Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms Part 11

If it be accepted, if the will submit, if the heart let itself be untwined, that its tendrils may be coiled closer round the heart of G.o.d, then the transformation is sure to come, and joy will dawn on those who have done rightly--that is, submissively and thankfully--by their sorrows. It will not be a joy like what the world calls joy--loud-voiced, boisterous, ringing with idiot laughter; but it will be pure, and deep, and sacred, and permanent. A white lily is fairer than a flaunting peony, and the joy into which sorrow accepted turns is pure and refining and good.

So, brethren! remember that the richest vintages are grown on the rough slopes of the volcano, and lovely flowers blow at the glacier's edge; and all our troubles, big and little, may be converted into gladnesses if we accept them as G.o.d meant them. Only they must be so accepted if they are to be thus changed.

But there may be some hearts recoiling from much that I have said in this sermon, and thinking to themselves, 'Ah! there are two kinds of sorrows. There are those that _can_ be cured, and there are those that _cannot_. What have you got to say to me who have to bleed from an immedicable wound till the end of my life?' Well, I have to say this--look beyond earth's dim dawns to that morning when 'the Sun of Righteousness shall arise, to them that love His name, with healing in His wings.' If we have to carry a load on an aching back till the end, be sure that when the night, which is far spent, is over, and the day which is at hand hath broken, every raindrop will be turned into a flas.h.i.+ng rainbow when it is smitten by the level light, and every sorrow rightly borne be represented by a special and particular joy.

Only, brother! if a life is to be spent in His favour, it must be spent in His fear. And if our cares and troubles and sorrows and losses are to be transfigured hereafter, then we must keep very near Jesus Christ, who has promised to us that His joy will remain with us, and that our sorrows shall be turned into joys. If we trust to Him, the voices that have been raised in weeping will be heard in gladness, and earth's minor will be transposed by the great Master of the music into the key of Heaven's jubilant praise. If only 'we look not at the things seen, but at the things which are not seen,' then 'our light affliction, which is but for a moment, will work out for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory'; and the weight will be no burden, but will bear up those who are privileged to bear it.

'BE ... FOR THOU ART'

'Be Thou to me a strong Rock, an house of defence to save me. 3. For Thou art my Rock and my Fortress.'--PSALM x.x.xi. 2, 3 (R.V.).

It sounds strange logic, 'Be ... for Thou art,' and yet it _is_ the logic of prayer, and goes very deep, pointing out both its limits and its encouragements. The parallelism between these two clauses is even stronger in the original than in our Version, for whilst the two words which designate the 'Rock' are not identical, their meaning is identical, and the difference between them is insignificant; one being a rock of any shape or size, the other being a perpendicular cliff or elevated promontory. And in the other clause, 'for a house of defence to save me,' the word rendered 'defence' is the same as that which is translated in the next clause 'fortress.' So that if we were to read thus: 'Be Thou a strong Rock to me, for a house, a fortress, for Thou art my Rock and my Fortress,' we should get the whole force of the parallelism. Of course the main idea in that of the 'Rock,' and 'Fortress' is only an exposition of one phase of the meaning of that metaphor.

I. So let us look first at what G.o.d is.

'A rock, a fortress-house.' Now, what is the force of that metaphor?

Stable being, as it seems to me, is the first thought in it, for there is nothing that is more absolutely the type of unchangeableness and steadfast continuance. The great cliffs rise up, and the river glides at their base--it is a type of mutability, and of the fleeting generations of men, who are as the drops and ripples in its course--it eddies round the foot of the rocks to which the old man looks up, and sees the same dints and streaks and fissures in it that he saw when he was a child.

The river runs onwards, the trees that root themselves in the clefts of the rock bear their spring foliage, and drop their leaves like the generations of men, and the Rock is 'the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever.' And G.o.d the Unchangeable rises, if I may so say, like some majestic cliff, round the foot of which rolls for ever the tide of human life, and round which are littered the successive layers of the leaves of many summers.

Then besides this stable being, and the consequences of it, is the other thought which is attached to the emblem in a hundred places in Scripture, and that is defence. 'His place of defence shall be the munitions of rocks.' When the floods are out, and all the plain is being dissolved into mud, the dwellers on it fly to the cliffs. When the enemy's banners appear on the horizon, and the open country is being harried and burned, the peasants hurry to the defence of the hills, and, sheltered there, are safe. And so for us this Name a.s.sures us that in Him, whatever floods may sweep across the low levels, and whatever foes may storm over the open land and the unwalled villages, there is always the fortress up in the hills, and thither no flood can rise, and there no enemy can come. A defence and a sure abode is his who dwells in G.o.d, and thus folds over himself the warm wings that stretch on either side, and shelter him from all a.s.sault. 'Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I.'

But the Rock is a defence in another way. If a hard-pressed fugitive is brought to a stand and can set his back against a rock, he can front his a.s.sailants, secure that no unseen foe shall creep up behind and deal a stealthy stab and that he will not be surrounded unawares. 'The G.o.d of Israel shall be your rearward,' and he who has 'made the Most High his habitation' is sheltered from 'the pestilence that walketh in darkness,'

as well as from 'the destruction that wasteth at noon-day,' and will be cleansed from 'secret faults' if he keeps up unbroken his union with G.o.d, for the 'faults' which are not recognised as faults by his partially illuminated conscience are known to G.o.d. But the Rock is a defence in yet another way, for it is a sure foundation for our lives.

Whoso builds on G.o.d need fear no change. When the floods rise, and the winds blow, and the rain storms down, the house that is on the Rock will stand.

And, then, in the Rock there is a spring, and round the spring there is 'the light of laughing flowers,' amidst the stern majesty of the cliff.

Just as the Law-giver of old smote the rock, and there gushed out the stream that satisfied the thirst of the whole travelling nation, so Paul would have us Christians repeat the miracle by our faith. Of us, too, it may be said, they drank 'of that Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.' Stable being, secure defence, a fountain of refreshment and satisfaction: all these blessings lie in that great metaphor.

II. Now, note our plea with G.o.d, from what He is.

'Be Thou to me a Rock ... for Thou art a Rock.' Is that not illogical?

No, for notice that little word, 'to me'--be Thou _to me_ what Thou art in Thyself, and hast been to all generations.' That makes all the difference. It is not merely 'Be what Thou art,' although that would be much, but it is 'be it to me,' and let _me_ have all which is meant in that great Name.

But then, beyond that, let me point out to you how this prayer suggests to us that all true prayer will keep itself within G.o.d's revelation of what He is. We take His promises, and all the elements which make up His name or manifestation of His character to the world, whether by His acts or by the utterances of this Book, or by the inferences to be drawn from the life of Jesus Christ, the great Revealer, or by what we ourselves have experienced of Him. The ways by which G.o.d has revealed Himself to the world define the legitimate subjects, and lay down the firm foundation, of our pet.i.tions. In all His acts G.o.d reveals Himself, and if I may so say, when we truly pray, we catch these up, and send them back again to heaven, like arrows from a bow. It is only when our desires and prayers foot themselves upon G.o.d's revelation of Himself, and in essence are, in various fas.h.i.+ons, the repet.i.tion of this prayer of my text: 'Be ... for Thou art,' that we can expect to have them answered. Much else may call itself prayer, but it is often but petulant and self-willed endeavour to force our wishes upon Him, and no answer will come to that. We are to pray about everything; but we are to pray about nothing, except within the lines which are marked out for us by what G.o.d has told us, in His words and acts, that He Himself is. Catch these up and fling them back to Him, and for every utterance that He has made of Himself, 'I am' so-and-so, let us go to Him and say 'Be Thou that to me,' and then we may be sure of an answer.

So then two things follow. If we pray after the pattern of this prayer, 'Be Thou to me what Thou art,' then a great many foolish and presumptuous wishes will be stifled in the birth, and, on the other hand, a great many feeble desires will be strengthened and made confident, and we shall be encouraged to expect great things of G.o.d.

Have you widened your prayers, dear friend!--and I do not mean by that only your outward ones, but the habitual aspiration and expectation of your minds--have you widened these to be as wide as what G.o.d has shown us that He is? Have you taken all G.o.d's revelation of Himself, and translated it into pet.i.tion? And do you expect Him to be to you all that He has ever been to any soul of man upon earth? Oh! how such a prayer as this, if we rightly understand it and feel it, puts to shame the narrowness and the poverty of our prayers, the falterings of our faith, and the absence of expectation in ourselves that we shall receive the fulness of G.o.d.

G.o.d owns that plea: 'Be ... what Thou art.' He cannot resist that. That is what the Apostle meant when he said, 'He abideth faithful, He cannot deny Himself.' He must be true to His character. He can never be other than He always has been. And that is what the Psalmist meant when he goes on, after the words that I have taken for my text, and says, 'For Thy Name's sake lead me and guide me,' What is G.o.d's Name? The collocation of letters by which we designate Him? Certainly not. The Name of G.o.d is the sum total of what G.o.d has revealed Himself as being.

And 'for the sake of the Name,' that He may be true to that which He has shown Himself to be, He will always endorse this bill that you draw upon Him when you present Him with His own character, and say 'Be to me what Thou art.'

III. Lastly, we have here the plea with G.o.d drawn from what we have taken Him to be to us.

That is somewhat different from what I have already been dwelling upon.

Mark the words: 'Be Thou to me a strong Rock, for Thou art _my_ Rock and _my_ Fortress.' What does that mean? It means that the suppliant has, by his own act of faith, taken G.o.d for his; that he has appropriated the great divine revelation, and made it his own. Now it seems to me that that appropriation is, if not _the_ point, at least one of the points, in which real faith is distinguished from the sham thing which goes by that name amongst so many people. A man by faith encloses a bit of the common for his very own. When G.o.d says that He 'so loved the world that He gave His ... Son,' I should say, 'He loved _me_, and gave Himself for _me_.' When the great revelation is made that He is the Rock of Ages, my faith says: '_My_ Rock and _my_ Fortress.' Having said that, and claimed Him for mine, I can then turn round to Him and say, 'Be to me what I have taken Thee to be.'

And that faith is expressed very beautifully and strikingly in one of the Old Testament metaphors, which frequently goes along with this one of the Rock. For instance, in a great chapter in Isaiah we find the original of that phrase 'the Rock of Ages.' It runs thus, 'Trust ye in the Lord for ever, for in the Lord JEHOVAH is the _Rock of Ages_.' Now the word for trust there literally means, to flee into a refuge, and so the true idea of faith is 'to fly for refuge,' as the Epistle to the Hebrews has it, 'to the Hope set before us,'--that is (keeping to the metaphor), to the cleft in the Rock.

That act of trust or flight will make it certain that G.o.d will be to us for a house of defence, a fortress to save us. Other rock-shelters may crumble. They may be carried by a.s.sault; they may be riven by earthquakes. 'The mountains shall depart, and the hills shall be removed,' but this Rock is impregnable, and all who take refuge in it are safe for ever.

And so the upshot of the whole matter is that G.o.d will be to us what we have faith to believe that He is, and our faith will be the measure of our possession of the fulness of G.o.d. If we can only say in the fulness of our hearts--and keep to the saying: 'Be Thou to me a Rock, for Thou art my Rock,' then nothing shall ever hurt us; and 'dwelling in the secret place of the Most High' we shall be kept in safety; our 'abode shall be the munitions of rocks, our bread shall be given us, and our water shall be made sure.'

'INTO THY HANDS'

'Into Thine hand I commit my spirit: Thou hast redeemed me, O Lord G.o.d of truth.'--PSALM x.x.xi. 5.

The first part of this verse is consecrated for ever by our Lord's use of it on the Cross. Is it not wonderful that, at that supreme hour, He deigned to take an unknown singer's words as His words? What an honour to that old saint that Jesus Christ, dying, should find nothing that more fully corresponded to His inmost heart at that moment than the utterance of the Psalmist long ago! How His mind must have been saturated with the Old Testament and with these songs of Israel! And do you not think it would be better for us if ours were completely steeped in those heart-utterances of ancient devotion?

But, of course, the Psalmist was not thinking about his death. It was an act for his life that he expressed in these words:--'Into Thine hands I commit my spirit.' If you will glance over the psalm at your leisure, you will see that it is the heart-cry of a man in great trouble, surrounded by all sorts of difficulties, with his very life threatened.

He was down in the very depths of darkness, and ringed about by all sorts of enemies at that moment, not sitting comfortably, as you and I are here, but in the midst of the hurly-burly and the strife, when by a dead lift of faith he flung himself clean out of his disasters, and, if I might so say, pitched himself into the arms of G.o.d. 'Into Thine hands I commit my spirit,' as a man standing in the midst of enemies, and bearing some precious treasure in his hand might, with one strong cast of his arm, fling it into the open hand of some mighty helper, and so baulk the enemies of their prey. That is the figure.

I. Now, let me say a word as to where to lodge a soul for safe keeping.

'Into Thine hands'--a banker has a strong room, and a wise man sends his securities and his valuables to the bank and takes an acknowledgment, and goes to bed at night, quite sure that no harm will come to them, and that he will get them when he wants them. And that is exactly what the Psalmist does here. He deposits his most precious treasure in the safe custody of One who will take care of it. The great Hand is stretched out, and the little soul is put into it. It closes, and 'no man is able to pluck them out of My Father's hand.'

Now that is only a picturesque way of putting the most threadbare, bald, commonplace of religious teaching. The word faith, when it has any meaning at all in people's minds when they hear it from the pulpit, is extremely apt, I fear, to create a kind of, if not disgust, at least a revulsion of feeling, as if people said, 'Ah, there he is at the old story again!' But will you freshen up your notions of what faith it means by taking that picture of my text as I have tried to expand and illuminate it a little by my metaphor? That is what is meant by 'Into Thy hands I commit my spirit.' There are two or three ways in which that is to be done, and one or two ways in which it is not to be done.

We do it when we trust Him for the salvation of our souls. There are a great many good Christian people who go mourning all their days, or, at least, sometimes mourning and sometimes indifferent. The most that they venture to say is, 'But I cannot be sure.' Our grandfathers used to sing:--

"Tis a point I long to know, Oft it causes anxious thought.'

Why should it cause anxious thought? Take your own personal salvation for granted, and work from that. Do not work _towards_ it. If you have gone to Christ and said, 'Lord, I cannot save myself; save me. I am willing to be saved,' be sure that you have the salvation that you ask, and that if you have put your soul in that fas.h.i.+on into G.o.d's hands, any incredible thing is credible, and any impossible thing is possible, rather than that you should fail of the salvation which, in the bottom of your hearts, you desire. Take the burden off your backs and put it on His. Do not be for ever questioning yourselves, 'Am I a saved man?' You will get sick of that soon, and you will be very apt to give up all thought about the matter at all. But take your stand on the fact, and with emanc.i.p.ated and buoyant hearts, and grateful ones, work from it, and because of it. And when sin rises up in your soul, and you say to yourselves, 'If I were a Christian I could not have done that,' or, 'If I were a Christian I could not be so-and-so'; remember that all sin is inconsistent with being a Christian, but no sin is incompatible with it; and that after all the consciousness of shortcomings and failure, we have just to come back to the old point, and throw ourselves on G.o.d's love. His arms are open to clasp us round. 'Into Thy hands I commit my spirit.'

Further, the Psalmist meant, by committing himself to G.o.d, trusting Him in reference to daily life, and all its difficulties and duties. Our act of trust is to run through everything that we undertake and everything that we have to fight with. Self-will wrenches our souls out of G.o.d's hands. A man who sends his securities to the banker can get them back when he likes. And if we undertake to manage our own affairs, or fling ourselves into our work without recognition of our dependence upon Him, or if we choose our work without seeking to know what His will is, that is recalling our deposit. Then you _will_ get it back again, because G.o.d does not keep anybody's securities against his will--you will get it back again, and much good it will do you when you have got it!

Self-will, self-reliance, self-determination--these are the opposites of committing the keeping of our souls to G.o.d. And, as I say, if you withdraw the deposit, you take all the burden and trouble of it on your own shoulders again. Do not fancy that you are 'living lives of faith in the Son of G.o.d,' if you are not looking to Him to settle what you are to do. You cannot expect that He will watch over you, if you do not ask Him where you are to go.

But now there is another thing that I would suggest, this committing of ourselves to G.o.d which begins with the initial act of trust in Him for the salvation of our souls, and is continued throughout life by the continual surrender of ourselves to Him, is to be accompanied with corresponding work. The Apostle Peter's memory is evidently hovering round this verse, whether he is consciously quoting it or not, when he says, 'Let them that suffer according to the will of G.o.d commit the keeping of their souls to Him _in welldoing_,' which has to go along with the act of trust and dependence. There must come the continual ordering of the life in accordance with His will; for 'well-doing' does not mean merely some works of beneficence and 'charity,' of the sort that have monopolised to themselves the name in latter days, but it means the whole of righteous conduct in accordance with the will of G.o.d.

So Peter tells us that it is vain for us to talk about committing the keeping of our soul to G.o.d unless we back up the committing with consistent, Christlike lives. Of course it is vain. How can a man expect G.o.d to take care of him when he plunges himself into something that is contrary to G.o.d's laws? There are many people who say, 'G.o.d will take care of me; He will save me from the consequences.' Not a bit of it--He loves us a great deal too well for that. If you take the bit between your teeth, you will be allowed to go over the precipice and be smashed to pieces. If you wish to be taken care of, keep within the prescribed limits, and consult Him before you act, and do not act till you are sure of His approval. G.o.d has never promised to rescue man when he has got into trouble by his own sin. Suppose a servant had embezzled his master's money through gambling, and then expected G.o.d to help him to get the money to pay back into the till. Do you think that would be likely to work? And how dare you antic.i.p.ate that G.o.d will keep your feet, if you are walking in ways of your own choosing? All sin takes a man out from the shelter of the divine protection, and the shape the protection has to take then is chastis.e.m.e.nt. And all sin makes it impossible for a man to exercise that trust which is the committing of his soul to G.o.d. So it has to be 'in welldoing,' and the two things are to go together. 'What G.o.d hath joined let not man put asunder.' You do not become a Christian by the simple exercise of trust unless it is trust that worketh by love.

But let me remind you, further, that this committing of our souls into G.o.d's hands does not mean that we are absolved from taking care of them ourselves. There is a very false kind of religious faith, which seems to think that it shuffles off all responsibility upon G.o.d. Not at all; you lighten the responsibility, but you do not get rid of it. And no man has a right to say 'He will keep me, and so I may neglect diligent custody of myself.' He keeps us very largely by helping us to keep our hearts with all diligence, and to keep our feet in the way of truth.

So let me now just say a word in regard to the blessedness of thus living in an atmosphere of continual dependence on, and reference to, G.o.d, about great things and little things. Whenever a man is living by trust, even when the trust is mistaken, or when it is resting upon some mere human, fallible creature like himself, the measure of his confidence is the measure of his tranquillity. You know that when a child says, 'I do not need to mind, father will look after that,' he may be right or wrong in his estimate of his father's ability and inclination; but as long as he says it, he has no kind of trouble or anxiety, and the little face is scarred by no deep lines of care or thought. So when we turn to Him and say, 'Why should I the burden bear?'

then there comes--I was going to say 'surging,' but 'trickling' is a better word--into my heart a settled peacefulness which nothing else can give. Look at this psalm. It begins, and for the first half continues, in a very minor key. The singer was not a poet posing as in affliction, but his words were wrung out of him by anguish. 'Mine eyes are consumed with grief; my life is spent with grief'; 'I am ... as a dead man out of mind'; 'I am in trouble.' And then with a quick wheel about, 'But I trusted in Thee, O Lord! I said, Thou art my G.o.d.' And what comes of that? This--'O how great is Thy goodness which Thou hast laid up for them that fear Thee!' 'Blessed be the Lord, for He hath showed me His marvellous kindness in a strong city.' And then, at the end of all, his peacefulness is so triumphant that he calls upon 'all His saints' to help him to praise. And the last words are 'Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart.' That is what you will get if you commit your soul to G.o.d. There was no change in the Psalmist's circ.u.mstances.

The same enemy was round about him. The same 'net was privily laid for him.' All that had seemed to him half an hour before as wellnigh desperate, continued utterly unaltered. But what _had_ altered? G.o.d had come into the place, and that altered the whole aspect of matters.

Instead of looking with shrinking and tremulous heart along the level of earth, where miseries were, he was looking up into the heavens, where G.o.d was; and so everything was beautiful. That will be our experience if we will commit the keeping of our souls to Him in well doing. You can bring June flowers and autumn fruits into snowy January days by the exercise of this trust in G.o.d. It does not need that our circ.u.mstances should alter, but only that our att.i.tude should alter. Look up, and cast your souls into G.o.d's hands, and all that is round you, of disasters and difficulties and perplexities, will suffer transformation; and for sorrow there will come joy because there has come trust.

I need not say a word about the other application of this verse, which, as I have said, is consecrated to us by our Lord's own use of it at the last. But is it not beautiful to think that the very same act of mind and heart by which a man commits his spirit to G.o.d in life may be his when he comes to die, and that death may become a voluntary act, and the spirit may not be dragged out of us, reluctant, and as far as we can, resisting, but that we may offer it up as a libation, to use one metaphor of St. Paul's, or may surrender it willingly as an act of faith? It is wonderful to think that life and death, so unlike each other, may be made absolutely identical in the spirit in which they are met. You remember how the first martyr caught up the words from the Cross, and kneeling down outside the wall of Jerusalem, with the blood running from the wounds that the stones had made, said, 'Lord Jesus!

receive my spirit.' That is the way to die, and that is the way to live.

One word is all that time permits about the ground upon which this great venture of faith may be made. 'Thou hast redeemed me, Lord G.o.d of Truth.' The Psalmist, I think, uses that word 'redeemed' here, not in its wider spiritual New Testament sense, but in its frequent Old Testament sense, of deliverance from temporal difficulties and calamities. And what he says is, in effect, this: 'I have had experience in the past which makes me believe that Thou wilt extricate me from this trouble too, because Thou art the G.o.d of Truth.' He thinks of what G.o.d has done, and of what G.o.d is. And Peter, whom we have already found echoing this text, echoes that part of it too, for he says, 'Let them commit the keeping of their souls to Him in well doing, as _unto a faithful Creator_,' which is all but parallel to 'Lord G.o.d of Truth.' So G.o.d will continue as He has begun, and finish what He has begun.