'Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,
nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the
scornful. 2. But his delight is in the law of the Lord.'
--PSALM i. 1, 2.
'Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the
Lord.'--PSALM cl. 6.
The Psalter is the echo in devout hearts of the other portions of divine
revelation. There are in it, indeed, further disclosures of God's mind
and purposes, but its especial characteristic is--the reflection of the
light of God from brightened faces and believing hearts. As we hold it
to be inspired, we cannot simply say that it is man's response to God's
voice. But if the rest of Scripture may be called the speech of the
Spirit of God _to_ men, this book is the answer of the Spirit of God
_in_ men.
These two verses which I venture to lay side by side present in a very
remarkable way this characteristic. It is not by accident that they
stand where they do, the first and last verses of the whole collection,
enclosing all, as it were, within a golden ring, and bending round to
meet each other. They are the summing up of the whole purpose and issue
of God's revelation to men.
The first and second psalms echo the two main portions of the old
revelation--the Law and the Prophets. The first of them is taken up with
the celebration of the blessedness and fruitful, stable being of the man
who loves the Law of the Lord, as contrasted with the rootless and
barren life of the ungodly, who is like the chaff. The second is
occupied with the contemplation of the divine 'decree' by which the
coming King is set in God's 'holy hill of Zion,' and of the blessedness
of 'all they who put their trust in Him,' as contrasted with the swift
destruction that shall fall on the vain imaginations of the rebellious
heathen and banded kings of earth.
The words of our first text, then, may well stand at the beginning of
the Psalter. They express the great purpose for which God has given His
Law. They are the witness of human experience to the substantial, though
partial, accomplishment of that purpose. They rise in buoyant triumph
over that which is painful and apparently opposed to it; and in spite of
sorrow and sin, proclaim the blessedness of the life which is rooted in
the Law of the Lord.
The last words of the book are as significant as its first. The closing
psalms are one long call to praise--they probably date from the time of
the restoration under Ezra and Nehemiah, when, as we know, 'the service
of song' was carefully re-established, and the harps which had hung
silent upon the willows by the rivers of Babylon woke again their
ancient melodies. These psalms climb higher and higher in their
rapturous call to all creatures, animate and inanimate, on earth and in
heaven, to praise Him. The golden waves of music and song pour out ever
faster and fuller. At last we hear this invocation to every instrument
of music to praise Him, responded to, as we may suppose, by each, in
turn as summoned, adding its tributary notes to the broadening river of
harmony--until all, with gathered might of glad sound blended with the
crash of many voices, unite in the final words, 'Let every thing that
hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.'
I. We have here a twofold declaration of God's great purpose in all His
self-revelation, and especially in the Gospel of His Son.
Our first text may be translated as a joyful exclamation, 'Oh! the
blessedness of the man--whose delight is in the law of the Lord.' Our
second is an invocation or a command. The one then expresses the purpose
which God secures by His gift of the Law; the other the purpose which He
summons us to fulfil by the tribute of our hearts and songs--man's
happiness and God's glory.
His purpose is Man's blessedness.
That is but another way of saying, God is love. For love, as we know it,
is eminently the desire for the happiness of the person on whom it is
fixed. And unless the love of God be like ours, however it may transcend
it, there is no revelation of Him to our hearts at all. If He be love,
then He 'delights in the prosperity' of His children.
And that purpose runs through all His acts. For perfect love is
all-pervasive, and even with us men, it rules the whole being; nor does
he love at all who seeks the welfare of the heart he clings to by fits
and starts, by some of his acts and not by others. When God comes forth
from the unvisioned light, which is thick darkness, of His own eternal,
self-adequate Being, and flashes into energy in Creation, Providence, or
Grace, the Law of His Working and His Purpose are one, in all regions.
The unity of the divine acts depends on this--that all flow from one
deep source, and all move to one mighty end. Standing on the height to
which His own declarations of His own nature lift our feebleness, we can
see how the 'river of God that waters the garden' and 'parts' into many
'heads,' gushes from one fountain. One of the psalms puts what people
call the 'philosophy' of creation and of providence very clearly, in
accordance with this thought--that the love of God is the source, and
the blessedness of man the end, of all His work: 'To Him that made great
lights; for His mercy endureth for ever. To Him that slew mighty kings;
for His mercy endureth for ever.'
Creation, then, is the effluence of the loving heart of God. Though the
sacred characters be but partially legible to us now, what He wrote, on
stars and flowers, on the infinitely great and the infinitely small, on
the infinitely near and the infinitely far off, with His creating hand,
was the one inscription--God is love. And as in nature, so in
providence. The origination, and the support, and the direction of all
things, are the works and the heralds of the same love. It is printed in
starry letters on the sky. It is graven on the rocks, and breathed by
the flowers. It is spoken as a dark saying even by sorrow and pain. The
mysteries of destructive and crushing providences have come from the
same source. And he who can see with the Psalmist the ever-during mercy
of the Lord, as the reason of creation and of judgments, has in his
hands the golden key which opens all the locks in the palace chambers of
the great King. He only hath penetrated to the secret of things
material, and stands in the light at the centre, who understands that
all comes from the one source--God's endless desire for the blessedness
of His creatures.
But while all God's works do thus praise Him by testifying that He seeks
to bless His creatures, the loftiest example of that desire is, of
course, found in His revelation of Himself to men's hearts and
consciences, to men's spirits and wills. That mightiest act of love,
beginning in the long-past generations, has culminated in Him in whom
'dwelleth the whole fulness of the Godhead bodily,' and in whose work is
all the love--the perfect, inconceivable, patient, omnipotent love of
our redeeming God.
And then, remember that this is not inconsistent with or contradicted by
the sterner aspects of that revelation, which cannot be denied, and
ought not to be minimised or softened. _Here_, on the right hand, are
the flowery slopes of the Mount of Blessing; _there_, on the left, the
barren, stern, thunder-riven, lightning-splintered pinnacles of the
Mount of Cursing. Every clear note of benediction hath its low minor of
imprecation from the other side. Between the two, overhung by the hopes
of the one, and frowned upon and dominated by the threatenings of the
other, is pitched the little camp of our human life, and the path of our
pilgrimage runs in the trough of the valley between. And yet--might we
not go a step farther, and say that above the parted summits stretches
the one overarching blue, uniting them both, and their roots deep down
below the surface interlace and twine together? That is to say, the
threatenings and rebukes, the acts of retributive judgment, which are
contained in the revelation of God, are no limitation nor disturbance of
the clear and happy faith that all which we behold is full of blessing,
and that all comes from the Father's hand. They are the garb in which
His Love needs to array itself when it comes in contact with man's sin
and man's evil. The love of God appears no less when it teaches us in
grave sad tones that 'the wages of sin is death,' than when it proclaims
that 'the gift of God is eternal life.'
Love threatens that it may never have to execute its threats. Love warns
that we may be wise in time. Love prophesies that its sad forebodings
may not be fulfilled. And love smites with lighter strokes of
premonitory chastisements, that we may never need to feel the whips of
scorpions.
Remember, too, that these sterner aspects both of Law and of Gospel
point this lesson--that we shall very much misunderstand God's purpose
if we suppose it to be blessedness for us men _anyhow_, irrespective
altogether of character. Some people seem to think that God loves us so
much, as they would say--so little, so ignobly, as I would say--as that
He only desires us to be happy. They seem to think that the divine love
is tarnished unless it provides for men's felicity, whether they are
God-loving and God-like or no. Thus the solemn and majestic love of the
Father in heaven is to be brought down to a weak good nature, which only
desires that the child shall cease crying and be happy, and does not
mind by what means that end is reached. God's purpose _is_ blessedness;
but, as this very text tells us, not blessedness anyhow, but one which
will not and cannot be given by God to those who walk in the way of
sinners. His love desires that we should be holy, and 'followers of God
as dear children'--and the blessedness which it bestows comes from
pardon and growing fellowship with Him. It can no more fall on
rebellious hearts than the pure crystals of the snow can lie and sparkle
on the hot, black cone of a volcano.
The other text that I have read sets forth another view of God's
purpose. God seeks our praise. The glory of God is the end of all the
divine actions. Now, that is a statement which no doubt is irrefragable,
and a plain deduction from the very conception of an infinite Being. But
it may be held in such connections, and spoken with such erroneous
application, and so divorced from other truths, that instead of being
what it is in the Bible, good news, it shall become a curse and a lie.
It may be so understood as to describe not our Father in heaven, but an
almighty devil! But, when the thought that God's purpose in all His acts
is His own glory, is firmly united with that other, that His purpose in
all His acts is our blessing, then we begin to understand how full of
joy it may be for us. His glory is sought by Him in the manifestation of
His loving heart, mirrored in our illuminated and gladdened hearts. Such
a glory is not unworthy of infinite love. It has nothing in common with
the ambitious and hungry greed of men for reputation or self-display.
That desire is altogether ignoble and selfish when it is found in human
hearts; and it would be none the less ignoble and selfish if it were
magnified into infinitude, and transferred to the divine. But to say
that God's glory is His great end, is surely but another way of saying
that He is love. The love that seeks to bless us desires, as all love
does, that it should be known for what it is, that it should be
recognised in our glad hearts, and smiled back again from our brightened
faces. God desires that we should know Him, and so have Eternal Life; He
desires that knowing Him, we should love Him, and loving should praise,
and so should glorify Him. He desires that there should be an
interchange of love bestowing and love receiving, of gifts showered down
and of praise ascending, of fire falling from the heavens and sweet
incense, from grateful hearts, going up in fragrant clouds acceptable
unto God. It is a sign of a Fatherly heart that He '_seeketh_ such to
worship Him'. He desires to be glorified by our praise, because He loves
us so much. He commences with an offer, He advances to a command. He
gives first, and then (not till then) He comes seeking fruit from the
'trees' which are 'the planting of the Lord, that He might be
glorified.' His plea is not 'the vineyard belongs to Me, and I have a
right to its fruits,' but 'what could have been done more to My
vineyard, that I have not done in it?--judge between Me and My
vineyard.' First, He showers down blessings; then, He looks for the
revenue of praise!
II. We may also take these passages as giving us a twofold expression of
the actual effects of God's revelation, especially in the Gospel, even
here upon earth.
The one text is the joyful exclamation built upon experience and
observation. The other is a call which is answered in some measure even
by voices that are often dumb in unthankfulness, often broken by sobs,
often murmuring in penitence.
God does actually, though not completely, make men blessed here. Our
text sums up the experience of all the devout hearts and lives whose
emotions are expressed in the Psalms. He who wrote this psalm would
preface the whole book by words into which the spirit of the book is
distilled. It will have much to say of sorrow and pain. It will touch
many a low note of wailing and of grief. There will be complaints and
penitence, and sighs almost of despair before it closes. But this which
he puts first is the note of the whole. So it is in our histories.
They will run through many a dark and desert place. We shall have
bitterness and trials in abundance, there will be many an hour of
sadness caused by my own evil, and many a hard struggle with it. But
high above all these mists and clouds will rise the hope that seeks the
skies, and deep beneath all the surface agitations of storms and
currents there will be the unmoved stillness of the central ocean of
peace in our hearts. In the 'valley of weeping' we may still be
'blessed' if 'the ways' are in our hearts, and if we make of the very
tears 'a well,' drawing refreshment from the very trials. With all its
sorrows and pains, its fightings and fears, its tribulations in the
world, and its chastenings from a Father's hand, the life of a Christian
is a happy life, and 'the joy of the Lord' remains with His servants.
More than twenty centuries have passed since that psalm was written. As
many stretched dim behind the Psalmist as he sang. He was gathering up
in one sentence the spirit of the past, and confirming it by his own
life's history. And has any one that has lived since then stood up and
said--'Behold! I have found it otherwise. I have waited on God, and He
has not heard my cry. I have served Him, and that for nought. I have
trusted in Him, and been disappointed. I have sought His face--in vain.
And I say, from my own experience, that the man who trusts in Him is
_not_ blessed'? Not one, thank God! The history of the past, so far as
this matter is concerned, may be put in one sentence 'They looked unto
Him and were lightened, and their faces were not ashamed,' and as for
the present, are there not some of us who can say, 'This poor man cried,
and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles'?
Brethren! make the experiment for yourselves. Test this experience by
your own simple affiance and living trust in Jesus Christ. We have the
experience of all generations to encourage us. What has blessed them is
enough for you and me. Like the meal and the oil, which were the
Prophet's resource in famine, yesterday's supply does not diminish
to-morrow's store. We, too, may have all that gladdened the hearts and
stayed the spirits of the saints of old. 'Oh! taste and see that God is
good.' 'Blessed is the man that trusteth in Him.'
So, too, God's gift produces man's praise.
What is it that He desires from us? Nothing but our thankful recognition
and reception of His benefits. We honour God by taking the full cup of
salvation which He commends to our lips, and by calling, while we drink,
upon the name of the Lord. Our true response to His Word, which is
essentially a proffer of blessing to us, is to open our hearts to
receive, and, receiving, to render grateful acknowledgment. The echo of
love which gives and forgives, is love which accepts and thanks. We have
but to lift up our empty and impure hands, opened wide to receive the
gift which He lays in them--and though they be empty and impure, yet
'the lifting up of our hands' is 'as the evening sacrifice'; our sense
of need stands in the place of all offerings. The stained thankfulness
of our poor hearts is accepted by Him who inhabits the praises of
eternity, and yet delights in the praises of Israel. He bends from
heaven to give, and all He asks is that we should take. He only seeks
our thankfulness--but He does seek it. And wherever His grace is
discerned, and His love is welcomed, there praise breaks forth, as
surely as streams pour from the cave of the glacier when the sun of
summer melts it, or earth answers the touch of spring with flowers.
And that effect is produced, notwithstanding all the complaints and
sighs and tears which sometimes choke our praise. It _is_ produced even
while these last; the psalms of thanksgiving are not all reserved for
the end of the book. But even in those which read like the very sobs of
a broken heart, there is ever present some tone of grateful
acknowledgment of God's mercy. He sends us sorrow, and He wills that we
should weep--but they should be tears like David's, who, at the lowest
point of his fortunes, when he plaintively besought God, 'Put Thou my
tears into Thy bottle'--could say in the same breath, 'Thy vows are upon
me, O God: I will render praises unto Thee.' God works on our souls that
we may have the consciousness of sin, and He wills that we should come
with broken and contrite hearts, and like the king of Israel wail out
our confessions and supplications--'Have mercy upon me, O God! according
to Thy loving-kindness.' But, like him, we should even in our lowliest
abasement, when our hearts are bruised, be able to say along with our
contrition, 'Open Thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Thy
praise.' Our sorrows are never so great that they hide our mercies. The
sky is never so covered with clouds that neither sun nor stars appear
for many days. And in every Christian heart the low tones of lamentation
and confession are blended with grateful praise. So it is even in the
darkest moments, whilst the blast of misfortune and misery is as a storm
against the wall.
But a brighter hope even for our life here rises from these words, if we
think of the place which they hold in the whole book. They are the last
words. Whatever other notes have been sounded in its course, all ends in
this. The winter's day has had its melancholy grey sky, with many a
bitter dash of snow and rain--but it has stormed itself out, and at
eventide, a rent in the clouds reveals the sun, and it closes in
peaceful clearness of light.
The note of gladness heard at the beginning, 'Oh! the blessedness of the
man that delights in the law of the Lord,' holds on persistently, like a
subdued and almost bewildered undercurrent of sweet sound amid all the
movements of some colossal symphony, through tears and sobs, confession
and complaint, and it springs up at the close triumphant, like the ruddy
spires of a flame long smothered, and swells and broadens, and draws all
the intricate harmonies into its own rushing tide. Some of you remember
the great musical work which has these very words for its theme. It
begins with the call, 'All that hath life and breath, praise ye the
Lord,' and although the gladness saddens into the plaintive cry of a
soul sick with hope deferred, 'Will the night soon pass?' yet, ere the
close, all discords are reconciled, and at last, with assurance firmer
for the experience of passing sorrows, loud as the voice of many waters
and sweet as harpers harping with their harps, the joyful invocation
peals forth again, and all ends, as it does in a Christian man's life,
and as it does in this book, with 'Praise ye the Lord.'