Each in his own delusions; they are lost
In chase of fancied happiness, still woo'd
And never won. Dream after dream ensues;
And still they dream that they shall still succeed,
And still are disappointed. Rings the world
With the vain stir. I sum up half mankind,
And add two-thirds of the remaining half,
And find the total of their hopes and fears
Dreams, empty dreams."[18]--_Cowper's Task._
[18] "I was at the very zenith of earthly happiness. On returning
from the ball, I took a hasty review of the evening I had passed
as I lay sleepless upon my pillow. The glitter--the music--the
dance--the excitement--the attention--the pleasure--all passed
before me. But, oh! I felt a want I could not describe. I sighed,
and, throwing my arm over my head, whispered to myself these
expressive words, '_Is this all?_'"--_Mrs Winslow, Life._
Let him who would solve this great problem of Happiness go to that
parable of nature--the hunted Stag seeking the water-brooks, the
thirsty soul seeking its God. God is the _home_ of the soul, and he is
away from home who pitches his tent and weaves his heart-affections
around anything short of Him. Who has not heard of "home-sickness"--the
desolate feelings of the lonely stranger in a strange land? Let
affection, and friendship, and pity do what they may to alleviate the
pang of distance and separation, though beaming faces be around, and
hands of love and sympathy be extended, still will the heart (despite
of all) be roaming the old hallowed haunts, climbing in thought the
hills of childhood, gazing on the old village church with its festoons
of ivy, seated under the aged elm, or listening to the music of the
passing brook and the music of voices sweeter and lovelier than all!
The soul is that stranger, dwelling in the tents of Kedar, and panting
for Heaven and God. Its language is, "I am _not_ at home, I am a
stranger here." Manifold, too, are the voices in this the land of its
exile, whispering, "_Arise ye and depart, for this is_ NOT _your
rest!_"[19]
[19] Micah ii. 10.
You may have seen in our mountain glens, in the solemn twilight, birds
winging their way to their nests. There may be lovely bowers, gardens
of fragrance and beauty, close by,--groves inviting to sweetest
melody, Nature's consecrated haunts of song. But they tempt them not.
Their nests--their _homes_--are in yonder distant rock, and thither
they speed their way! So with the soul. The painted glories of this
world will not satisfy it. There is no rest in these for its weary
wing and wailing cry. It goes singing up and home to God. It has its
nest in the crevices of the Rock of Ages. When detained in the nether
valley, often is the warbling note heard, "Oh that I had wings like a
dove! for then would I flee away, and be at rest." And when the flight
has been made from the finite to the infinite--from the lower valleys
of sense to the hills of faith--from the creature to the Creator--from
man to God,--as we see it folding its buoyant pinion and sinking into
the eternal clefts, we listen to the song, "_Return unto thy rest, O
my soul_!"
Reader! may this flight be yours. "Seek ye the Lord while He may be
found!" The creature may change, He cannot. The creature must die, He
is eternal. "_O God, thou art my God; early will I seek_ THEE: _my
soul thirsteth for_ THEE, _my flesh longeth for_ THEE _in a dry and
thirsty land, where no water is.... Because Thy loving-kindness is
better than life, my lips shall praise Thee._" (Ps. lxiii.)
II.
The Hart Wounded.
"I was a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since. With many an arrow deep infix'd
My panting side was charged, when I withdrew,
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
There was I found by One who had Himself
Been hurt by th' archers. In His side He bore,
And in His hands and feet, the cruel scars.
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
He drew them forth, and heal'd, and bade me live!"
--_Cowper._
"It was in this extremity it occurred to her that, in the deficiency
of all hope in creatures, there might be _hope and help in God_. Borne
down by the burdens of a hidden providence (a providence which she did
not then love, because she did not then understand it) she yielded to
the pressure that was upon her, and began to look to Him in whom alone
there is true assistance."--_Madame Guyon's Life_, p. 38.
"As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after
thee, O God."--_Verse 1._
II.
The Hart Wounded.
Are we not warranted to infer that it was the _wounded_ stag which
David now saw, or pictured he saw, seeking the brooks?--the hart hit
by the archers, with blood-drops standing on its flanks, and its eye
glazed with faintness, exhaustion, and death? But for these wounds it
would never have come to the Valley. It would have been nestling still
up in its native heath--the thick furze and cover of the mountain
heights of Gilead. But the shaft of the archer had sped with unerring
aim; and, with distended nostril and quivering limb, it hastens to
allay the rage of its death-thirst.
Picture of David, ay, and of many who have been driven to drink of
that "river, the streams whereof make glad the city of God." They are
_wounded_ spirits; the arrow festering in their souls, and drawing
their life-blood. Faint, trembling, forlorn, weary, they have left
the world's high ground--the heights of vanity, and indifference, and
self-righteousness, and sin--and have sought the lowly Valley of
humiliation.
What are some of these arrows? There are arrows from the quiver of
MAN, and arrows from the quiver of GOD.
The _arrows of man_ are often the cruellest of all. "_Lo, the wicked
bend their bow, they make ready their arrow upon the string, that they
may privily shoot at the upright in heart._" (Ps. xi. 2.) ENVY is an
archer. His shaft is dipped in gall and wormwood. JEALOUSY is a
bowman, whose barbed weapons cannot stand the prosperity of a rival.
REVENGE has his quiver filled with keen points of steel, that burn to
retaliate the real or imagined injury. MALICE is an archer that seeks
his prey in ambush. He lurks behind the rock. He inflicts his wanton
mischief--irreparable injury--on the absent or innocent. CONTEMPT is a
bowman of soaring aim. He looks down with haughty, supercilious scorn
on others. The teeth of such "are spears and arrows, and their tongue
a sharp sword." (Ps. lvii. 4.) DECEIT.--He is, in these our days, a
huntsman of repute--a modern Nimrod--with gilded arrows in his
quiver, and a bugle, boasting great things, slung at his girdle. He
makes his target the unsuspecting; decoys them, with siren look,
within his toils, and leaves them, wounded and helpless, on "the
mountains of prey!" "_Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and
from a deceitful tongue. What shall be given unto thee? or what shall
be done unto thee, thou false tongue? Sharp arrows of the mighty, with
coals of juniper._" (Ps. cxx. 2-4.)
But there are arrows also from the _quiver of_ GOD. "_The arrows of
the Almighty_," says Job, "_are within me, the poison whereof drinketh
up my spirit._" (Job vi. 4.) "_He hath bent His bow,_" says Jeremiah,
"_and set me as a mark for the arrow. He hath causéd the arrows of His
quiver to enter into my reins._" (Lam. iii. 12, 13.) And who will not
breathe the prayer of the Gilead Exile at another time?--"_Let me fall
into the hands of God, for great are_ HIS _mercies!_" "_Faithful are
the wounds of_ THIS _friend._" (2 Sam. xxiv. 14; Prov. xxvii. 6.)
We need not stop to enumerate particularly these _arrows_. There is
the blanched arrow of _sickness_, the rusted arrow of _poverty_, the
lacerating arrow of _bereavement_, stained and saturated with tears,
and feathered from our own bosoms! There is the arrow, too, (though of
a different kind,) of God's own blessed _Word_, "quick and powerful."
"_Thine arrows are sharp in the heart of the King's enemies._" (Ps.
xlv. 5.)
Yet, blessed be God, these are often arrows which wound only to heal;
or rather, which, from the wounds they create, send the bleeding,
panting, thirsting soul to seek the waters of comfort in God himself.
Suffering one! be thankful for thy wounds. But for these shafts thou
mightest have been, at this moment, sleeping on the mountain heights
of self-righteousness, or worldliness, or sin, with no thought of thy
soul; the streams of salvation disowned; forsaking, and continuing to
forsake, the "Fountain of Living Waters."
Let me ask, Has this been the result of thy woundings? Have they led
thee from the "broken (leaky) cistern" to say, "All my springs are in
THEE?" Remember affliction, worldly calamity, bereavement, have a
twofold effect. It is a solemn alternative! They may drive thee
nearer, they may drive thee farther from, thy God. They may drive
thee down to the gushing stream, or farther up the cold, freezing
mountain-side. The wounded hart of this Psalm, on receiving the sting
of the arrow, might have plunged only deeper and deeper into the toils
of the huntsmen, or the solitudes of the forest. It might have gone
with its pining eye, and broken heart, and bleeding wound, to bury
itself amid the withered leaves.
How many there are whose afflictions seem to lead to this sad
consequence; who, when mercies and blessings are removed, abandon
themselves to sullen and morbid fretfulness; who, instead of bowing
submissive to the hand that wounds and is able to heal, seem to feel
as if they were denuded of their rights! Their language is the bitter
reproach of Jonah--"_I do well to be angry, even unto death_."
Muffling themselves in hardened unbelief, their wretched solace is
that of despair--"_It is better for me to die than to live_."
"_Blessed is the man that_ ENDURETH _temptation_," not who rushes away
to pine, and bleed, and die;--or to feed still on husks and the
garbage of the wilderness, but who makes the nobler resolve, "_I will
arise and go to my Father_." Blessed is the man whose cry, like that
of the child, is answered by his heavenly Parent bending over the
cradle of his sorrow;--who feels, as the Psalmist did, that his
gracious Father and God is never so near him as in a time of trial.
"_When my spirit was overwhelmed,_ THEN THOU _knewest my path._" The
bird of the desert is said to bury its head in the sand on the
approach of its foes, and to abandon itself to destruction; but
blessed is the man who rather is like the bird of the grove, the first
twigs of whose nest have been ruthlessly pulled to pieces by the hand
of violence. Hovering for a while over her pillaged home, she fills
the wood with her plaintive lament, then soars away from the haunt of
the destroyer to begin a fresh one, in a place of safety, on the top
branch of some cedar of God!
Such was the case with David on the occasion of this Psalm. He had
read to him the most touching homily the world _could_ read on the
precarious tenure of earthly blessings. His sceptre, his crown, his
family, were like the bubbles on that foaming stream on which he
gazed, dancing their little moment on its surface, then gone, and gone
for ever. Is he to abandon himself to an ignoble despair? Is he to
conclude that the Lord has made him a target on which to exhaust His
quiver--that He has "forgotten to be gracious?" Is he to join
marauding chiefs beyond the Jordan, savage freebooters--become a
mountain adventurer on these Gentile borders, and forget Zion and
Zion's God? No! the earthly crown may fade, but the homeless,
uncrowned, unsceptred monarch has a better home and a better King
above; invisible walls and battlements, better than all the trenches
and moats of an earthly fortress, encompass the wanderer. With his eye
on these, thus he weaves his warrior song--"_I will say of the Lord,
He is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength,
in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my
high tower_." (Ps. xviii. 2.)
Reader! let me ask you, in closing this chapter, are _you_ panting for
God?
This is not the way--this is not the history of _most_. They are
panting, but _not_ for God! They are panting up the hill, like
Sisyphus, with their huge stone. _Ambition_ is panting up the hill--no
time to take a breath. _Pleasure_ is panting up the hill--pursuing her
butterfly existence--a phantom-chase--rushing from flower to flower,
extracting all the luscious sweets she can. _Fame_ is panting up the
hill, blowing her trumpet before her, eager to erect her own monument
on the coveted apex. _Mammon_ is pushing up the hill with his panting
team, to erect the temple of riches. Multitudes of hapless wayfarers
in the same reckless scramble have tumbled into crevices, and are
crying for help. Mammon's wheels are locked,--his treasure-chests have
fallen into the mire;--and yet, _on_ he goes, driving his jaded steeds
over the poor, and weak, and helpless--ay, those that assisted him to
load before he started at the mountain base. He must gain the top at
all hazards as best he may; and he will be crowned a hero, too, and
lauded for his feat!
Ah! strange that men should still be pursuing that phantom-chase. Or,
rather, strange that they should live so immeasurably beneath the
grandeur of their own destiny; rasping the shallows when they should
be out in the deep sea; furling and warping the sails of immortality,
instead of having every available yard of canvas spread to the breeze
of heaven.
These objects of earthly, perishable pursuit, _may_ do when the world
is bright, the heart unwounded, the eye undimmed. These may do when
the sun shines unclouded in our firmament, when our fields are waving,
when fortune is weaving her golden web, and the bark of existence with
its white sails is holding its way through summer seas. These may do
when the home circle is unbroken; when we miss no loved face, when we
mark no silent voice, no vacant chair. _But_ when the muffled drum
takes the place of life's joyous music;--when our skies are robed in
sackcloth, when Nature takes on its hue of ashen paleness; when every
flower, seared and frost-bitten, seems to droop its head in sadness
and sorrow, and hide its tears amid withered leaves and blighted
stems, exuding only the fragrance of decay!--what _then_? The
prophet's voice takes up the lesson--"_The voice said, Cry; and he
said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the glory of man
as the flower of the grass!_" Poor trifler that thou art! to be so
long mocked and deceived by a dead and dying world; desolate,
friendless, hopeless, portionless; a vessel driven from its moorings,
out unpiloted on a tempestuous sea! BUT there is a haven for the
tempest-tossed. The Saviour thou hast long despised and rejected, is a
provided harbour for such as _thee_. "_A_ MAN _shall be an
hiding-place from the wind, a covert from the tempest, as rivers of
water in a dry place, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land._"
(Isaiah xxxii. 2.)
Art thou panting after the streams of salvation? The Shepherd who
feeds His flock by these "still waters" thus addresses thee--LET HIM
THAT IS ATHIRST, COME.
ATHIRST! who is not athirst? It is the attribute of universal
humanity! Who does not feel that this world is presenting us with
muddy streams and broken, leaky cisterns? Who does not feel, in their
moments of deep and calm reflection, when we are brought face to face
with the great enigma of existence, that the world is serving up faded
flowers instead of those redolent with imperishable fragrance, and
glowing with unfading bloom? _Friendless one!_--thou who art standing
alone like a solitary tree in the forest whom the woodman's axe has
spared--thy compeers cut down at thy side--COME! _Child of
calamity!_--the chill hand of penury laid on thine earthly
comforts--the widow's cruise fast failing, her staff of bread
diminishing--COME! _Child of bereavement!_--the pillars in thy
heart-shrine crumbling to decay, thy head bowed like a bulrush--thou
who knowest that fortune may again replace and replenish her dismantled
walls, but that nothing can reanimate thy still marble, or refill the
vacant niche in thy heart of hearts--COME! _Prodigal!_--wanderer from
God, exile from peace, roaming the forest-haunts of sin, plunging
deeper and deeper into their midnight of ruin and despair--has an
arrow, either from the quiver of man, or of God, wounded thy heart?
Art thou, in thy agony, seeking rest and finding none,--having the
gnawing feeling of dissatisfaction with all created things, and an
undefined longing for a solace they cannot give? Yes! for _thee_, too,
for thy gaping, bleeding wound there is "balm in Gilead, and a
Physician there." I repeat, Jesus this day stands by the glorious
streams of His own purchased salvation, and cries, saying--"_If any
man_ THIRST, _let him come unto me and drink_!"
"Yea, Lord!" be it yours to reply--"Lord, I _come!_ thirsty, faint,
forlorn, wounded, weary! I come, 'just as I am, without one plea.'
Thou art all I need, all I require, in sickness and health, in joy
and in sorrow, in life and in death, in time and through eternity. The
snow-clad hills may cease to feed the brooks;--that sun may cease to
shine, or nature grow weary of his loving beams;--that moon may cease
on her silver lyre, night by night, to discourse to the listening
earth;--the birds may become mute at the voice of the morning;--flowers
may droop, instead of ringing their thousand bells at the jubilant
step of summer;--the gasping pilgrim may rush from the stream, and
prefer the fiery furnace-glow of the desert sands,--but 'this God
shall be my God for ever and ever;' and, even when death is sealing my
eyes, and the rush of darkness is coming over my spirit, even then
will I take up the old exile strain--the great sigh of weary
humanity--and blend its notes with the song of heaven--'AS THE HART
PANTETH AFTER THE WATER-BROOKS, SO PANTETH MY SOUL AFTER THEE, O
GOD.'"
III.
The Living God.
"Hear me! To Thee my soul in suppliance turneth;
Like the lorn pilgrim on the sands accursed.
For life's sweet waters, God! my spirit yearneth:
Give me to drink. I perish here of thirst."
"Oh, it is His own self I pant after. Fellowship--living, constant,
intimate fellowship with Him, is the cry He often hears from the
desolate void of my unloving heart. How do I loathe the sin which
makes the atmosphere so misty--the clouds so thick and dark!"--_Life
of Adelaide Newton_, p. 246.
"My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and
appear before God?"--_Verse 2._
III.
THE LIVING GOD.
In the two former chapters, we listened to the first sigh of the
exile--the first strain of his plaintive song. It was the groping and
yearning of his soul after God, as the alone object of happiness.
You may have watched the efforts of the plant, tossed amid rack and
weed in some dark cellar, to climb to the light. Like the captive in
the dungeon longing to cool his fevered brow in the air of heaven, its
sickly leaves seem to struggle and gasp for breath. They grope, with
their blanched colours, towards any chink or crevice or grated window,
through which a broken beam is admitted. Or garden flowers choked amid
rank luxuriance, or under the shade of tree or wall, how ambitious to
assert their freedom, and pay homage to the parent sun, lifting their
pendant leaves or petals as a target for his golden arrows!
The soul, away from the great Sun of its being, frets and pines and
mourns! Every affection droops in languor and sadness when that light
is away. Its abortive efforts to obtain happiness in other and meaner
joys, and its dissatisfaction with them, is itself a testimony to the
strength and loftiness of its aspiration--a manifesto of its real
grandeur! The human affections must be fastened on _something_! They
are like the clinging ivy which creeps along the ground, and grasps
stones, rocks, weeds, and unsightly ruins, if it can find nothing else
on which to fix its tendrils; but when it reaches the root of the
tree, or base of the castle wall, it spurns its grovelling existence,
and climbs its upward way till it hangs in graceful festoons from the
topmost branch or turret.
We are to contemplate, now, a second breathing of this exiled
supplicant--a new element in his God-ward aspiration.
"_My soul thirsteth for God,_ FOR THE LIVING GOD: _when shall I come
and appear before God?_"
This is no mere repetition of the former verse. It invests the
believer's relationship to the object of his faith and hope with a new
and more solemn interest.
For David's present condition and experience in the land of his
exile--the feeling of utter isolation throbbing through the pulses of
his soul,--there were required some extraordinary and peculiar sources
of comfort. The old conventional dogmas of theology, at such seasons,
are insufficient. Who has not felt, in some great crisis of their
spiritual being, similar to his, when all the hopes and joys of
existence rock and tremble to their foundations; when, by some sudden
reverse of fortune, the pride of life becomes a shattered ruin; or, by
some appalling bereavement, the hope and solace of the future is
blighted and withered like grass;--who has not been conscious of a
longing desire to know more of this infinite God, who holds the
balances of Life and Death in His hands, and who has come forth from
the inscrutable recesses of His own mysterious being, and touched us
to the quick? What of His character, His attributes, His ways! There
is a feeling, such as we never had before, to draw aside the veil
which screens the Invisible. It may be faith in its feeblest form,
awaking as from a dream; lisping the very alphabet of Divine truth,
and asking, in broken and stammering accents, "Does God _really
live?_--Is it, after all, Deity, or is it Chance, that is ruling the
world? Is this great Being near, or is He distant? Does He take
cognizance of all events in this world; or are minute, trivial
occurrences, contingent on the accidents of nature or the caprice of
man? _Is He_ THE LIVING ONE?" God, a distant abstraction shrouded in
the awful mystery of His own attributes, will not do;--we must realise
His presence; our cry, at such a time, is that of the old patriarch at
the brook Jabbok, or of his descendant at the brooks of Gilead--"_Tell
me thy_ NAME."[20] Is it merely _love_, or is it the loving ONE? Is it
_omnipotence_, or is it the almighty ONE? Is it some mysterious,
impalpable principle, some property of matter or attribute of mind--or
is it a _personal_ Jehovah, one capable of loving and of being loved?
Have the lips of incarnate truth and wisdom deceived us by a mere
figure of speech, when, in the great Liturgy of the Church universal,
in the prayer which is emphatically "His own," He hath taught us, in
its opening words, to say, "Our FATHER which art in heaven, hallowed
be thy NAME!"
[20] Gen. xxxii. 28.
How earnestly do the saints in former times, and especially in their
seasons of trial, cleave to the thought of this _personal_ presence;
in other words, a thirst for "the _living God_!"
What was the solace of the patriarch Job, as he was stretched on his
bed of sackcloth and ashes, when other friends had turned against him
in bitter derision, and were loading him with their reproaches? It was
the realisation of a _living defender_ who would vindicate his
integrity,--"_I know that my Redeemer liveth_." (Job xix. 25.)
God appeared to Moses in a burning bush. The symbol taught him
encouraging truths;--that the Hebrew race, after all their experience
of fiery trial, would come forth unscathed and unconsumed. But the
shepherd-leader desired more than this: he craved the assurance of a
LIVING GOD--an ever-present guardian, a pillar to guide by day, and a
column of defence by night. It was the truth that was borne to his ear
from the desert's fiery oracle. There could be no grander watchword
for himself, or for the enslaved people,--"_God said unto Moses,_ I AM
THAT I AM!" No comment is subjoined;--nothing to diminish the glory of
that majestic utterance. The Almighty Speaker does not qualify it by
adding, "I am light, power, wisdom, glory;" but He simply declares His
_being and existence_--He unfolds Himself as "_the living God_!" It is
enough!