Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms Part 38

WHAT G.o.d WILL DO FOR US

'He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him. 16. With long life will I satisfy him, and show him My salvation.'--PSALM xci. 15, 16.

When considering the previous verses of this psalm, I pointed out that at its close we have G.o.d's own voice coming in to confirm and expand the promises which, in the earlier portion of it, have been made in His name to the devout heart. The words which we have now to consider cover the whole range of human life and need, and may be regarded as being a picture of the sure and blessed consequences of keeping our hearts fixed upon our Father, G.o.d. He Himself speaks them, and His word is true.

The verses of the text fall into three portions. There are promises for the suppliant, promises for the troubled, promises for mortals. 'He shall call upon Me and I will answer him'; that is for the suppliant. 'I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honour him'; that is for the distressed. 'With long life will I satisfy him, and show him My salvation'; that is for the mortal. Now let us look at these three.

I. The promise to the suppliant.

'He will call upon Me and I will answer.' We may almost regard the first of these two clauses as part of the promise. It is not merely a Hebrew way of putting a supposition, 'If he calls upon Me, then I will answer him,' nor merely a virtual commandment, 'Call, if you expect an answer,'

but itself is a part of the blessing and privilege of the devout and faithful heart. 'He shall call upon Me'; the King opens the door of His chamber and beckons us within.

In these great words we may see set forth both the instinct, as I may call it, of prayer, and the privilege of access to G.o.d. If a man's heart is set upon G.o.d, his very life-breath will be a cry to His Father. He will experience a need which is not degraded by being likened to an instinct, for it acts as certainly as do the instincts of the lower creatures, which guide them by the straightest possible road to the surest supply of their need. Any man who has learned in any measure to love G.o.d and trust Him will, in the measure in which he has so learned, live in the exercise and habit of prayer; and it will be as much his instinct to cry to G.o.d in all changing circ.u.mstances as it is for the swallows to seek the sunny south when the winter comes, or the cold north when the sunny south becomes torrid and barren. So, then, 'He shall call upon Me' is the characteristic of the truly G.o.d-knowing and G.o.d-loving heart, which was described in the previous verse. 'Because he has clung to Me in love, therefore will I deliver him; because he has known My name, therefore will I set him on high,' and because he has clung and known therefore it is certain that He will 'call upon Me.'

My friend! do you know anything of that instinctive appeal to G.o.d? Does it come to your heart and to your lips without your setting yourself to pray, just as the thought of dear ones on earth comes stealing into our minds a hundred times a day, when we do not intend it nor know exactly how it has come? Does G.o.d suggest Himself to you in that fashion, and is the instinct of your hearts to call upon Him?

Again, we see here not only the unveiling of the very deepest and most characteristic attribute of the devout soul, but also the a.s.surance of the privilege of access. G.o.d lets us speak to Him. And there is, further, a wonderful glimpse into the very essence of true prayer. 'He shall call upon Me.' What for? No particular object is specified as sought. It is G.o.d whom we want, and not merely any things that even He can give. If asking for these only or mainly is our conception of what prayer is, we know little about it. True prayer is the cry of the soul for the living G.o.d, in whom is all that it needs, and out of whom is nothing that will do it good. 'He shall call upon Me,' that is prayer.

'I will answer him.' Yes! Of course the instinct is not all on one side.

If the devout heart yearns for G.o.d, G.o.d longs for the devout heart. If I might use such a metaphor, just as the ewe on one side of the hedge hears and answers the bleating of its lamb on the other, so, if my heart cries out for the living G.o.d, anything is more credible than that such a cry should not be answered. You may not get this, that, or the other blessing which you ask, for perhaps they are not blessings. You may not get what you fancy you need. We are not always good at translating our needs into words, and it is a mercy that there is Some One that understands what we do want a great deal better than we do ourselves.

But if below the specific pet.i.tion there lies the cry of a heart that calls for the living G.o.d, then whether the specific pet.i.tion be answered or dispersed into empty air will matter comparatively little. 'He shall call upon Me,' and that part of his prayer 'I will answer' and come to him and be in him. Is that our experience of what it is to pray, and our notion of what it is to be answered?

II. Further, here we have a promise for suppliants.

I take the next three clauses of the text as being all closely connected. 'I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him and honour him'--in trouble, His presence; from trouble, His deliverance; after trouble, glorifying and refining. There are the whole theory and process of the discipline of the devout man's life.

'I will be with him in trouble.' The promise is not only that, when trials of any kind, larger or smaller, more grave or more slight, fall upon us, we shall become more conscious, if we take them rightly, of G.o.d's presence, but that all which is meant by G.o.d's presence shall really be more fully ours, and that He is, if I may say so, actually nearer us. Though, of course, all words about being near or far have only a very imperfect application to our relation to Him, still the gifts that are meant by His presence--that is to say, His sympathy, His help, His love--are more fully given to a man who in the darkness is groping for his Father's hand, and yet not so much groping for as grasping it. He _is_ nearer us as well as _felt_ to be nearer us, if we take our sorrows rightly. The effect of sorrow devoutly borne, in bringing G.o.d closer to us, belongs to it, whether it be great or small; whether it be, according to the metaphor of an earlier portion of this psalm, 'a lion or an adder'; or whether it be a buzzing wasp or a mosquito. As long as anything troubles me, I may make it a means of bringing G.o.d closer to myself.

Therefore, there is no need for any sorrowful heart ever to say, 'I am solitary as well as sad.' He will always come and sit down by us, and if it be that, like poor Job upon his dunghill, we are not able to bear the word of consolation, yet He will wait there till we are ready to take it. He is there all the same, though silent, and will be near all of us, if only we do not drive Him away. 'He will call upon Me and I will answer him'; and the beginning of the answer is the real presence of G.o.d with every troubled heart.

Then there follows the next stage, deliverance from trouble; 'I will _deliver_ him.' That is not the same word as is employed in the previous verse, though it is translated in the same way in our Bibles. The word here means lifting up out of a pit, or dragging up out of the midst of anything that surrounds a man, and so setting him in some place of safety. Is this promise always true, about people who in sorrow of any kind cast themselves upon G.o.d? Do they always get deliverance from Him?

There are some sorrows from the pressure of which we shall never escape.

Some of us have to carry such. Has this promise no application to the people for whom outward life can never bring an end of the sorrows and burdens that they carry? Not so. He will deliver us not only by taking the burden off our backs, but by making us strong to carry it, and the sorrow, which has changed from wild and pa.s.sionate weeping into calm submission, is sorrow from which we have been delivered. The serpent may still wound our heel, but if G.o.d be with us He will give us strength to press the wounded heel on the malignant head, and we can squeeze all the poison out of it. The bitterness remains; be it so, but let us be quite sure of this, that though sorrow be lifelong, that does not in the least contradict the great and faithful promise, 'I will be with him in trouble and deliver him,' for where He is _there_ is deliverance.

Lastly, there is the third of these promises for the troubled. 'I will honour him.' The word translated 'honour' is more correctly rendered 'glorify.' Is not that the end of a trouble which has been borne in company with Him; and from which, because it has been so borne, a devout heart is delivered even whilst it lasts? Does not all such sorrow hallow, enn.o.ble, refine, purify the sufferer, and make him liker his G.o.d? 'He for our profit, that we should be partakers of His holiness.'

Is not that G.o.d's way of glorifying us before heaven's glory? When a blunt knife is ground upon a wheel, the sparks fly fast from the edge held down upon the swiftly-revolving emery disc, but that is the only way to sharpen the dull blade. Friction, often very severe friction, and heat are indispensable to polish the shaft and turn the steel into a mirror that will flash back the sunshine. So when G.o.d holds us to His grindstone, it is to get a polish on the surface. 'I will deliver him and I will glorify him.'

III. Last of all, we have the promise for mortals.

'With long life will I satisfy him, and show him My salvation.' I do not know whether by that first clause the Psalmist meant, as people who sometimes like to make the Psalmist mean as little as possible tell us that he did mean, simply 'length of days.' For my own part I do not believe that he did. He meant that, no doubt, for longevity was part of the Old Testament promises for this life. But 'length of days' does not 'satisfy' all old people who attain to it, and that 'satisfaction'

necessarily implies something more than the prolongation of the physical life to old age. The idea contained in this promise may be ill.u.s.trated by the expression which is used in reference to a select few of the Old Testament saints, of whom it is recorded that they died 'full of days.'

That does not merely mean that they had many days, but that, whatever the number, they had as many as they wished, and departed unreluctantly, having had enough of life. They looked back, and saw that all the past had been very good, and that goodness and mercy had determined and accompanied all their days, and so they did not wish to linger longer here, but closed their eyes in peace, with no hungry, vain cravings for prolonged life. They had got all out of the world which it could give, and were contented to have done with it all.

So this promise a.s.sures us that, if we are of those who, in the midst of fleeting days, lay hold on the 'Ancient of Days' and live by Him, we shall find a table spread in the wilderness, and like travellers in an inn, having eaten enough, shall willingly obey the call to leave the meal provided on the road, and pa.s.s into the Father's house, and sit at the bountiful feast there.

The heart that lives near G.o.d, whether its years be few or many, will find in life all that life is capable of giving, and when the end comes will not be unwilling that it should come, nor hold on desperately to the last f.a.g-end and fragment of life that it can keep within its clutches, but will be satisfied to have lived and be contented to die.

Nor is this all, for says the Psalmist, 'I will show him My salvation.'

That sight comes after he is satisfied with length of days here. And so I think the fair interpretation of the words, in their place in this psalm, is, that however dimly, yet certainly, here the Psalmist saw something beyond. It was not a black curtain which dropped at death. He believed that, yonder, the man who here had been living near G.o.d, calling to Him, realising His presence, and satisfied with the fatness of His house upon earth, would see something that would satisfy him more. 'I shall be satisfied when I awake in Thy likeness.' That is satisfaction indeed, and the vision, which is possession, of that perfected salvation is the vision that makes the blessedness of heaven.

So, dear friends! we, if we will, may have access to G.o.d's chamber at every moment, and may have His presence, which will make it impossible that we should ever be alone. We may have Him to deliver us from all the evil that is in evil, and to turn it into good. We may have Him to purge, and cleanse, and uplift, and change us into His likeness, even by the ministry of our trials. We may get out of life the last drop of the sweetness that He has put in it; and when it comes to a close, may say, 'It is enough! Let Thy servant depart in peace; for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation,' and then we may go to see it better in that world where we shall all, if we attain thither, be 'satisfied' when we 'awake in His likeness.'

FORGIVENESS AND RETRIBUTION

'Thou wast a G.o.d that forgavest them, though Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.'--PSALM xcix. 8.

When the prophet Isaiah saw the great vision which called him to service, he heard from the lips of the seraphim around the Throne the threefold ascription of praise: 'Holy! holy! holy! Lord G.o.d of hosts.'

This psalm seems to be an echo of that heavenly chorus, for it is divided into three sections, each of which closes with the refrain, 'He is holy,' and each of which sets forth some one aspect or outcome of that divine holiness. In the first part the holiness of His universal dominion is celebrated; in the second, the holiness of His revelations and providences to Israel, His inheritance; in the third, the holiness of His dealings with them that call upon His name, both when He forgives their sins and when He scourges for the sins that He has forgiven.

Two remarks of an expository character will prepare the way for what I have further to say. The first is that the word 'though' in my text, which holds together the two statements that it contains, is commentary rather than translation. For the original has the simple 'and,' and the difference between the two renderings is this, that 'though' implies some real or apparent contrariety between forgiveness and taking vengeance, which makes their co-existence remarkable, whereas 'and' lays the two things down side by side. The Psalmist simply declares that they are both there, and puts in no such fine distinction as is represented by the words 'though,' or 'but,' or 'yet.' To me it seems a great deal more eloquent in its simplicity and reticence that he should say, 'Thou forgavest them and tookest vengeance,' than that he should say 'Thou forgavest them though Thou tookest vengeance.'

Then there is another point to be noted, viz. we must not import into that word 'vengeance,' when it is applied to divine actions, the notions which cl.u.s.ter round it when it is applied to ours. For in its ordinary use it means retaliation, inflicted at the bidding of personal enmity or pa.s.sion. But there are no turbid elements of that sort in G.o.d. His retribution is a great deal more a.n.a.logous to the unimpa.s.sioned, impersonal action of public law than it is to the 'wild justice of revenge.' When we speak of His 'vengeance' we simply mean--unless we have dropped into a degrading superst.i.tion--the just recompense of reward which divinely dogs all sin. There is one saying in Scripture which puts the whole matter in its true light, 'Vengeance is Mine; I will repay,' saith the Lord; the last clause of which interprets the first. So, then, with these elucidations, we may perhaps see a little more clearly the sequence of the Psalmist's thought here--G.o.d's forgiveness, and co-existing with that, G.o.d's scourging of the sin which He forgives; and both His forgiveness and the scourging, the efflux and the manifestation of the divine holiness. Now just let us look at these thoughts. Here we have--

I. The adoring contemplation of the divine forgiveness.

I suppose that is almost exclusively a thought due to the historical revelation, through the ages, to Israel, crowned, as well as deepened, by the culmination and perfecting of the eternal revelation of G.o.d in Jesus Christ our Lord. I suppose the conception of a forgiving G.o.d is the product of the Old and of the New Testament. But familiar as the word is to us, and although the thing that it means is embodied in the creed of Christendom, 'I believe ... in the forgiveness of sins,' I think that a great many of us would be somewhat put to it, if we were called upon to tell definitely and clearly what we mean when we speak of the forgiveness of sins. Many of us, prior to thinking about the matter, would answer 'the non-infliction or remission of penalty.' And I am far from denying that that is an element in forgiveness, although it is the lowest and the most external, in both the Old Testament and the New Testament conception of it. But we must rise a great deal higher than that. We are ent.i.tled, by our Lord's teaching, to parallel G.o.d's forgiveness and man's forgiveness; and so perhaps the best way to understand the perfect type of forgiveness is to look at the imperfect types which we see round us. What, then, do we mean by human forgiveness? It is seen in mult.i.tudes of cases where there is no question at all of penalty. Two men get alienated from one another. One of them does something which the other thinks is a sin against friendship or loyalty, and he who is sinned against says, 'I forgive you.' That does not mean that he does not inflict a penalty, because there is no penalty in question. Forgiveness is not a matter of conduct, then, primarily, but it is a matter of disposition, of att.i.tude, or, to put it into a shorter word, it is a matter of the heart; and even on the lower level of the human type, we see that remission of penalty may be a part, sometimes is and sometimes is not, but is always the smallest part of it, and a derivative and secondary result of something that went before. An unconscious recognition of this att.i.tude of mind and heart, as being the essential thing in forgiveness, brings about an instance of the process by which two words that originally mean substantially the same thing come to acquire each its special shade of meaning. What I refer to is this--when a judicial sentence on a criminal is remitted, we never hear any one speak about the criminal being 'forgiven.' We keep the word 'pardon,' in our daily conventional intercourse, for slight offences or for the judicial remission of a sentence. The king pardons a criminal; you never hear about the king 'forgiving' a criminal. And that, as I take it, is just because people have been groping after the thought that I am trying to bring out, viz. that the remission of penalty is one thing, and purging the heart of all alienation and hatred is another; and that the latter is forgiveness, whilst the former has to be content with being pardon.

The highest type of forgiveness is the paternal. Every one of us who remembers our childhood, and every one of us who has had children of his own, knows what paternal forgiveness is. It is not when you put away the rod that the little face brightens again and the tears cease to flow, but it is when _your_ face clears, and the child knows that there is no cloud between it and the father, or still more the mother, that forgiveness is realised. The immediate effect of our transgressions is that we, as it were, thereby drop a great, black rock into the stream of the divine love, and the channel is barred by our action; and G.o.d's forgiveness is when, as was the case in another fashion in the Deluge, the floods rise above the tops of the highest hills; and as the good old hymn that has gone out of fashion nowadays, says, over sins:

'Like the mountains for their size, The seas of sovereign grace arise.'

When the love of G.o.d flows over the black rock, as the incoming tide does over some jagged reef, then, and not merely when the rod is put on the shelf, is forgiveness bestowed and received.

But, as I have said, the remission of penalty _is_ an element in forgiveness. Some people say: 'It is a very dangerous thing, in the interests of Christian truth, to treat that relation of a loving Father as if it expressed all that G.o.d is to men.' Quite so; G.o.d is King as well as Father. There are a.n.a.logies, both in paternal and regal government, which help us to understand the divine dealings with us; though, of course, in regard to both we must always remember that the a.n.a.logies are remote and not to be pressed too far. But even in recognising the fact that an integral part of forgiveness is remission of penalty, we come back, by another path, to the same point, that the essence of forgiveness is the uninterrupted flow of love. Remission of penalty;--yes, by all means. But then the question comes, what _is_ the penalty of sin? And I suppose that the deepest answer to that is, separation from G.o.d. But if the true New Testament conception of the penalty of sin is the eternal death which is the result of the rending of a man away from the Source of life, then the remission of the penalty is precisely identical with the uninterrupted flow of the divine love.

The mists of autumnal mornings drape the sky in gloom, and turn the blessed sun itself into a lurid ball of fire. Sweep away the mists, and its rays again pour out beneficence. The man who sins, piles up, as it were, a cloud-bank between himself and G.o.d, and forgiveness, which is the remission of the penalty, is the sweeping away of the cloud-bank, and the pouring out of sunshine upon a darkened heart. So, brethren! the essence of forgiveness is that G.o.d shall love me all the same, though I sin against Him.

But now turn, in the next place, to

II. G.o.d's scourging of the sin which He forgives.

Look at the instances in our psalm, 'Moses and Aaron among His priests.... They called upon the Lord and He answered them. Thou wast a G.o.d that forgavest them, and Thou tookest vengeance of their doings.'

Moses dies on Pisgah, Aaron is stripped of his priestly robes by his brother's hand and left alone amongst the clouds and the eagles, on the solitary summit of the mountain, and yet Moses and Aaron knew themselves forgiven the sins for which they died those lonely deaths. And these are but instances of what is universally true, that the sin which is pardoned is also 'avenged' in the sense of having retribution dealt out to it.

I need not dwell upon this at any length, but let me just remind you how there are two provinces of human experience in which this is abundantly true: one, that of outward consequences, and another that of inward consequences. Take, for instance, two men, boon companions, who together have wasted their substance in riotous living. One of them is converted, as we call it, becomes a Christian, knows himself forgiven. The other one is not. Is the one less certain to have a corrugated liver than the other? Will the disease, the pauperism, the ruined position in life, the loss of reputation be any different in the cases of him who is pardoned and of him who is not? No; the two will suffer in a similar fashion, and the different att.i.tude that the one has to the divine love from that which the other has, will not make a hair of difference as to the results that follow. The consequences are none the less divine retribution because they are the result of natural laws, and none the less penal because they are automatically inflicted.

There is another department in which we see the same law working, and that is the inward consequences. A man does change his att.i.tude to his former sins, when he knows that he is pardoned; but the results of these sins will follow all the same, whether he is forgiven or not. Memory will be tarnished, habits will be formed and chain a man, capacities will be forfeited, weaknesses will ensue. The wounds may be healed, but the scars will remain, and when we consider how certainly, and as I said, divinely, such issues dog all manner of transgression, we can understand what the Psalmist meant when, not thinking about a future retribution, but about the present life's experiences, he said, 'Thou wast a G.o.d that forgavest them, and Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions.' 'The sluggard will not plough by reason of the cold, therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing,' and that will be his case whether he is forgiven, or not forgiven, by the divine love.

So, dear friends! do not let us confound the two things which are so widely separated, the flow of the divine love to us irrespective of our sins, which is the true forgiveness, and the remission of the penalty, the infliction of which may itself be a part of forgiveness. 'Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap,' and he will reap it whether he has sown darnel and tares and poisonous seeds, of which he is now ashamed, and for which he has received forgiveness, or whether he has not asked nor received it.

Only remember that if we humbly realise the great fact that G.o.d has forgiven us, we can, as they say, 'take our punishment' in an altogether different spirit and temper, and it comes to be, not judicial penalty, but paternal chastis.e.m.e.nt, the token of love, and of which we can say that 'We are judged of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.'

Lastly, my text leads us to think of--

III. Forgiveness and scourging as both issues of holy love.