'All those that put their trust in Thee ... them also that love Thy
name ... the righteous.'--PSALM v. 11, 12.
I have ventured to isolate these three clauses from their context,
because, if taken in their sequence, they are very significant of the
true path by which men draw nigh to God and become righteous. They are
all three designations of the same people, but regarded under different
aspects and at different stages. There is a distinct order in them, and
whether the Psalmist was fully conscious of it or not, he was
anticipating and stating, with wonderful distinctness, the Christian
sequence--faith, love, righteousness.
These three are the three flights of stairs, as it were, which lead men
up to God and to perfection, or if you like to take another metaphor,
meaning the same thing, they are respectively the root, the stalk, and
the fruit of religion. 'They that put their trust in Thee ... them also
that love Thy Name ... the righteous.'
I. So, then, the first thought here is that the foundation of all is
trust.
Now, the word that is employed here is very significant. In its literal
force it really means to 'flee to a refuge.' And that the literal
signification has not altogether been lost in the spiritual and
metaphorical use of it, as a term expressive of religious experience, is
quite plain from many of the cases in which it occurs. Let me just
repeat one of them to you. 'Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful to
me, for my soul trusteth in Thee; yea, in the shadow of Thy wings will I
make my refuge.' There the picture that is in the words is distinctly
before the Psalmist's mind, and he is thinking not only of the act of
mind and heart by which he casts himself in confidence upon God, but
upon that which represents it in symbol, the act by which a man flees
into some hiding-place. The psalm is said in the superscription to have
been written when David hid in a cave from his persecutor. Though no
weight be given to that statement, it suggests the impression made by
the psalm. In imagination we can see the rough sides of the cavern that
sheltered him arching over the fugitive, like the wings of some great
bird, and just as he has fled thither with eager feet and is safely
hidden from his pursuers there, so he has betaken himself to the
everlasting Rock, in the cleft of which he is at rest and secure. To
trust in God is neither more nor less than to flee to Him for refuge,
and there to be at peace. The same presence of the original metaphor,
colouring the same religious thought, is found in the beautiful words
with which Boaz welcomes Ruth, when he prays for her that the God of
Israel may reward her, 'under the shadow of whose wings thou hast come
to trust.'
So, as a man in peril runs into a hiding-place or fortress, as the
chickens beneath the outspread wing of the mother bird nestle close in
the warm feathers and are safe and well, the soul that trusts takes its
flight straight to God, and in Him reposes and is secure.
Now, it seems to me that such a figure as that is worth tons of
theological lectures about the true nature of faith, and that it tells
us, by means of a picture that says a great deal more than many a
treatise, that faith is something very different from a cold-blooded act
of believing in the truth of certain propositions; that it is the flight
of the soul--knowing itself to be in peril, and naked, and unarmed--into
the strong Fortress.
What is it that keeps a man safe when he thus has around him the walls
of some citadel? Is it himself, is it the act by which he took refuge,
or is it the battlements behind which he crouches? So in faith--which is
more than a process of a man's understanding, and is not merely the
saying, 'Yes, I believe all that is in the Bible is true; at any rate,
it is not for me to contradict it,' but is the running of the man, when
he knows himself to be in danger, into the very arms of God--it is not
the running that makes him safe, but it is the arms to which he runs.
If we would only lay to heart that the very essence of religion lies in
this 'flight of the lonely soul to the only God,' we should understand
better than we do what He asks from us in order that He may defend us,
and how blessed and certain His defence is. So let us clear our minds
from the thought that anything is worth calling trust which is not thus
taking refuge in God Himself.
Now, I need not remind you, I suppose, that all this is just as true
about us as it was about David, and that the emotion or the act of his
will and heart which he expresses in these words of my text is neither
more nor less than the Christian act of faith. There is no difference
except a difference of development; there is no difference between the
road to God marked out in the Psalms, and the road to God laid down in
the Gospels. The Psalmist who said, 'Trust ye in the Lord for ever,' and
the Apostle who said, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt
be saved,' were preaching identically the same doctrine. One of them
could speak more fully than the other could of the Person on whom trust
was to be rested, but the trust itself was the same, and the Person on
whom it rested was the same, though His Name of old was Jehovah, and His
Name to-day is 'Immanuel, God with us.'
Nor need I do more than point out how the context of the words that I
have ventured to detach from their surroundings is instructive: 'Let all
those that put their trust in Thee rejoice because Thou defendest them.'
The word for defending there continues the metaphor that lies in the
word for 'trust,' for it means literally to cover over and so to
protect. Thus, when a man runs to God for His refuge, God
'Covers his defenceless head
With the shadow of His wings.'
And the joy of trust is, first, that it brings round me the whole
omnipotence of God for my defence, and the whole tenderness of God for
my consolation, and next, that in the very exercise of trust in such
defence, so fortified and vindicated by experience, there is great
reward. All who thus flee into the refuge shall find refuge whither they
flee, and shall be glad.
II. Then the next thought of my texts, which I do not force into them,
but which results, as it seems to me, distinctly from the order in which
they occur in the context, is that love follows trust.
'All those that put their trust in Thee--they also that love Thee.' If I
am to love God, I must be quite sure that God loves me. My love can
never be anything else than an answer to His. It can only be secondary
and derived, or I would rather say reflected and flashed back from His.
And so, very significantly, the Psalmist says, 'Those that love Thy
Name,' meaning by 'Name,' as is always meant by it, the revealed
character of God. If I am to love God, He must not hide in the darkness
behind His infinity, but must come out and give me something about Him
that I know. The three letters G O D mean nothing, and there is no power
in them to stir a man's heart. It must be the knowledge of the acts of
God that brings men to love Him. And there is no way of getting that
knowledge but through the faith which, as I said, must precede love. For
faith realises the fact that God loves. 'We have known and believed the
love that God hath to us.' The first step is to grasp the great truth of
the loving God, and through that truth to grasp the God that loves. And
then, and not till then, does there spring up in a man's heart love
towards Him. But it is only the faith that is set on Him who hath
declared the Father unto us that gives us for our very own the grasp of
the facts, which facts are the only possible fuel that can kindle love
in a human heart. 'We love Him because He first loved us,' and we shall
never know that He loves us unless we come to the knowledge through the
road of faith. So John himself tells us when he says, in the words that
I have already quoted, 'We have known and believed.' He puts the
foundation last, 'We have known,' because 'we have believed' 'the love
that God hath to us.'
And so faith is the only possible means by which any of us can ever
experience, as well as realise, the love that kindles ours. It is the
possession of the fact of redemption for my very own and of the
blessings which accompany it, and that alone, that binds a man to God in
the bonds of love that cannot be broken, and that subdues and unites all
vagrant emotions, affections, and desires in the mighty tide of a love
that ever sets towards Him. As surely as the silvery moon in the sky
draws after it the heaped waters of the ocean all round the world, so
God's love draws ours. They that believe contemplate, and they that
believe experience the effects of that divine love, which must be
experienced ere our answering love can be flashed back to heaven.
Students of acoustics tell us that if you have two stringed instruments
in adjacent apartments, tuned to the same pitch, a note sounded on one
of them will be feebly vibrated upon the other as soon as the waves of
sound have reached the sensitive string. In like manner a man's heart
gives off a faint, but musical, little tinkle of answering love to God
when the deep note of God's love to him, struck on the chords of heaven
up yonder, reaches his poor heart.
Love follows trust. So, brethren, if we desire to be warmed, let us get
into the sunshine and abide there. If we desire to have our hearts
filled with love to God, do not let us waste our time in trying to pump
up artificial emotions or to persuade ourselves that we love Him better
than we do, but let us fix our thoughts and fasten our refuge-seeking
trust on Him, and then that shall kindle ours.