'I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with Thy likeness.'
--PSALM xvii. 15.
'As a dream when one awaketh; so, O Lord, when Thou awakest, Thou
shalt despise their image.'--PSALM lxxiii. 20.
Both of these Psalms are occupied with that standing puzzle to Old
Testament worthies--the good fortune of bad men, and the bad fortune of
good ones. The former recounts the personal calamities of David, its
author. The latter gives us the picture of the perplexity of Asaph its
writer, when he 'saw the prosperity of the wicked.'
And as the problem in both is substantially the same, the solution also
is the same. David and Asaph both point onwards to a period when this
confusing distribution of earthly good shall have ceased, though the one
regards that period chiefly in its bearing upon himself as the time when
he shall see God and be at rest, while the other thinks of it rather
with reference to the godless rich as the time of their destruction.
In the details of this common expectation, also, there is a remarkable
parallelism. Both describe the future to which they look as an awaking,
and both connect with it, though in different ways and using different
words, the metaphor of an image or likeness. In the one case, the future
is conceived as the Psalmist's awaking, and losing all the vain show of
this dreamland of life, while he is at rest in beholding the appearance,
and perhaps in receiving the likeness, of the one enduring Substance,
God. In the other, it is thought of as God's awaking, and putting to
shame the fleeting shadow of well-being with which godless men befool
themselves.
What this period of twofold awaking may be is a question on which good
men and thoughtful students of Scripture differ. Without entering on the
wide subject of the Jewish knowledge of a future state, it may be enough
for the present purpose to say that the language of both these Psalms
seems much too emphatic and high-pitched, to be fully satisfied by a
reference to anything in this life. It certainly looks as if the great
awaking which David puts in immediate contrast with the death of 'men of
this world,' and which solaced his heart with the confident expectation
of beholding God, of full satisfaction of all his being, and possibly
even of wearing the divine likeness, pointed onwards, however dimly, to
that 'within the veil.' And as for the other psalm, though the awaking
of God is, no doubt, a Scriptural phrase for His ending of any period of
probation and indulgence by an act of judgment, yet the strong words in
which the context describes this awaking, as the 'destruction' and the
'end' of the godless, make it most natural to take it as here referring
to the final close of the probation of life. That conclusion appears to
be strengthened by the contrast which in subsequent verses is drawn
between this 'end' of the worldling, and the poet's hopes for himself of
divine guidance in life, and afterwards of being taken (the same word as
is used in the account of Enoch's translation) by God into His presence
and glory--hopes whose exuberance it is hard to confine within the
limits of any changes possible for earth.
The doctrine of a future state never assumed the same prominence, nor
possessed the same clearness in Israel as with us. There are great
tracts of the Old Testament where it does not appear at all. This very
difficulty, about the strange disproportion between character and
circumstances, shows that the belief had not the same place with them as
with us. But it gradually emerged into comparative distinctness.
Revelation is progressive, and the appropriation of revelation is
progressive too. There is a history of God's self-manifestation, and
there is a history of man's reception of the manifestation. It seems to
me that in these two psalms, as in other places of Old Testament
Scripture, we see inspired men in the very course of being taught by
God, on occasion of their earthly sorrows, the clearer hopes which alone
could sustain them. They stood not where we stand, to whom Christ has
'brought life and immortality to light'; but to their devout and
perplexed souls, the dim regions beyond were partially opened, and
though they beheld there a great darkness, they also 'saw a great
light.' They saw all this solid world fade and melt, and behind its
vanishing splendours they saw the glory of the God whom they loved, in
the midst of which they felt that there _must_ be a place for them,
where eternal realities should fill their vision, and a stable
inheritance satisfy their hearts.
The period, then, to which both David and Asaph look, in these two
verses, is the end of life. The words of both, taken in combination,
open out a series of aspects of that period which carry weighty lessons,
and to which we turn now.