseen, and permitted to grow without check or restraint, are
these unconscious sins. 'Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that
thing which he alloweth.'

III. Notice the discipline, or practical issues, to which such
considerations should lead.

To begin with, they ought to take down our self-complacency, if we have
any, and to make us feel that, after all, our characters are very poor
things. If men praise us, let us try to remember what it will be good
for us to remember, too, when we are tempted to praise ourselves--the
underworld of darkness which each of us carries about within us.

Further, let me press upon you two practical points. This whole set of
contemplations should make us practise a very rigid and close
self-inspection. There will always be much that will escape our
observation--we shall gradually grow to know more and more of it--but
there can be no excuse for that which I fear is a terribly common
characteristic of the professing Christianity of this day--the all but
entire absence of close inspection of one's own character and conduct. I
know very well that it is not a wholesome thing for a man to be always
poking in his own feelings and emotions. I know also that, in a former
generation, there was far too much introspection, instead of looking to
Jesus Christ and forgetting self. I do not believe that
self-examination, directed to the discovery of reasons for trusting the
sincerity of my own faith, is a good thing. But I do believe that,
without the practice of careful weighing of ourselves, there will be
very little growth in anything that is noble and good.

The old Greeks used to preach, 'Know thyself.' It was a high behest, and
very often a very vain-glorious one. A man's best means of knowing what
he is, is to take stock of what he does. If you will put your conduct
through the sieve, you will come to a pretty good understanding of your
character. 'He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city
broken down, without walls,' into which all enemies can leap unhindered,
and out from which all things that will may pass. Do you set guards at
the gates and watch yourselves with all carefulness.

Then, again, I would say we must try to diminish as much as possible the
mere instinctive and habitual and mechanical part of our lives, and to
bring, as far as we can, every action under the conscious dominion of
principle. The less we live by impulse, and the more we live by
intelligent reflection, the better it will be for us. The more we can
get habit on the side of goodness, the better; but the more we break up
our habits, and make each individual action the result of a special
volition of the spirit guided by reason and conscience, the better for
us all.

Then, again, I would say, set yourselves to educate your consciences.
They need that. One of the surest ways of making conscience more
sensitive is always to consult it and always to obey it. If you neglect
it, and let it prophesy to the wind, it will stop speaking before long.
Herod could not get a word out of Christ when he 'asked Him many
questions' because for years he had not cared to hear His voice. And
conscience, like the Lord of conscience, will hold its peace after men
have neglected its speech. You can pull the clapper out of the bell upon
the rock, and then, though the waves may dash, there will not be a
sound, and the vessel will drive straight on to the black teeth that are
waiting for it. Educate your conscience by obeying it, and by getting
into the habit of bringing everything to its bar.

And, still further, compare yourselves constantly with your model. Do as
the art students do in a gallery, take your poor daub right into the
presence of the masterpiece, and go over it line by line and tint by
tint. Get near Jesus Christ that you may learn your duty from Him, and
you will find out many of the secret sins.

And, lastly, let us ask God to cleanse us.

My text, as translated in the Revised Version, says, '_Clear_ Thou me
from secret faults.' And there is present in that word, if not
exclusively, at least predominantly, the idea of a judicial acquittal,
so that the thought of the first clause of this verse seems rather to be
that of pronouncing guiltless, or forgiving, than that of delivering
from the power of. But both, no doubt, are included in the idea, as
both, in fact, come from the same source and in response to the same
cry.

And so we may be sure that, though our eye does not go down into the
dark depths, God's eye goes, and that where He looks He looks to pardon,
if we come to Him through Jesus Christ our Lord.

He will deliver us from the power of these secret faults, giving to us
that divine Spirit which is 'the candle of the Lord,' to search us, and
to convince of our sins, and to drag our evil into the light; and giving
us the help without which we can never overcome. The only way for us to
be delivered from the dominion of our unconscious faults is to increase
the depth and closeness and constancy of our communion with Jesus
Christ; and then they will drop away from us. Mosquitoes and malaria,
the one unseen in their minuteness, and the other, 'the pestilence that
walketh in darkness,' haunt the swamps. Go up on the hilltop, and
neither of them are found. So if we live more and more on the high
levels, in communion with our Master, there will be fewer and fewer of
these unconscious sins buzzing and stinging and poisoning our lives, and
more and more will His grace conquer and cleanse.

They will all be manifested some day. The time comes when He shall bring
to light the hidden things and darkness and the counsels of men's
hearts. There will be surprises on both hands of the Judge. Some on the
right, astonished, will say, 'Lord, when saw we Thee?' and some on the
left, smitten to confusion and surprise, will say, 'Lord, Lord, have we
not prophesied in Thy name?'

Let us go to Him with the prayer, 'Search me, O God! and try me; and see
if there be any wicked way in me; and lead me in the way everlasting.'




OPEN SINS


    'Keep back Thy servant also from presumptuous sins; let them not
    have dominion over me: then shall I be upright, and I shall be
    innocent from the great transgression.'--PSALM xix. 13.

Another psalmist promises to the man who dwells 'in the secret place of
the Most High' that' he shall not be afraid for the terror by night, nor
for the arrow that flieth by day, nor for the pestilence that walketh at
noonday,' but shall 'tread upon the lion and adder.' These promises
divide the dangers that beset us into the same two classes as our
Psalmist does--the one secret; the other palpable and open. The former,
which, as I explained in my last sermon, are sins hidden, not from
others, but from the doer, may fairly be likened to the pestilence that
stalks slaying in the dark, or to the stealthy, gliding serpent, which
strikes and poisons before the naked foot is aware. The other resembles
the 'destruction that wasteth at noonday,' or the lion with its roar and
its spring, as, disclosed from its covert, it leaps upon the prey.

Our present text deals with the latter of these two classes.
'Presumptuous sins' does not, perhaps, convey to an ordinary reader the
whole significance of the phrase, for it may be taken to define a single
class of sins--namely, those of pride or insolence. What is really meant
is just the opposite of 'secret sins'--all sorts of evil which, whatever
may be their motives and other qualities, have this in common, that the
doer, when he does them, knows them to be wrong.

The Psalmist gets this further glimpse into the terrible possibilities
which attach even to a servant of God, and we have in our text these
three things--a danger discerned, a help sought, and a daring hope
cherished.

I. Note, then, the first of these, the dreaded and discerned
danger--'presumptuous sins,' which may 'have dominion over' us, and lead
us at last to a 'great transgression.'

Now the word which is translated 'presumptuous' literally means _that
which boils or bubbles_; and it sets very picturesquely before us the
movement of hot desires--the agitation of excited impulses or
inclinations which hurry men into sin in spite of their consciences. It
is also to be noticed that the prayer of my text, with singular pathos
and lowly self-consciousness, is the prayer of 'Thy servant,' who knows
himself to be a servant, and who therefore knows that these glaring
transgressions, done in the teeth of conscience and consciousness, are
all inconsistent with his standing and his profession, but yet are
perfectly possible for him.

An old mediaeval mystic once said, 'There is nothing weaker than the
devil stripped naked.' Would it were true! For there is one thing that
is weaker than a discovered devil, and that is my own heart. For we all
know that sometimes, with our eyes open, and the most unmistakable
consciousness that what we are doing was wrong, we have set our teeth
and done it, Christian men though we may profess to be, and may really
be. All such conduct is inconsistent with Christianity; but we are not
to say, therefore, that it is incompatible with Christianity. Thank God!
that is a very different matter. But as long as you and I have two
things--viz. strong and hot desires, and weak and flabby wills--so long
shall we, in this world full of combustibles, not be beyond the
possibility of a dreadful conflagration being kindled by some
devil-blown sparks. There are plenty of dry sticks lying about to put
under the caldron of our hearts, to make them boil and bubble over! And
we have, alas! but weak wills, which do not always keep the reins in
their hands as they ought to do, nor coerce these lower parts of our
nature into their proper subordination. Fire is a good servant, but a
bad master; and we are all of us too apt to let it become master, and
then the whole 'course of nature' is 'set on fire of hell.' The servant
of God may yet, with open eyes and obstinate disregard of his better
self and of all its remonstrances, go straight into 'presumptuous sin.'

Another step is here taken by the Psalmist. He looks shrinkingly and
shudderingly into a possible depth, and he sees, going down into the
abyss, a ladder with three rungs on it. The topmost one is wilful,
self-conscious transgression. But that is not the lowest stage; there is
another step. Presumptuous sin tends to become despotic sin. 'Let them
not _have dominion_ over me.' A man may do a very bad thing once, and
get so wholesomely frightened, and so keenly conscious of the disastrous
issues, that he will never go near it again. The prodigal would not be
in a hurry, you may depend upon it, to try the swine trough and the far
country, and the rags, and the fever, and the famine any more. David got
a lesson that he never forgot in that matter of Bathsheba. The bitter
fruit of his sin kept growing up all his life, and he had to eat it, and
that kept him right. They tell us that broken bones are stronger at the
point of fracture than they were before. And it is possible for a man's
sin--if I might use a paradox which you will not misunderstand--to
become the instrument of his salvation.

But there is another possibility quite as probable, and very often
recurring, and that is that the disease, like some other morbid states
of the human frame, shall leave a tendency to recurrence. A pin-point
hole in a dyke will be widened into a gap as big as a church-door in ten
minutes, by the pressure of the flood behind it. And so every act which
we do in contradiction of our standing as professing Christians, and in
the face of the protests, all unavailing, of that conscience which is
only a voice, and has no power to enforce its behests, will tend to
recurrence once and again. The single acts become habits, with awful
rapidity. Just as the separate gas jets from a multitude of minute
apertures coalesce into a continuous ring of light, so deeds become
habits, and get dominion over us. 'He sold himself to do evil.' He made
himself a bond-slave of iniquity. It is an awful and a miserable thing
to think that professing Christians do often come into that position of
being, by their inflamed passions and enfeebled wills, servants of the
evil that they do. Alas! how many of us, if we were honest with
ourselves, would have to say. 'I am carnal, sold unto sin.'

That is not the lowest rung of the slippery ladder. Despotic sin ends in
utter departure.

The word translated here, quite correctly, 'transgression,' and
intensified by that strong adjective attached, 'a _great_
transgression,' literally means _rebellion_, _revolt_, or some such
idea; and expresses, as the ultimate issue of conscious transgression
prolonged and perpetuated into habit, an entire casting off of
allegiance to God. 'No man can serve two masters.' 'His servants ye are
whom ye obey,' whomsoever ye may call your master. The Psalmist feels
that the end of indulged evil is going over altogether to the other
camp. I suppose all of us have known instances of that sort. Men in my
position, with a long life of ministry behind them, can naturally
remember many such instances. And this is the outline history of the
suicide of a Christian. First secret sin, unsuspected, because the
conscience is torpid; then open sin, known to be such, but done
nevertheless; then dominant sin, with an enfeebled will and power of
resistance; then the abandonment of all pretence or profession of
religion. The ladder goes down into the pit, but not to the bottom of
the pit. And the man that is going down it has a descending impulse
after he has reached the bottom step and he falls--Where? The first step
down is tampering with conscience. It is neither safe nor wise to do
anything, howsoever small, against that voice. All the rest will come
afterward, unless God restrains--'first the blade, then the ear, then
the full corn in the ear,' and then the bitter harvest of the poisonous
grain.

II. So, secondly, note the help sought.

The Psalmist is like a man standing on the edge of some precipice, and
peeping over the brink to the profound beneath, and feeling his head
beginning to swim. He clutches at the strong, steady hand of his guide,
knowing that unless he is restrained, over he will go. 'Keep Thou back
Thy servant from presumptuous sins.'

So, then, the first lesson we have to take is, to cherish a lowly
consciousness of our own tendency to light-headedness and giddiness.
'Blessed is the man that feareth always.' That fear has nothing cowardly
about it. It will not abate in the least the buoyancy and bravery of our
work. It will not tend to make us shirk duty because there is temptation
in it, but it will make us go into all circumstances realising that
without that divine help we cannot stand, and that with it we cannot
fall. 'Hold Thou me up, and I shall be safe.' The same Peter that said,
'Though all should forsake Thee, yet will not I,' was wiser and braver
when he said, in later days, being taught by former presumption, 'Pass
the time of your sojourning here in fear.'

Let me remind you, too, that the temper which we ought to cherish is
that of a confident belief in the reality of a divine support. The
prayer of my text has no meaning at all, unless the actual supernatural
communication by God's own Holy Spirit breathed into men's hearts be a
simple truth. 'Hold Thou me up,' 'Keep Thou me back,' means, if it means
anything, 'Give me in my heart a mightier strength than mine own, which
shall curb all this evil nature of mine, and bring it into conformity
with Thy holy will.'

How is that restraining influence to be exercised? There are many ways
by which God, in His providence, can fulfil the prayer. But the way
above all others is by the actual operation upon heart and will and
desires of a divine Spirit, who uses for His weapon the Word of God,
revealed by Jesus Christ, and in the Scriptures. 'The sword of the
Spirit is the Word of God,' and God's answer to the prayer of my text is
the gift to every man who seeks it of that indwelling Power to sustain
and to restrain.

That will keep our passions down. The bubbling water is lowered in its
temperature, and ceases to bubble, when cold is added to it. When God's
Spirit comes into a man's heart, that will deaden his desires after
earth and forbidden ways. He will bring blessed higher objects for all
his affections. He who has been fed on 'the hidden manna' will not be
likely to hanker after the leeks and onions, however strong their smell
and pungent their taste, that grew in the Nile mud in Egypt. He who has
tasted the higher sweetnesses of God will have his heart's desires after
lower delights strangely deadened and cooled. Get near God, and open
your hearts for the entrance of that divine Spirit, and then it will not
seem foolish to empty your hands of the trash that they carry in order
to grasp the precious things that He gives. A bit of scrap-iron
magnetised turns to the pole. My heart, touched by the Spirit of God
dwelling in me, will turn to Him, and I shall find little sweetness in
the else tempting delicacies that earth can supply. 'Keep Thy servant
back from,' by depriving him of the taste for, 'presumptuous sins.'

That Spirit will strengthen our wills. For when God comes into a heart,
He restores the due subordination which has been broken into discord and
anarchy by sin. He dismounts the servant riding on horseback, and
carrying the horse to the devil, according to the proverb, and gives the
reins into the right hands. Now, if the gift of God's Spirit, working
through the Word of God, and the principles and the motives therein
unfolded, and therefrom deducible, be the great means by which we are to
be kept from open and conscious transgression, it follows very plainly
that our task is twofold. One part of it is to see that we cultivate
that spirit of lowly dependence, of self-conscious weakness, of
triumphant confidence, which will issue in the perpetual prayer for
God's restraint. When we enter upon tasks which may be dangerous, and
into regions of temptation which cannot but be so, though they be duty,
we should ever have the desire in our hearts and upon our lips that God
would keep us from, and in, the evil.

The other part of our duty is to make it a matter of conscience and
careful cultivation, to use honestly and faithfully the power which, in
response to our desires, has been granted to us. All of you, Christian
men and women, have access to an absolute security against every
transgression; and the cause lies wholly at your own doors in each case
of failure, deficiency, or transgression, for at every moment it was
open to you to clasp the Hand that holds you up, and at every moment, if
you failed, it was because your careless fingers had relaxed their
grasp.

III. Lastly, observe the daring hope here cherished.

'Then shall I be upright, and I shall be innocent from the great
transgression.' That is the upshot of the divine answer to both the
petitions which have been occupying us in these two successive sermons.
It is connected with the former of them by the recurrence of the same
word, which in the first petition was rendered 'cleanse'--or, more
accurately, 'clear'--and in this final clause is to be rendered
accurately, 'I shall be _clear_ from the great transgression.' And it
obviously connects in sense with both these petitions, because, in order
to be upright and clear, there must, first of all, be divine cleansing,
and then divine restraint.

So, then, nothing short of absolute deliverance from the power of sin in
all its forms should content the servant of God. Nothing short of it
contents the Master for the servant. Nothing short of it corresponds to
the power which Christ puts in operation in every heart that believes in
Him. And nothing else should be our aim in our daily conflict with evil
and growth in grace. Ah! I fear me that, for an immense number of
professing Christians in this generation, the hope of--and, still more,
the aim towards--anything approximating to entire deliverance from sin,
have faded from their consciences and their lives. Aim at the stars,
brother! and if you do not hit them, your arrow will go higher than if
it were shot along the lower levels.

Note that an indefinite approximation to this condition is possible. I
am not going to discuss, at this stage of my discourse, controversial
questions which may be involved here. It will be time enough to discuss
with you whether you can be absolutely free from sin in this world when
you are a great deal freer from it than you are at present. At all
events, you can get far nearer to the ideal, and the ideal must always
be perfect. And I lay it on your hearts, dear friends! that you have in
your possession, if you are Christian people, possibilities in the way
of conformity to the Master's will, and entire emancipation from all
corruption, that you have not yet dreamed of, not to say applied to your
lives. 'I pray God that He would sanctify you wholly, and that your
whole body, soul, and spirit be preserved blameless unto the coming.'

That daring hope will be fulfilled one day; for nothing short of it will
exhaust the possibilities of Christ's work or satisfy the desires of
Christ's heart.

The Gospel knows nothing of irreclaimable outcasts. To it there is but
one unpardonable sin, and that is the sin of refusing the cleansing of
Christ's blood and the sanctifying of Christ's Spirit. Whoever you are,
whatever you are, go to God with this prayer of our text, and realise
that it is answered in Jesus Christ, and you will not ask in vain. If
you will put yourself into His hands, and let Him cleanse and restrain,
He will give you new powers to detect the serpents in the flowers, and
new resolution to shake off the vipers into the fire. For there is
nothing that God wants half so much as that we, His wandering children,
should come back to Him, and He will cleanse us from the filth of the
swine trough and the rags of our exile, and clothe us in 'fine linen
clean and white.' We may each be sinless and guiltless. We can be so in
one way only. If we look to Jesus Christ, and live near Him, He 'will be
made of God unto us wisdom,' by which we shall detect our secret sins;
'righteousness,' whereby we shall be cleansed from guilt;
'sanctification,' which shall restrain us from open transgression; 'and
redemption,' by which we shall be wholly delivered from evil and
'presented faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding
joy.'




FEASTING ON THE SACRIFICE


    'The meek shall eat and be satisfied.'--PSALM xxii. 26.

'The flesh of the sacrifice of his peace-offering for thanksgiving shall
be offered in the day of his oblation.' Such was the law for Israel. And
the custom of sacrificial feasts, which it embodies, was common to many
lands. To such a custom my text alludes; for the Psalmist has just been
speaking of 'paying his vows' (that is, sacrifices which he had vowed in
the time of his trouble), and to partake of these he invites the meek.
The sacrificial dress is only a covering for high and spiritual
thoughts. In some way or other the singer of this psalm anticipates that
his experiences shall be the nourishment and gladness of a wide circle;
and if we observe that in the context that circle is supposed to include
the whole world, and that one of the results of partaking of this
sacrificial feast is 'your heart shall live for ever,' we may well say
with the Ethiopian eunuch, 'Of whom speaketh the Psalmist thus?'

The early part of the psalm answers the question. Jesus Christ laid His
hand on this wonderful psalm of desolation, despair, and deliverance
when on the Cross He took its first words as expressing His emotion
then: 'My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken Me?' Whatever may be our
views as to its authorship, and as to the connection between the
Psalmist's utterances and his own personal experiences, none to whom
that voice that rang through the darkness on Calvary is the voice of the
Son of God, can hesitate as to who it is whose very griefs and sorrows
are thus the spiritual food that gives life to the whole world.

From this, the true point of view, then, from which to look at the whole
of this wonderful psalm, I desire to deal with the words of my text now.

I. We have, first, then, the world's sacrificial feast.

The Jewish ritual, and that of many other nations, as I have remarked,
provided for a festal meal following on, and consisting of the material
of, the sacrifice. A generation which studies comparative mythology, and
spares no pains to get at the meaning underlying the barbarous worship
of the rudest nations, ought to be interested in the question of the
ideas that formed and were expressed by that elaborate Jewish ritual. In
the present case, the signification is plain enough. That which, in one
aspect, is a peace-offering reconciling to God, in another aspect is the
nourishment and the joy of the hearts that accept it. And so the work of
Jesus Christ has two distinct phases of application, according as we
think of it as being offered to God or appropriated by men. In the one
case it is our peace; in the other it is our food and our life. If we
glance for a moment at the marvellous picture of suffering and
desolation in the previous portion of this psalm, which sounds the very
depths of both, we shall understand more touchingly what it is on which
Christian hearts are to feed. The desolation that spoke in 'Why hast
Thou forsaken Me?' the consciousness of rejection and reproach, of
mockery and contempt, which wailed, 'All that see Me laugh Me to scorn;
they shoot out the lip; they shake the head, saying, "He trusted on the
Lord that He would deliver Him; let Him deliver Him, seeing He
delighteth in Him"'; the physical sufferings which are the very picture
of crucifixion, so as that the whole reads liker history than prophecy,
in 'All My bones are out of joint; My strength is dried up like a
potsherd; and My tongue cleaveth to My jaws'; the actual passing into
the darkness of the grave, which is expressed in 'Thou hast brought Me
into the dust of death'; and even the minute correspondence, so
inexplicable upon any hypothesis except that it is direct prophecy,
which is found in 'They part My garments among them, and cast lots upon
My vesture'--these be the viands, not without bitter herbs, that are
laid on the table which Christ spreads for us. They are parts of the
sacrifice that reconciles to God. Offered to Him they make our peace.
They are parts and elements of the food of our spirits. Appropriated and
partaken of by us they make our strength and our life.

Brethren! there is little food, there is little impulse, little strength
for obedience, little gladness or peace of heart to be got from a Christ
who is _not_ a Sacrifice. If we would know how much He may be to us, as
the nourishment of our best life, and as the source of our purest and
permanent gladness, we must, first of all, look upon Him as the Offering
for the world's sin, and then as the very Life and Bread of our souls.
The Christ that feeds the world is the Christ that died for the world.

Hence our Lord Himself, most eminently in one great and profound
discourse, has set forth, not only that He is the Bread of God which
'came down from heaven,' but that His flesh and His blood are such, and
the separation between the two in the discourse, as in the memorial
rite, indicates that there has come the violent separation of death, and
that thereby He becomes the life of humanity.

So my text, and the whole series of Old Testament representations in
which the blessings of the Kingdom are set forth as a feast, and the
parables of the New Testament in which a similar representation is
contained, do all converge upon, and receive their deepest meaning from,
that one central thought that the peace-offering for the world is the
food of the world.

We see, hence, the connection between these great spiritual ideas and
the central act of Christian worship. The Lord's Supper simply says by
act what my text says in words. I know no difference between the rite
and the parable, except that the one is addressed to the eye and the
other to the ear. The rite is an acted parable; the parable is a spoken
rite. And when Jesus Christ, in the great discourse to which I have
referred, dilates at length upon the 'eating of His flesh and the
drinking of His blood' as being the condition of spiritual life, He is
not referring to the Lord's Supper, but the discourse and the rite refer
both to the same spiritual truth. One is a symbol; the other is a
saying; and symbol and saying mean just the same thing. The saying does
not refer to the symbol, but to that to which the symbol refers. It
seems to me that one of the greatest dangers which now threaten
Evangelical Christianity is the strange and almost inexplicable
recrudescence of Sacramentarianism in this generation to which those
Christian communities are contributing, however reluctantly and
unconsciously, who say there is something more than commemorative
symbols in the bread and wine of the Lord's table. If once you admit
that, it seems, in my humble judgment, that you open the door to the
whole flood of evils which the history of the Church declares have come
with the Sacramentarian hypothesis. And we must take our stand, as I
believe, upon the plain, intelligible thoughts--Baptism is a declaratory
symbol, and nothing more; the Lord's Supper is a commemorative symbol,
and nothing more; except that both are acts of obedience to the
enjoining Lord. When we stand there we can face all priestly
superstitions, and say, 'Jesus I know; and Paul I know; but who are ye?'
'The meek shall eat and be satisfied,' and the food of the world is the
suffering Messiah.

But what have we to say about the act expressed in the text? 'The meek
shall eat.' I do not desire to dwell at any length upon the thought of
the process by which this food of the world becomes ours, in this
sermon. But there are two points which perhaps may be regarded as
various aspects of one, on which I would like to say just a sentence or
two. Of course, the translation of the 'eating' of my text into
spiritual reality is simply that we partake of the food of our spirits
by the act of faith in Jesus Christ. But whilst that is so, let me put
emphasis, in a sentence, upon the thought that personal appropriation,
and making the world's food mine, by my own individual act, is the
condition on which alone I get any good from it. It is possible to die
of starvation at the door of a granary. It is possible to have a table
spread with all that is needful, and yet to set one's teeth, and lock
one's lips, and receive no strength and no gladness from the rich
provision. 'Eat' means, at any rate, incorporate with myself, take into
my very own lips, masticate with my very own teeth, swallow down by my
very own act, and so make part of my physical frame. And that is what we
have to do with Jesus Christ, or He is nothing to us. 'Eat'; claim your
part in the universal blessing; see that it becomes yours by your own
taking of it into the very depths of your heart. And then, and then
only, will it become your food.

And how are we to do that if, day in and day out, and week in and week
out, and year in and year out, with some of us, there be scarce a
thought turned to Him; scarce a desire winging its way to Him; scarce
one moment of quiet contemplation of these great truths. We have to
ruminate, we have to meditate; we have to make conscious and frequent
efforts to bring before the mind, in the first place, and then before
the heart and all the sensitive, emotional, and voluntary nature, the
great truths on which our salvation rests. In so far as we do that we
get good out of them; in so far as we fail to do it, we may call
ourselves Christians, and attend to religious observances, and be
members of churches, and diligent in good works, and all the rest of it,
but nothing passes from Him to us, and we starve even whilst we call
ourselves guests at His table.

Oh! the average Christian life of this day is a strange thing; very,
very little of it has the depth that comes from quiet communion with
Jesus Christ; and very little of it has the joyful consciousness of
strength that comes from habitual reception into the heart of the grace
that He brings. What is the good of all your profession unless it brings
you to that? If a coroner's jury were to sit upon many of us--and we are
dead enough to deserve it--the verdict would be, 'Died of starvation.'
'The meek shall eat,' but what about the professing Christians that feed
their souls upon anything, everything rather than upon the Christ whom
they say they trust and serve?

II. And now let me say a word, in the second place, about the rich
fruition of this feast.

'The meek shall be satisfied.' 'Satisfied!' Who in the world is? And if
we are not, why are we not? Jesus Christ, in the facts of His death and
resurrection--for His resurrection as well as His death are included in
the psalm--brings to us all that our circumstances, relationships, and
inward condition can require.

Think of what that death, as the sacrifice for the world's sin, does. It
sets all right in regard to our relation to God. It reveals to us a God
of infinite love. It provides a motive, an impulse, and a Pattern for
all life. It abolishes death, and it gives ample scope for the loftiest
and most exuberant hopes that a man can cherish. And surely these are
enough to satisfy the seeking spirit.

But go to the other end, and think, not of what Christ's work does for
us, but of what we need to have done for us. What do you and I want to
be satisfied? It would take a long time to go over the catalogue; let me
briefly run through some of the salient points of it. We want, for the
intellect, which is the regal part of man, though it be not the highest,
truth which is certain, comprehensive, and inexhaustible; the first, to
provide anchorage; the second, to meet and regulate and unify all
thought and life; and the last, to allow room for endless research and
ceaseless progress. And in that fact that the Eternal Son of the Eternal
Father took upon Himself human nature, lived, died, rose, and reigns at
God's right hand, I believe there lie the seeds of all truth, except the
purely physical and material, which men need. Everything is there; every
truth about God, about man, about duty, about a future, about society;
everything that the world needs is laid up in germ in that great gospel
of our salvation. If a man will take it for the foundation of his
beliefs and the guide of his thinkings, he will find his understanding
is satisfied, because it grasps the personal Truth who liveth, and is
with us for ever.

Our hearts crave, however imperfect their love may be, a perfect love;
and a perfect love means one untinged by any dash of selfishness,
incapable of any variation or eclipse, all-knowing, all-pitying,
all-powerful. We have made experience of precious loves that die. We
know of loves that change, that grow cold, that misconstrue, that may
have tears but have no hands. We know of 'loves' that are only a fine
name for animal passions, and are twice cursed, cursing them that give
and them that take. The happiest will admit, and the lonely will
achingly feel, how we all want for satisfaction a love that cannot fail,
that can help, that beareth all things, and that can do all things. We
have it in Jesus Christ, and the Cross is the pledge thereof.

Conscience wants pacifying, cleansing, enlightening, directing, and we
get all these in the good news of One that has died for us, and that
lives to be our Lord. The will needs authority which is not force. And
where is there an authority so constraining in its sweetness and so
sweet in its constraint as in those silken bonds which are stronger than
iron fetters? Hope, imagination, and all other of our powers or
weaknesses, our gifts or needs, are satisfied when they feed on Christ.
If we feed upon anything else it turns to ashes that break our teeth and
make our palates gritty, and have no nourishment in them. We shall be
'for ever roaming with a hungry heart' unless we take our places at the
feast on the one sacrifice for the world's peace.

III. I can say but a word as to the guests.

It is 'the meek' who eat. The word translated 'meek' has a wider and
deeper meaning than that. 'Meek' refers, in our common language, mainly
to men's demeanour to one another; but the expression here goes deeper.
It means both 'afflicted' and 'lowly'--the right use of affliction being
to bow men, and they that bow themselves are those who are fit to come
to Christ's feast. There is a very remarkable contrast between the words
of my text and those that follow a verse or two afterwards. 'The meek
shall eat and be satisfied,' says the text. And then close upon its
heels comes, 'All those that be fat upon earth shall eat.' That is to
say, the lofty and proud have to come down to the level of the lowly,
and take indiscriminate places at the table with the poor and the
starving, which, being turned into plain English is just this--the one
thing that hinders a man from partaking of the fulness of Christ's
feeding grace is self-sufficiency, and the absence of a sense of need.
They that 'hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be filled'; and
they that come, knowing themselves to be poor and needy, and humbly
consenting to accept a gratuitous feast of charity--they, and only they,
do get the rich provisions.

You are shut out because you shut yourselves out. They that do not know
themselves to be hungry have no ears for the dinner-bell. They that feel
the pangs of starvation and know that their own cupboards are empty,
they are those who will turn to the table that is spread in the
wilderness, and there find a 'feast of fat things.'

And so, dear friends! when He calls, do not let us make excuses, but
rather listen to that voice that says to us, 'Why do you spend your
money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which
satisfieth not.... Incline your ear unto Me; hear, and your soul shall
live.'




THE SHEPHERD KING OF ISRAEL


    'The Lord is my shepherd: I shall not want. 2. He maketh me to lie
    down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters. 3. He
    restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for
    His name's sake. 4. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
    shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod
    and Thy staff, they comfort me. 5. Thou preparest a table before me
    in the presence of mine enemies: Thou anointest my head with oil; my
    cup runneth over. 6. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all
    the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for
    ever.'--PSALM xxiii. 1-6.

The king who had been the shepherd-boy, and had been taken from the
quiet sheep-cotes to rule over Israel, sings this little psalm of Him
who is the true Shepherd and King of men. We do not know at what period
of David's life it was written, but it sounds as if it were the work of
his later years. There is a fulness of experience about it, and a tone
of subdued, quiet confidence which speaks of a heart mellowed by years,
and of a faith made sober by many a trial. A young man would not write
so calmly, and a life which was just opening would not afford material
for such a record of God's guardianship in all changing circumstances.

If, then, we think of the psalm as the work of David's later years, is
it not very beautiful to see the old king looking back with such vivid
and loving remembrance to his childhood's occupation, and bringing up
again to memory in his palace the green valleys, the gentle streams, the
dark glens where he had led his flocks in the old days; very beautiful
to see him traversing all the stormy years of warfare and rebellion, of
crime and sorrow, which lay between, and finding in all God's guardian
presence and gracious guidance? The faith which looks back and says, 'It
is all very good,' is not less than that which looks forward and says,
'Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.'

There is nothing difficult of understanding in the psalm. The train of
thought is clear and obvious. The experiences which it details are
common, the emotions it expresses simple and familiar. The tears that
have been dried, the fears that have been dissipated, by this old song;
the love and thankfulness which have found in them their best
expression, prove the worth of its simple words. It lives in most of our
memories. Let us try to vivify it in our hearts, by pondering it for a
little while together now.

The psalm falls into two halves, in both of which the same general
thought of God's guardian care is presented, though under different
illustrations, and with some variety of detail. The first half sets Him
forth as a shepherd, and us as the sheep of His pasture. The second
gives Him as the Host, and us as the guests at His table, and the
dwellers in His house.

First, then, consider that picture of the divine Shepherd and His
leading of His flock.

It occupies the first four verses of the psalm. There is a double
progress of thought in it. It rises, from memories of the past, and
experiences of the present care of God, to hope for the future. 'The
Lord is my Shepherd'--'I will fear no evil.' Then besides this progress
from what was and is, to what will be, there is another string, so to
speak, on which the gems are threaded. The various methods of God's
leading of His flock, or rather, we should say, the various regions into
which He leads them, are described in order. These are Rest, Work,
Sorrow--and this series is so combined with the order of time already
adverted to, as that the past and the present are considered as the
regions of rest and of work, while the future is anticipated as having
in it the valley of the shadow of death.

First, God leads His sheep into rest. 'He maketh me to lie down in green
pastures, He leadeth me beside the still waters.' It is the hot
noontide, and the desert lies baking in the awful glare, and every stone
on the hills of Judaea burns the foot that touches it. But in that
panting, breathless hour, here is a little green glen, with a quiet
brooklet, and moist lush herb-age all along its course, and great stones
that fling a black shadow over the dewy grass at their base; and there
would the shepherd lead his flock, while the sunbeams, like swords,' are
piercing everything beyond that hidden covert. Sweet silence broods
there, The sheep feed and drink, and couch in cool lairs till he calls
them forth again. So God leads His children.

The psalm puts the rest and refreshment _first_, as being the most
marked characteristic of God's dealings. After all, it is so. The years
are years of unbroken continuity of outward blessings. The reign of
afflictions is ordinarily measured by days. 'Weeping endures for a
night.' It is a rainy climate where half the days have rain in them; and
that is an unusually troubled life of which it can with any truth be
affirmed that there has been as much darkness as sunshine in it.

But it is not mainly of outward blessings that the Psalmist is thinking.
They are precious chiefly as emblems of the better spiritual gifts; and
it is not an accommodation of his words, but is the appreciation of
their truest spirit, when we look upon them, as the instinct of devout
hearts has ever done, as expressing both God's gift of temporal mercies,
and His gift of spiritual good, of which higher gift all the lower are
meant to be significant and symbolic. Thus regarded, the image describes
the sweet rest of the soul in communion with God, in whom alone the
hungry heart finds food that satisfies, and from whom alone the thirsty
soul drinks draughts deep and limpid enough.

This rest and refreshment has for its consequence the restoration of the
soul, which includes in it both the invigoration of the natural life by
the outward sort of these blessings, and the quickening and restoration
of the spiritual life by the inward feeding upon God and repose in Him.

The soul thus restored is then led on another stage; 'He leadeth me in
the paths of righteousness for His name's sake,'--that is to say, God
guides us into work.

The quiet mercies of the preceding verse are not in themselves the end
of our Shepherd's guidance; they are means to an end, and that is--work.
Life is not a fold for the sheep to lie down in, but a road for them to
walk on. All our blessings of every sort are indeed given us for our
delight. They will never fit us for the duties for which they are
intended to prepare us, unless they first be thoroughly enjoyed. The
highest good they yield is only reached through the lower one. But,
then, when joy fills the heart, and life is bounding in the veins, we
have to learn that these are granted, not for pleasure only, but for
pleasure in order to power. We get them, not to let them pass away like
waste steam puffed into empty air, but that we may use them to drive the
wheels of life. The waters of happiness are not for a luxurious bath
where a man may lie, till, like flax steeped too long, the very fibre be
rotted out of him; a quick plunge will brace him, and he will come out
refreshed for work. Rest is to fit for work, work is to sweeten rest.

All this is emphatically true of the spiritual life. Its seasons of
communion, its hours on the mount, are to prepare for the sore sad work
in the plain; and he is not the wisest disciple who tries to make the
Mount of Transfiguration the abiding place for himself and his Lord.

It is not well that our chief object should be to enjoy the consolations
of religion; it is better to seek first to do the duties enjoined by
religion. Our first question should be, not, How may I enjoy God? but,
How may I glorify Him? 'A single eye to His glory' means that even our
comfort and joy in religious exercises shall be subordinated, and (if
need were) postponed, to the doing of His will. While, on the one hand,
there is no more certain means of enjoying Him than that of humbly
seeking to walk in the ways of His commandments, on the other hand,
there is nothing more evanescent in its nature than a mere emotion, even
though it be that of joy in God, unless it be turned into a spring of
action for God. Such emotions, like photographs, vanish from the heart
unless they be fixed. Work for God is the way to fix them. Joy in God is
the strength of work for God, but work for God is the perpetuation of
joy in God.

Here is the figurative expression of the great evangelical principle,
that works of righteousness must follow, not precede, the restoration of
the soul. We are justified not by works, but for works, or, as the
Apostle puts it in a passage which sounds like an echo of this psalm, we
are 'created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before
ordained _that we should walk in them_.' The basis of obedience is the
sense of salvation. We work not _for_ the assurance of acceptance and
forgiveness, but _from_ it. First the restored soul, then the paths of
righteousness for _His_ name's sake who has restored me, and restored me
that I may be like Him.

But there is yet another region through which the varied experience of
the Christian carries him, besides those of rest and of work. God leads
His people through sorrow. 'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death, I will fear no evil.'

The 'valley of the shadow of death' does not only mean the dark approach
to the dark dissolution of soul and body, but any and every gloomy
valley of weeping through which we have to pass. Such sunless gorges we
have all to traverse at some time or other. It is striking that the
Psalmist puts the sorrow, which is as certainly characteristic of our
lot as the rest or the work, into the future. Looking back he sees none.
Memory has softened down all the past into one uniform tone, as the
mellowing distance wraps in one solemn purple the mountains which, when
close to them, have many a barren rock and gloomy rift, All behind is
good. And, building on this hope, he looks forward with calmness, and
feels that no evil shall befall.

But it is never given to human heart to meditate of the future without
some foreboding. And when 'Hope enchanted smiles,' with the light of the
future in her blue eyes, there is ever something awful in their depths,
as if they saw some dark visions behind the beauty. Some evils may come;
some will probably come; one at least is sure to come. However bright
may be the path, somewhere on it, perhaps just round that turning, sits
the 'shadow feared of man.' So there is never hope only in any heart
that wisely considers the future. But to the Christian heart there may
be this--the conviction that sorrow, when it comes, will not harm,
because God will be with us; and the conviction that the Hand which
guides us into the dark valley, will guide us through it and up out of
it. Yes, strange as it may sound, the presence of Him who sends the
sorrow is the best help to bear it. The assurance that the Hand which
strikes is the Hand which binds up, makes the stroke a blessing, sucks
the poison out of the wound of sorrow, and turns the rod which smites
into the staff to lean on.

The second portion of this psalm gives us substantially the same
thoughts under a different image. It considers God as the host, and us
as the guests at His table and the dwellers in His house.

In this illustration, which includes the remaining verses, we have, as
before, the food and rest, the journey and the suffering. We have also,
as before, memory and present experience issuing in hope. But it is all
intensified. The necessity and the mercy are alike presented in brighter
colours; the want is greater, the supply greater, the hope for the
future on earth brighter; and, above all, while the former set of images
stopped at the side of the grave, and simply refused to fear, here the
vision goes on beyond the earthly end; and as the hope comes brightly
out, that all the weary wanderings will end in the peace of the Father's
house, the absence of fear is changed into the presence of triumphant
confidence, and the resignation which, at the most, simply bore to look
unfaltering into the depth of the narrow house, becomes the faith which
plainly sees the open gate of the everlasting home.

God supplies our wants in the very midst of strife. 'Thou preparest a
table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head
with oil. My cup runneth over.' Before, it was food and rest first, work
afterwards. Now it Is more than work--it is conflict. And the mercy is
more strikingly portrayed, as being granted not only _before toil_, but
_in warfare_. Life is a sore fight; but to the Christian man, in spite
of all the tumult, life is a festal banquet. There stand the enemies,
ringing him round with cruel eyes, waiting to be let slip upon him like
eager dogs round the poor beast of the chase. But for all that, here is
spread a table in the wilderness, made ready by invisible hands; and the
grim-eyed foe is held back in the leash till the servant of God has fed
and been strengthened. This is our condition--always the foe, always the
table.

What sort of a meal should that be? The soldiers who eat and drink, and
are drunken in the presence of the enemy, like the Saxons before
Hastings, what will become of them? Drink the cup of gladness, as men do
when their foe is at their side, looking askance over the rim, and with
one hand on the sword, 'ready, aye ready,' against treachery and
surprise. But the presence of the danger should make the feast more
enjoyable too, by the moderation it enforces, and by the contrast it
affords--as to sailors on shore, or soldiers in a truce. Joy may grow on
the very face of danger, as a slender rose-bush flings its bright sprays
and fragrant blossoms over the lip of a cataract; and that not the wild
mirth of men in a pestilence, with their 'Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die,' but the simple-hearted gladness of those who have
preserved the invaluable childhood gift of living in the present moment,
because they know that to-morrow will bring God, whatever it brings, and
not take away His care and love, whatever it takes away.

This, then, is the form under which the experience of the past is
presented in the second portion,--joy in conflict, rest and food even in
the strife. Upon that there is built a hope which transcends that in the
previous portion of the psalm. As to this life, 'Goodness and mercy
shall follow us.' This is more than 'I will fear no evil.' That said,
sorrow is not evil if God be with us. This says, sorrow is mercy. The
one is hope looking mainly at outward circumstances, the other is hope
learning the spirit and meaning of them all. These two angels of
God--Goodness and Mercy--shall follow and encamp around the pilgrim. The
enemies whom God held back while he feasted, may pursue, but will not
overtake him. They will be distanced sooner or later; but the white
wings of these messengers of the covenant will never be far away from
the journeying child, and the air will often be filled with the music of
their comings, and their celestial weapons will glance around him in all
the fight, and their soft arms will bear him up over all the rough ways,
and up higher at last to the throne.

So much for the earthly future. But higher than all that rises the
confidence of the closing words, 'I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
for ever.' This should be at once the crown of all our hopes for the
future, and the one great lesson taught us by all the vicissitudes of
life. The sorrows and the joys, the journeying and the rest, the
temporary repose and the frequent struggles, all these should make us
_sure_ that there is an end which will interpret them all, to which they
all point, for which they may all prepare. We get the table in the
wilderness here. It is as when the son of some great king comes back
from foreign soil to his father's dominions, and is welcomed at every
stage in his journey to the capital with pomp of festival, and
messengers from the throne, until he enters at last his palace home,
where the travel-stained robe is laid aside, and he sits down with his
father at his table. God provides for us here in the presence of our
enemies; it is wilderness food we get, manna from heaven, and water from
the rock. We eat in haste, staff in hand, and standing round the meal.
But yonder we sit down with the Shepherd, the Master of the house, at
His table in His kingdom. We put off the pilgrim-dress, and put on the
royal robe; we lay aside the sword, and clasp the palm. Far off, and
lost to sight, are all the enemies. We fear no change. We 'go no more
out.'

The sheep are led by many a way, sometimes through sweet meadows,
sometimes limping along sharp-flinted, dusty highways, sometimes high up
over rough, rocky mountain-passes, sometimes down through deep gorges,
with no sunshine in their gloom; but they are ever being led to one
place, and when the hot day is over they are gathered into one fold, and
the sinking sun sees them safe, where no wolf can come, nor any robber
climb up any more, but all shall rest for ever under the Shepherd's eye.

Brethren! can you take this psalm for yours? Have you returned unto
Christ, the Shepherd and Bishop of your souls? Oh! let Him, the Shepherd
of Israel, and the Lamb of God, one of the fold and yet the Guide and
Defender of it, human and divine, bear you away from the dreary
wilderness whither He has come seeking you. He will carry you rejoicing
to the fold, if only you will trust yourselves to His gentle arm. He
will restore your soul. He will lead you and keep you from all dangers,
guard you from every sin, strengthen you when you come to die, and bring
you to the fair plains beyond that narrow gorge of frowning rock. Then
this sweet psalm shall receive its highest fulfilment, for then 'they
shall hunger no more, neither shall they thirst any more, neither shall
the sun light on them, nor any heat, for the Lamb which is in the midst
of the Throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains
of waters, and God shall wipe all tears from their eyes.'




A GREAT QUESTION AND ITS ANSWER


    'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? and who shall stand in
    His holy place?'--PSALM xxiv. 3.

The psalm from which these words are taken flashes up into new beauty,
if we suppose it to have been composed in connection with the bringing
of the Ark into the Temple, or for some similar occasion. Whether it is
David's or not is a matter of very small consequence. But if we look at
the psalm as a whole, we can scarcely fail to see that some such
occasion underlies it. So just exercise your imaginations for a moment,
and think of the long procession of white-robed priests bearing the Ark,
and followed by the joyous multitude chanting as they ascended, 'Who
shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in His holy
place?' They are bethinking themselves of the qualifications needed for
that which they are now doing. They reach the gates, which we must
suppose to have been closed that they might be opened, and from the
half-chorus outside there peals out the summons, 'Lift up your heads, O
ye gates! and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory
shall come in.' Then from within another band of singers answers with
the question, 'Who is this King of Glory' who thus demands entrance? And
triumphantly the reply rings out, 'The Lord, strong and mighty; the
Lord, mighty in battle.' Still reluctant, the question is put again,
'Who is this King of Glory?' and the answer is given once more, 'The
Lord of hosts, He is the King of Glory.' There is no reference in the
second answer to 'battle.' The conflicts are over, and the dominion is
established, and at the reiterated summons the ancient gates roll back
on their hinges, burst as by a strong blow, and Jehovah enters into His
rest, He and the Ark of His strength. If that is the general connection
of the psalm--and I think you will admit that it adds to its beauty and
dramatic force if we suppose it so--then this introductory question,
sung as the procession climbed the steep, had realised what was needed
for those who should get the entrance that they sought, and comes to be
a very significant and important one. I deal now with the question and
its answer.

I. The question of questions.

That question lies deep in all men's hearts, and underlies sacrifices
and priesthoods and asceticisms and tortures of all sorts, and is the
inner meaning of Hindoos swinging with hooks in their backs, and others
of them measuring the road to the temple by prostrating themselves every
yard or two as they advance. These self-torturers are all asking the
same question: 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?' It
sometimes rises in the thoughts of the most degraded, and it is present
always with some of the better and nobler of men.

Now, there are three places in the Old Testament where substantially the
same question is asked. There is this psalm of ours; there is another
psalm which is all but a duplicate, which begins with 'Lord, who shall
abide in Thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in Thy holy hill?' And there is
another shape into which the question is cast by the fervent and
somewhat gloomy imagination of one of the prophets, who puts it thus:
'Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who shall dwell with
the everlasting burnings?' There never was a more disastrous
misapplication of Scripture than the popular idea that these two last
questions suggest the possibility of a creature being exposed to the
torments of future punishment. They have nothing to do with that. 'Who
among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?' If you want a commentary,
remember the words, 'Our God is a consuming fire.' That puts us on the
right track, if we needed any putting on it, for answering this
question, not in the gruesome and ghastly sense in which some people
take it, but in all the grandeur of Isaiah's thought. He sees God as
'the everlasting burnings.' Fire is the emblem of life as well as of
death; fire is the means of quickening as well as of destroying; and
when we speak of Him as 'the everlasting burnings' we are reminded of
the bush in the desert, where His own signature was set, 'burning and
not consumed.'

So the question in all the three places referred to is substantially the
same--and what does it indicate? It indicates the deep consciousness
that men have that they need to be in that home, that for life and peace
and blessedness, they must get somehow to the side of God, and be quiet
there, as children in their Father's house. We all know that this is
true, whether our life is regulated by it or not. Very deep in every
man's conscience, if he will attend to its voice, there is that which
says, 'You are a pilgrim and a sojourner, and homeless and desolate
until you nestle beneath the outspread wings in the Holy Place, and are
a denizen of God's house.'

The question further suggests another. The universal
consciousness--which is, I believe, universal--though it is overlain and
stifled by many of us, and neglected and set at nought by others--is
that this fellowship with God, which is indispensable to a man's peace,
is impossible to a man's impurity. So the question raises the thought of
the consciousness of sin which comes creeping over a man when he is
sometimes feeling after God, and seems to batter him in the face, and
fling him back into the outer darkness, 'How can I enter in there?' and
conscience has no answer, and the world has none, and as I shall have to
say presently, the answer which the Old Testament, as Law, gives is
almost as hopeless as the answer which conscience gives. But at all
events that this question should rise and insist upon being answered as
it does proves these three things--man's need of God, man's sense of
God's purity, man's consciousness of his own sin.

And what does that ascent to the hill of the Lord include? All the
present life, for, unless we are 'dwelling in the house of the Lord all
the days of our lives beholding His beauty and inquiring in His Temple,'
then we have little in life that is worth the having. The old Arab right
of claiming hospitality of the Sheikh into whose tent the fugitive ran
is used in Scripture over and over again to express the relation in
which alone it is blessed for a man to live--namely, as a guest of
God's. That is peace. That is all that we require, to sit at His
fireside, if I may so say, to claim the rites of hospitality, which the
Arab chief would not refuse to the veriest tatterdemalion, or the
greatest enemy that he knew, if he came into his tent and sought it. God
sits in the door of His tent, and is ready to welcome us.

The ascent to the hill of the Lord means more than that. It includes
also the future. I suppose that when men think about another
world--which I am afraid none of us think about as often as we ought to
do, in order to make the best of this one--the question, in some shape
or other, which this band of singers lifted up, rises to their lips,
'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in His
Holy Place' beyond the stars? Well, brethren! that is the question which
concerns us all, more than anything else in the world, to have clearly
and rightly answered.

II. Note the answer to this great question.

The psalm answers it in an instructive fashion, which we take as it
stands. 'He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.' Let me measure
myself by the side of that requirement. 'Clean hands?'--are mine clean?
'And a pure heart?'--what about mine? 'Who hath not lifted up his soul
unto vanity'--and where have my desires and thoughts so often gone? 'Nor
sworn deceitfully.' These are the qualifications that our psalm dashes
down in front of us when we ask the question.

The other two occasions to which I have referred, where the same
question is put, give substantially the same answer. It might be
interesting, if one had time, or this was the place, to look at the
differences in the replies, as suggesting the slight differences in the
ideal of a good man as presented by the various writers, but that must
be left untouched now. Taking these four conditions that are laid down
here, we come to this, that psalmist and prophet with one voice say that
same solemn thing: 'Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.'
There is no faltering in the answer, and it is an answer to which the
depths of conscience say 'Yes.' We all admit, when we are wise, that for
communion with God on earth, and for treading the golden pavements of
that city into which nothing that is unclean shall enter, absolute
holiness is necessary. Let no man deceive himself--that stands the
irreversible, necessary condition.

Well, then, is anybody to go in? Let us read on in our psalm. An
impossible requirement is laid down, broad and stern and unmistakable.
But is that all? 'He shall receive a blessing from the Lord, and
righteousness from the God of his salvation.' So, then, the impossible
requirement is made possible as a gift to be received. And although I do
not know that this psalmist, in the twilight of revelation, saw all that
was involved in what he sang, he had caught a glimpse of this great
thought, that what God required, God would give, and that our way to get
the necessary, impossible condition realised in ourselves is to
'receive' it. 'He shall receive ... righteousness from the God of his
salvation.' Now, do you not see how, like some great star, trembling
into the field of the telescope, and sending arrowy beams before it to
announce its approach, the great central Christian truth is here
dawning, germinant, prophesying its full rising? And the truth is this,
'that I might be found in Him, not having my own righteousness, but that
which is of God through Christ.' Ah, brethren! impossibilities become
possible when God comes and says, 'I give thee that which thou canst not
have.' The old prophet asked the question, 'What doth God require of
thee?' and his answer was, 'That thou shouldst do justice, and love
mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.' If he had gone on to ask a better
question, 'What does God give thee?' he would have said what all the New
Testament says, 'He gives what He commands, and He bestows before He
requires.' And so in Jesus Christ there is the forgiveness that blots
out the past, and there is the new life bestowed that will develop the
righteousness far beyond our reach. And thus the question which evoked
first the answer that might drive us to despair, evokes next a response
that commands us to hope.

But that is not all, for the psalm goes on: 'This is the generation of
them that seek Him, that seek Thy face.' Yes; couched in germ there lies
in that last word the great truth which is expanded in the New
Testament, like a beech-leaf folded up in its little brown sheath
through all the winter, and ready to break and give out its green
plumelets as soon as the warm rains and sunshine of spring come. 'They
that seek Him'--'if thou seek Him He will be found of thee.' The
requirement of righteousness, as I have said, is not abolished by the
Gospel, as some people seem to think that it substitutes faith for
righteousness; but it is made possible by the Gospel which through faith
gives righteousness. And what the Psalmist meant by 'seeking' we
Christian people mean by 'faith.' Earnest desire and confident
application to Him are sure to obtain righteousness. To these there will
never be returned a refusing answer. 'I have never said to any of the
seed of Jacob, seek ye Me in vain.' So, brethren! if we seek we shall
receive; if we receive we shall be holy, if we are holy we shall dwell
with God, in sweet and blessed communion, and be denizens of His house,
and sit together in heavenly places with Him all the days of our lives,
and then shall pass, when 'goodness and mercy have followed us all the
days of our lives,' and 'dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.'




THE GOD WHO DWELLS WITH MEN


    'Lift up your heads, O ye gates: and be ye lift up, ye everlasting
    doors; and the King of glory shall come in. 8. Who is this King of
    glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. 9.
    Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting
    doors; and the King of glory shall come in. 10. Who is this King of
    glory? The Lord of hosts, He is the King of glory.'
    --PSALM xxiv. 7-10.

This whole psalm was probably composed at the time of the bringing of
the ark into the city of Zion. The former half was chanted as the
procession wound its way up the hillside. It mainly consists of the
answer to the question 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?' and
describes the kind of men that dwell with God, and the way by which they
obtain their purity.

This second half of our psalm is probably to be thought of as being
chanted when the procession had reached the summit of the hill and stood
before the barred gates of the ancient Jebusite city. It is mainly in
answer to the question, 'Who is this King of Glory?' and is the
description of the God that dwells with men, and the meaning of His
dwelling with them.

We are to conceive of a couple of half choirs, the one within, the other
without the mountain hold. The advancing choir summons the gates to open
in the grand words: 'Lift up your heads, O ye gates! even lift them up,
ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.' Their lofty
lintels are too low for His head to pass beneath; so they have to be
lifted that He may find entrance. They are 'everlasting doors,' grey
with antiquity, hoary with age. They have looked down, perhaps, upon
Melchizedek, King of Salem, as he went forth in the morning twilight of
history to greet the patriarch. But in all the centuries they have never
seen such a King as this King of Glory, the true King of Israel who now
desires entrance.

The answer to the summons comes from the choir within. 'Who is this King
of Glory?' the question represents ignorance and possible hesitation, as
if the pagan inhabitants of the recently conquered city knew nothing of
the God of Israel, and recognised no authority in His name. Of course,
the dramatic form of question and answer is intended to give additional
force to the proclamation as by God Himself of the Covenant name, the
proper name of Israel's God, as Baal was the name of the Canaanite's
God, 'the Lord strong and mighty; the Lord mighty in battle,' by whose
warrior power David had conquered the city, which now was summoned to
receive its conqueror. Therefore the summons is again rung out, 'Lift up
your heads, O ye gates! and the King of Glory shall come in.' And once
more, to express the lingering reluctance, ignorance not yet dispelled,
suspicion and unwilling surrender, the dramatic question is repeated,
'Who is this King of Glory?' The answer is sharp and authoritative in
its brevity, and we may fancy it shouted with a full-throated
burst--'The Lord of Hosts,' who, as Captain, commands all the embattled
energies of earth and heaven conceived as a disciplined army. That great
name, like a charge of dynamite, bursts the gates of brass asunder, and
with triumphant music the procession sweeps into the conquered city.

Now these great words, throbbing with the enthusiasm at once of poetry
and of devotion, may, I think, teach us a great deal if we ponder them.

I. Notice, first, their application, their historical and original
application, to the King who dwelt with Israel.

We must never forget that in the Old Testament we have to do with an
incomplete and a progressive revelation, and that if we would understand
its significance, we must ever endeavour to ascertain to what point in
that progress the words before us belong. We are not to read into these
words New Testament depth and fulness of meaning; we are to take them
and try to find out what they meant to David and to his people; and so
we shall get a firm basis for any deeper significance which we may
hereafter see in them. The thought of God, then, in these words is
mainly that of a God of strong and victorious energy, a warrior-God, a
conquering King, one whose word is power, who rules amidst the armies of
heaven, and amidst the inhabitants of earth.

A brief consideration of each expression is all which can be attempted
here. 'Who is this King of Glory?' The first idea, then, is that of
sovereign rule; the idea which had become more and more plain and clear
to the national consciousness of the Hebrew with the installation of
monarchy amongst them. And it is very beautiful to see how David lays
hold of that thought of God being Himself the King of Israel; and dwells
so often in his psalms on the idea that he, poor, pale, earthly shadow,
is but a representative and a viceroy of the true King who sits in the
heavens. He takes off his crown and lays it before His throne and says:
'Th

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