The Psalmist expresses, as I have said, the same idea in both clauses.
In the former the 'anger' is contemplated not so much as an element in
the divine mind, as in its manifestations in the divine dealings. I
shall have a word or two, presently, to say about the Scriptural
conception of the 'anger' of God and its relation to the 'favour' of
God; but for the present I take the two clauses as being substantially
equivalent.
Now is it true--is it not true?--that if a man rightly regards the
proportionate duration of these two diverse elements in his life, he
must come to the conclusion that the one is continuous and the other is
but transitory? A thunderstorm is very short when measured against the
long summer day in which it crashes; and very few days have them. It
must be a bad climate where half the days are rainy. If we were to take
the chart and prick out upon it the line of our sailing, we should find
that the spaces in which the weather was tempestuous were brief and few
indeed as compared with those in which it was sunny and calm.
But then, man looks before and after, and has the terrible gift that by
anticipation and by memory he can prolong the sadness. The proportion of
solid matter needed to colour the Irwell is very little in comparison
with the whole of the stream. But the current carries it, and half an
ounce will stain miles of the turbid stream. Memory and anticipation
beat the metal thin, and make it cover an enormous space. And the misery
is that, somehow, we have better memories for sad hours than for joyful
ones, and it is easier to get accustomed to 'blessings,' as we call
them, and to lose the poignancy of their sweetness because they become
familiar, than it is to apply the same process to our sorrows, and thus
to take the edge off them. The rose's prickles are felt in the flesh
longer than its fragrance lives in the nostrils, or its hue in the eye.
Men have long memories for their pains as compared with their
remembrance of their sorrows.
So it comes to be a piece of very homely, well-worn, and yet always
needful, practical counsel to try not to magnify and prolong grief, nor
to minimise and abbreviate gladness. We can make our lives, to our own
thinking, very much what we will. We cannot directly regulate our
emotions, but we can regulate them, because it is in our own power to
determine which aspect of our life we shall by preference contemplate.
Here is a room, for instance, papered with a paper with a dark
background and a light pattern on it. Well, you can manoeuvre your eye
about so as either to look at the black background--and then it is all
black, with only a little accidental white or gilt to relieve it here
and there; or you can focus your eye on the white and gold, and then
that is the main thing, and the other is background. We can choose, to a
large extent, what we shall conceive our lives to be; and so we can very
largely modify their real character.
'There's nothing either good or bad
But thinking makes it so.'
They who will can surround themselves with persistent gladness, and they
who will can gather about them the thick folds of an everbrooding and
enveloping sorrow. Courage, cheerfulness, thankfulness, buoyancy,
resolution, are all closely connected with a sane estimate of the
relative proportions of the bright and the dark in a human life.
II. And now consider, secondly, the inclusion of the 'moment' in the
'life.'
I do not know that the Psalmist thought of that when he gave utterance
to my text, but whether he did it or not, it is true that the 'moment'
spent in 'anger' is a part of the 'life' that is spent in the 'favour.'
Just as within the circle of a life lies each of its moments, the same
principle of inclusion may be applied to the other contrast presented
here. For as the 'moment' is a part of the 'life,' the 'danger' is a
part of the love. The 'favour' holds the 'anger' within itself, for the
true Scriptural idea of that terrible expression and terrible fact, the
'wrath of God,' is that it is the necessary aversion of a perfectly pure
and holy love from that which does not correspond to itself. So, though
sometimes the two may be set against each other, yet at bottom, and in
reality, they are one, and the 'anger' is but a mode in which the
'favour' manifests itself. God's love is plastic, and if thrown back
upon itself, grieved and wounded and rejected, becomes the 'anger' which
ignorant men sometimes seem to think it contradicts. There is no more
antagonism between these two ideas when they are applied to God than
when they are applied to you parents in your relations to a disobedient
child. You know, and it knows, that if there were no love there would be
little 'anger.' Neither of you suppose that an irate parent is an
unloving parent. 'If ye, being evil, know how,' in dealing with your
children, to blend wrath and love, 'how much more shall your Father
which is in heaven' be one and the same Father when His love manifests
itself in chastisement and when it expands itself in blessings!
Thus we come to the truth which breathes uniformity and simplicity
through all the various methods of the divine hand, that howsoever He
changes and reverses His dealings with us, they are one and the same.
You may get two diametrically opposite motions out of the same machine.
The same power will send one wheel revolving from right to left, and
another from left to right, but they are co-operant to grind out at the
far end the one product. It is the same revolution of the earth that
brings blessed lengthening days and growing summer, and that cuts short
the sun's course and brings declining days and increasing cold. It is
the same motion which hurls a comet close to the burning sun, and sends
it wandering away out into fields of astronomical space, beyond the ken
of telescope, and almost beyond the reach of thought. And so one uniform
divine purpose, the 'favour' which uses the 'anger,' fills the life, and
there are no interruptions, howsoever brief, to the steady continuous
flow of His outpoured blessings. All is love and favour. Anger is masked
love, and sorrow has the same source and mission as joy. It takes all
sorts of weathers to make a year, and all tend to the same issue, of
ripened harvests and full barns. O brethren! if we understand that God
means something better for us than happiness, even likeness to Himself,
we should understand better how our deepest sorrows and bitterest tears,
and the wounds that penetrate deepest into our bleeding hearts, all come
from the same motive, and are directed to the same end as their most
joyful contraries. One thing the Lord desires, that we may be partakers
of His holiness, and so we may venture to give an even deeper meaning to
the Psalmist's words than he intended, and recognise that the 'moment'
is an integral part of the 'life,' and the 'anger' a mode of the
manifestation of the 'favour.'