Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms Part 43

You want another motive to be brought to bear upon your conduct, and upon your convictions and your will mightier than any that now influence them; and you get that if you will yield yourself to the love that has come down from heaven to save you, and says to you, 'If you love Me, keep My commandments.' You want for keeping yourself and cleansing your way reinforcements to your own inward vigour, and you will get these if you will trust to Jesus Christ, who will breathe into you the Spirit of His own life, which will make you 'free from the law of sin and death.'

You want, if your path is to be cleansed--the youngest of you, the most tenderly nurtured, the purest, the most innocent wants--forgiveness for a past path, which is in some measure stained and foul, as well as strength for the future, to deliver you from the dreadful influence of the habit of evil. And you get all these, dear friends! in the blood of Jesus Christ that cleanses from all sin.

So, standing as you do in the place where two ways meet, and with your choice yet in your power, I beseech you, turn away from the broad, easy road that slopes pleasantly downwards, and choose the narrow, steep path that climbs. Better rocks than mud, better the painful life of self-restraint and self-denial than the life of pleasing self.

Oh! choose the better portion, choose Christ for your Leader, your Law, your Lord! Trust yourselves to that great sacrifice which He made on the Cross, that all the past for you may be cleansed, and the future may be swept clear; and, so trusting, be sure He will be with you, to keep you and to guide you into the path which His own hand has raised above the filth of the world; the path of holiness, along which you may walk with feet and garments unstained till you come to Zion, 'with songs and everlasting joy upon your heads,' and bless Him there for all the way by which He led you home.

LIFE HID AND NOT HID

'Thy word have I hid in my heart.'--PSALM cxix. 11.

'I have not hid Thy righteousness in my heart.'--PSALM xl. 10.

Then there are two kinds of hiding--one right and one wrong: one essential to the life of the Christian, one inconsistent with it. He is a shallow Christian who has no secret depths in his religion. He is a cowardly or a lazy one, at all events an unworthy one, who does not exhibit, to the utmost of his power, his religion. It is bad to have all the goods in the shop window; it is just as bad to have them all in the cellar. There are two aspects of the Christian life--one between G.o.d and myself, with which no stranger intermeddles; one patent to all the world. My two texts touch these two.

I. 'I have hid Thy word within my heart.' There we have the word hidden, or the secret religion of the heart.

Now, I have often had occasion to remind you that the Old Testament use of the word 'heart' is much wider than our modern one, which limits it to being the seat and organ of love, affection, or emotion; whereas in the Old Testament the 'heart' is the very vital centre of the personal self. As the Book of Proverbs has it, 'out of it are the issues of life,' all the outgoings of activity of every kind, both that which we ascribe to the head, and that which we ascribe to the heart. These come, according to the Old Testament idea, from this central self. And so, when the Psalmist says, 'I have hid Thy word within my heart,' he means 'I have buried it deep in the very midst of my being, and put it down at the very roots of myself, and there incorporated it with the very substance of my soul.'

Now, I venture to take that expression, 'Thy word,' in a somewhat wider sense than the Psalmist employed it. There are three ideas conveyed by that expression in Scripture; and two of them are distinctly found in this psalm.

First, there is the plain, obvious one, which means by 'the word,'

written revelation. The Bible of the Psalmist was a very small volume compared with ours. The Pentateuch, and perhaps some of the historical books, possibly also one or two of the prophets--and these were about all. Yet this fragmentary word he 'hid in his heart.' Now, dear brethren! I wish to say a very practical thing or two, and I begin with this. If you want to be strong Christian people, hide the Bible in your heart. When I was a boy the practice of good Christian folk was to read a daily chapter. I wonder if that is kept up. I gravely suspect it is not. There are, no doubt, a great many causes contributing to the comparative decay amongst professing Christians, of Bible reading and Bible study. There is modern 'higher criticism,' which has a great deal to say about how and when the books were made, especially the books that composed this Psalmist's Bible. But I want to insist that no theories, were they ever so well established--as I take leave to say they are not--no theories about these secondary questions touch the value of Scripture as a factor in the development of the Christian life. Whatever a man may think about these, he will be none the less alive, if he is wise, to the importance of the daily devotional study of Scripture.

Then there is another set of reasons for the neglect of Scripture, in the multiplication of other forms of literature. People have so many other books to read now, that they have not much time for reading their Bibles, or if they have, they think they have not. No literature will ever take the place of the old Book. Why, even looked at as a mere literary product there is nothing in the world like it! And no religious literature, sermons, treatises, still less magazines and periodicals, will do for Christian men what the Bible will do for them. You make a tremendous mistake, for your own souls' sake, if your religious reading consists in what people have said and thought about Scripture, more than in the Scripture itself. Why should you dip your pitchers into the reservoir, when you can take them up to where the spring comes gushing out of the hillside, pure and limpid and living?

Then there is the drive of our modern life which crowds out the word.

Get up a quarter of an hour earlier and you will have time to read your Bible. It will be well worth the sacrifice, if it is a sacrifice. I do not mean by reading the Bible what, I am afraid, is far too common, reading a sc.r.a.p of Scripture as if it were a kind of charm. But I would most earnestly press upon you that muscle and fibre will distinctly atrophy and become enfeebled, if Christian people neglect the first plain way of hiding the word in their heart, which is to make the utterances of Scripture as if incorporated with their very being, and part of their very selves.

But there is another use of the expression, 'Thy word,' which is not without example in this great psalm of praise of the word. In one place in it we read, 'For ever, O Lord! Thy word is settled in heaven'; that is not the Bible. 'Thy faithfulness is unto all generations. They continue this day according to Thy ordinances'; these are not the Bible--'for all are Thy servants.' 'Unless Thy law had been my delight, I should have perished in my afflictions'; I think that is not the Bible either, but it is the utterance of G.o.d's will, as expressed in the Psalmist's affliction. G.o.d's word comes to us in His providences and in many other ways. It is the declaration of His character and purposes, however they are declared, and the expression of His will and command, however expressed. In that wider sense of the phrase, I would say, 'Hide that manifested will of G.o.d in your hearts.' Let us cultivate the habit of bringing all 'the issues of life'--the streams that bubble up from that fountain in the centre of our being--into close relation to what we know to be G.o.d's will concerning us. Let the thought of the will of G.o.d sit sovereign arbiter, enthroned in the very centre of our personality, ruling our will, bending it and making it yielding and conformed to His, governing our affections, regulating our pa.s.sions, restraining our desires, stimulating our slothfulness, quickening our aspirations, lifting heavenwards our hopes, and bringing the whole of the activities that well up from our hearts into touch with the will of G.o.d. Cast the healing branch into the very eye of the fountain, and then all the streams will partake of the cleansing. Let that known will of G.o.d be as the leaven hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. A fanciful interpretation of that emblem makes the three measures to mean the triple const.i.tuents of humanity, body, soul, and spirit. We may smile at the fantastic exposition, but let us take heed to obey the exhortation. When G.o.d's will is deeply planted within, it will work quickening change on the heavy dough of our sluggish natures. It is when we bring the springs of our actions--namely, our motives, which are our true selves--into touch with His uttered will, that our deeds become conformed to it. Look after the motives, and the deeds will look after themselves. 'I have hid Thy word within my heart.'

And now I venture upon a further application of this phrase, of which the Psalmist had no notion, but which, in G.o.d's great mercy, in the progress of revelation, we can make. There is a better word of G.o.d than the Bible; there is a better word of G.o.d than any will uttered in His providences and the like. There is the Incarnate Word of G.o.d, who 'was from the beginning with G.o.d, and was G.o.d,' and is manifested in these last times unto us. I am keeping well within the a.n.a.logy of Scripture teaching when I see the perfecting of revelation by the spoken Word as reached in the revelation by the personal word; and when, in addition to the exhortation, to hide the Scripture in your hearts, and to hide the uttered will of G.o.d, however uttered, in your hearts, I add, let us hide Christ in our hearts. For He will 'dwell in our hearts by faith,' and if He is shrined within the curtains of the secret place within us, which is 'the secret place of the Most High,' then, in the courts of the sanctuary, there will be a pure sacrifice and a priest clad 'in the beauties of holiness.'

II. The word not hidden, or the religion of the outward life.

Our second text brings into view the outer side of the devout life, that which is turned to the world. The word is to be hidden in the heart, for this very end of being then revealed in the life. For what other purpose is it to be set in the centre of our being and applied to the springs of action, than to mould action, and so to be displayed in conduct? It is not to be hid like some forgotten and unused treasure in a castle vault, but to be buried deep in a living person, that it may affect all that person's character and acts. 'There is nothing hidden, but that it should come abroad.' The deepest, sacredest, most secret Christian experiences are to be operative on the outward life. A man may be caught up into the third heavens and there hear words which mortal speech cannot utter, but the incommunicable vision should tell on his patience and fort.i.tude, and influence his Christian work. Nor is our manifestation of the springs of our action to be confined to conduct.

However eloquent it is, it will be all the more intelligible for the commentary supplied by confession with the mouth. Speech for Christ is a Christian obligation. 'What ye hear in the ear, that proclaim ye on the housetops.' True, there is a legitimate reticence as to the depths of personal religion, which needs very strong reasons to warrant its being broken through. Peter told Mark nothing of the interview which he had with Christ on the Resurrection morning, but he must have told the fact.

We shall do well to be silent as to what pa.s.ses between Jesus and us in secret; but we shall not do well if, coming from our private communion with Him, we do not 'find' some to whom we can say, 'We have found the Messiah,' and so bring them to Jesus.

The word, if hid in the heart, will certainly be manifest in the life.

For not only is it impossible for a man who deeply and continually realises G.o.d's will, and lives in touch with Jesus Christ, to prevent these experiences from visibly affecting His life and conduct, but also in the measure in which we have that conscious inward possession of the divine word and the divine Christ we shall be impelled to manifest them to our fellows by every means in our power. What, then, is the inference to be drawn from the fact that there are thousands of professing Christian people in Manchester, who never felt the slightest touch of a necessity to make known the Master whom they say they serve? They must be very shallow Christians, having no depth of experience, or that experience would insist on coming out. True Christian emotion is like a fire smouldering within some substance, that never rests till it burns its way to the outside. As one of the prophets puts it, 'I said I will speak no more in Thy name'; he goes on to tell how his resolve of silence gave way under the pressure of the unuttered speech--'Thy word shut up in my bones was like a fire, and I was weary of forbearing and I could not stay.' So it will always be. Every genuine conviction demands utterance. A full heart needs the relief of speech. If you feel no need to show your allegiance and love to Christ by speech as well as by life, I shrewdly suspect you have little love or allegiance to hide.

Further, the more we show it, the more need there is for us to cultivate the hidden element in our religion. If I were talking to ministers I should have a great deal to say about that. There are preachers who preach away their own religion. The two att.i.tudes of mind in imparting and in receiving are wholly different; and if one is allowed to encroach upon the other, nothing but harm can come. 'As thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone,'--that is the short account of the decay of personal religion in many a life outwardly diligent in Christian work.

If there is a proportionate cultivation of the hidden self, then the act of manifesting will tend to strengthen it. It is meant that our Christian convictions and affections should grow in strength and in transforming power upon ourselves, by reason of utterance; just as when you let air in, the fire burns brighter. But it is quite possible that we may dissipate and scatter our feeble religion by talking about it; and some of us may be in danger of that. The loftier you mean to build your tower, the deeper must be the foundation that you dig. The more any of us are trying to do for Jesus Christ, the more need there is that we increase our secret communion with Jesus Christ.

We may wrongly hide our religion so that it evaporates. Too many professing Christians put away their religion as careless housewives might do some precious perfume, and when they go to take it out, they find nothing but a rotten cork, a faint odour, and an empty flask. Take care of burying your religion so deep, as dogs do bones, that you cannot find it again, or if you do discover, when you open the coffin, that it holds only a handful of dry dust. The heart has two actions. In one it opens its portals and expands to receive the inflowing blood which is the life. In the other it contracts to drive the life through the veins.

For health there must be both motions; the receptiveness, in the secret 'hiding of the word in the heart'; the expulsive energy in the 'not hiding Thy righteousness in my heart.'

A STRANGER IN THE EARTH

'I am a stranger in the earth: hide not Thy commandments from me....

64. The earth, O Lord, is full of Thy mercy: teach me Thy statutes.'

--PSALM cxix. 19, 64.

There is something very remarkable in the variety-in-monotony of this, the longest of the psalms. Though it be the longest it is in one sense the simplest, inasmuch as there is but one thought in it, beaten out into all manner of forms and based upon all various considerations. It reminds one of the great violinist who out of one string managed to bring such music and melody.

The one thought is the infinite preciousness of G.o.d's law, by which, of course, is not meant the written record of that law which lies in Scripture, but the utterances of G.o.d's law in any form, by which men may receive it. You will find that that wider signification of the word 'law,' 'commandment,' 'statute,' is essential to the understanding of every portion of this psalm.

And now these two pet.i.tions which I have put together base the prayer, which they both offer, in slightly varied form ('Teach me Thy statutes,'

or 'Hide not Thy commandments from me,') upon two diverse considerations, which, taken in conjunction, are extremely interesting.

The two facts on which the one pet.i.tion rests, are like two great piers on two opposite sides of a river, each of which holds one end of the arch. 'The earth is full of Thy mercy'; ay! but 'I am a stranger upon the earth.' These two things are both true, and from each of them, and still more from both of them taken together, rises up this pet.i.tion. Let us look then at the facts, and then at the prayer that is built upon them.

Take first that thought of the rejoicing earth, full of G.o.d's mercy as some cup is full of rich wine, or as the flowers in the morning are filled with dew. The Bible does not look at the external world, the material universe, from a scientific point of view, nor does it look at it from a poetical point of view, but from a simply religious one.

Nothing that modern science has taught us to say about the world in the least affects this principle which the Psalmist lays down, that it is all full of G.o.d's mercy. The thought is intended to exclude man and man's ways and all connected with him, as we shall see presently, but the Psalmist looks out upon the earth and all the rest of its inhabitants, and he is sure of two things: one, that G.o.d's direct act is at work in it all, so as that every creature that lives, and everything that is, lives and is because G.o.d is there, and working there; and next, that everything about us is the object of loving thoughts of G.o.d's; and has, as it were, some reflection of G.o.d's smile cast across it like the light of flowers upon the gra.s.s. Spring days with life 're-orient out of dust,' and the annual miracle beginning again all round, with the birds in the trees, that even dwellers in towns can hear singing as if their hearts would burst for very mirth and hopefulness, the blossoms beginning to push above the frosty ground, and the life breaking out of the branches that were stiff and dry all through the winter, proclaim the same truth as the Psalmist was contemplating when he spoke thus. He looks all round, and everywhere sees the signature of a loving divine Hand.

The earth is full to br.i.m.m.i.n.g of Thy mercy. It takes faith to see that; it takes a deeper and a firmer hold of the thought of a present G.o.d than most men have, to feel that. For the most of us, the world has got to be very empty of G.o.d now. We hear rather the creaking of the wheels of a great machine, or see the workings of a blind, impersonal force. But I believe that all that is precious and good in the growth of knowledge since the old days when this Psalmist wrote may be joyfully accepted by us, and deep down below all we may see the deeper, larger truth of the living purpose and will of G.o.d Himself. And I know no reason why twentieth-century men, full to the fingertips of modern scientific thought, may not say as heartily as the old Psalmist said, 'The earth, O Lord! is full of Thy mercy.'

But then there is another side to all this. Amidst all this sunny play of gladness, and apocalypse of blessing, there stands one exception.

Hearken to the other word of my texts, 'I am a stranger upon the earth.'

Man is out of joint with the great whole, out of harmony with the music, the only hungry one at the feast. All other creatures are admirably adapted for the place they fill, and the place they fill is sufficient for them. But I stand here, knowing that I do not belong to this goodly fellowship, feeling that I am an exception to the rule. As Colonel Gardiner said, 'I looked at the dog, and I wished that _I_ was a dog.'

Ah! many another man has felt, Why is it that whilst every creature, the motes that dance in the sunbeam, and the minutest living things, however insignificant, are all filled to the very brim of their capacity--why is it that I, the roof and crown of things, stand here, a sad and solitary stranger, having made acquaintance with grief; having learned what they know not, the burden of toil and care, cursed with forecast and antic.i.p.ation, saddened by memory, torn by desires? 'We look before and after, and pine for what is not.' All other beings fit their place, and their place fits them like a glove upon a fair hand, but I stand here 'a stranger upon the earth.' And the more I feel, or at least the more I am convinced that it is full of G.o.d's mercy, the more I feel that there is something else which I need to make me, in my fashion, as really and as completely blessed as the lowest of His creatures.

The Psalmist tells us what that something more is: 'I am a stranger upon the earth; hide not Thy commandments from me.' That is my food, that is what I need; that is the one thing that will make our souls feel at rest, that we shall have not merely a Bible in our hands, but the will of G.o.d, the knowledge and the love of the will of G.o.d, in our hearts.

When we can say 'I delight to do Thy will, and my whole being seeks to lay itself beneath the mould of Thine impressing purpose, and to be shaped accordingly'; Oh! then, then the care and the toil and the sorrow and the restlessness and the sense of transiency, all change. Some of them pa.s.s away altogether; those of them that survive are transfigured from darkness to glory. Just as some gloomy cliff, impending over the plain, when the rising sun smites upon it, is changed into a rosy and golden glory, so the frowning peaks that look down upon us, are all trans.m.u.ted and glorified, when once the light of G.o.d's recognised will falls upon them.

'All is right that seems most wrong, If it be His sweet will.'

And when He has not hidden His commandments from us, but we have them in our hearts, for the joy and the strength of our lives, then, then it does not matter, though we have to say, 'foxes have holes, and birds of the air have their roosting-places,' and I only, in creation, have 'not where to lay my head.' If we have His will in our hearts, and are humbly and yet lovingly trying to do it, then toil becomes easy, and work becomes blessedness. If we have His will in our hearts, and are seeking to cleave to it, then and only then, do we cease to feel that it is sad that we should be strangers upon the earth, because then and then only can we say 'we seek for a better country, that is, a heavenly.'

Oh, dear friends! we shall be cursed with restlessness and 'weighed upon with sore distress'; and a fleeting world will, by its very fleetingness, be a misery to us, until we have learned to yield our wills to G.o.d, and to drink in His law as the joy and the rejoicing of our hearts. A stranger upon the earth needs the statutes of the Lord, he needs no more, and then they will be as the Psalmist says in another place, 'his song in the house of his pilgrimage.'

But the first of our two texts suggests further to us the certainty that this pet.i.tion shall not be in vain. If the thought, 'I am a stranger in the earth,' teaches us our need of G.o.d's commandments, the thought, 'the earth is full of Thy mercies,' a.s.sures us that we shall get what we need.

Surely it is not going to be the case that we only are to be left hungry when all other creatures sit at His table and feast there. Surely He who knows what each living thing requires, and opens His hand, and satisfies their desires, is not going to leave the n.o.bler famishing of an immortal soul uncared for.

Surely if all through the universe besides, we see that the measure of a creature's capacity is the measure of G.o.d's gift to it, there is not going to be, there need not be, any disproportion between what we require and what we possess. Surely if His ear can hear and translate, and His loving hand can open to satisfy, the croaking of the young raven when it cries, He will neither mistake nor neglect the voice of a man's heart, when it is asking what is so in accordance with His will as that He should let him know and love His statutes.

It is not meant to be the case that we lie in the middle of His creation, the one exception to the universal law, like Gideon's fleece, dry and dusty, while every poor bit of bush and gra.s.s round about is soaked with His dew. If 'the earth is full of Thy mercy,' Thou thereby hast pledged Thyself that my heart shall be full of Thy law and Thy grace, if I desire it.