1 If Jehovah build not a house,
Vainly do its builders toil upon it;
If Jehovah keeps not a city,
Vainly wakes the keeper.
2 Vain is it for you, ye that make early [your] rising and your
sitting down late,
That eat the bread of painful toil;
Even so He gives [it] to His beloved while in sleep.
3 Behold, sons are an heritage from Jehovah,
The fruit of the womb is [His] reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a mighty man,
So are sons of [a father's] youth.
5 Happy the man who has filled his quiver with them,
They shall not be ashamed
When they speak with enemies in the gate.
This pure expression of conscious dependence on God's blessing for
all well-being may possibly have special reference to the Israel of
the Restoration. The instances of vain human effort and care would
then have special force, when the ruins of many generations had to be
rebuilt and the city to be guarded. But there is no need to seek for
specific occasion, so general is this psalm. It sings in a spirit of
happy trust the commonplace of all true religion, that God's blessing
prospers all things, and that effort is vain without it. There is no
sweeter utterance of that truth anywhere, till we come to our Lord's
parallel teaching, lovelier still than that of our psalm, when He
points us to the flowers of the field and the fowls of the air, as
our teachers of the joyous, fair lives that can be lived, when no
carking care mars their beauty.
In ver. 1 the examples chosen by the singer are naturally connected.
The house when built is one in the many that make the city. The owner's
troubles are not over when it is built, since it has to be watched. It
is as hard to keep as to acquire earthly goods. The psalmist uses the
past tenses in describing the vanity of building and watching unblessed
by God. "They" have built in vain, and watched in vain. He, as it were,
places us at the point of time when the failure is developed,--the
half-built house a ruin, the city sacked and in flames.
Ver. 2 deals with domestic life within the built house and guarded
city. It is vain to eke out the laborious day by early beginning and
late ending. Long hours do not mean prosperous work. The evening meal
may be put off till a late hour; and when the toil-worn man sits down
to it, he may eat bread made bitter by labour. But all is in vain
without God's blessing. The last clause of the verse must be taken as
presenting a contrast to the futile labour reprehended in the former
clauses; and therefore the beautiful rendering of the A.V. must be
abandoned, though it has given many sweet thoughts to trustful souls,
and none sweeter than in Mrs. Browning's pathetic lines. But clearly
the contrast is between labour which effects nothing, but is like
spinning ropes out of sea-sand, and God's gift of the good which the
vain toil had aimed at, and which He gives to His beloved in their
sleep. "So" seems here to be equivalent to "Even so," and the thought
intended is probably that God's gift to His beloved secures to them
the same result as is ineffectually sought by godless struggles.
This is no preaching of laziness masquerading as religious trust.
The psalmist insists on one side of the truth. Not work, but
self-torturing care and work, without seeking God's blessing, are
pronounced vanity.
The remainder of the psalm dwells on one special instance of God's
gifts, that of a numerous family, which, in accordance with the Hebrew
sentiment, is regarded as a special blessing. But the psalmist is
carried beyond his immediate purpose of pointing out that that chief
earthly blessing, as he and his contemporaries accounted it, is God's
gift, and he lingers on the picture of a father surrounded in his old
age by a band of stalwart sons born unto him in his vigorous youth,
and so now able to surround him with a ring of strong protectors
of his declining days. "They shall speak with their enemies in the
gate." Probably "they" refers to the whole band, the father in the
midst and his sons about him. The gate was the place where justice
was administered, and where was the chief place of concourse. It is
therefore improbable that actual warfare is meant: rather, in the
disputes which might arise with neighbours, and in the intercourse of
city life, which would breed enmities enough, the man with his sons
about him could hold his own. And such blessing is God's gift.
The lesson of the psalm is one that needs to be ever repeated. It
is so obvious that it is unseen by many, and apt to be unnoticed by
all. There are two ways of going to work in reference to earthly
good. One is that of struggling and toiling, pushing and snatching,
fighting and envying, and that way comes to no successful issue;
for if it gets what it has wriggled and wrestled for, it generally
gets in some way or other an incapacity to enjoy the good won, which
makes it far less than the good pursued. The other way is the way of
looking to God and doing the appointed tasks with quiet dependence
on Him, and that way always succeeds; for, with its modest or large
outward results, there is given likewise a quiet heart set on God,
and therefore capable of finding water in the desert and extracting
honey from the rock. The one way is that of "young lions," who, for
all their claws and strength, "do lack and suffer hunger"; the other
is that of "them that seek the Lord," who "shall not want any good."