'None of them that trust in Him'--I need not, I suppose, further dwell
upon the absolute identity shown by this phrase between the Old and the
New Testament conceptions; but I should like to make a remark, which I
dare say I have often made before--it cannot be made too often--that,
whatever be the differences between the Old and the New, this is not the
difference, that they present two different ways of approaching God.
There are a great many differences; the conception of the divine nature
is no doubt infinitely deepened, made more tender and more lofty, by the
thought of the Fatherhood of God. The contents of the revelation which
our faith is to grasp are brought out far more definitely and
articulately and fully in the New Testament. But in the Old, the road to
God was the same as it is to-day; and from the beginning there has only
been, and through all Eternity there will only be, one path by which men
can have access to the Father, and that is by faith. 'Trust' is the Old
Testament word, 'faith' is the New. They are absolutely identical, and
there would have been a flood of light--sorely needed by a great many
good people--cast upon the relations between those two complementary and
harmonious halves of a consistent whole, if our translators had not been
influenced by their unfortunate love for varying translations of the
same word, but had contented themselves with choosing one of these two
words 'trust' or 'faith,' and had used that one consistently and
uniformly throughout the Old and New books. Then we should have
understood, what anybody who will open his eyes can see now, that what
the New Testament magnifies as 'faith' is identical with what the Old
Testament sets forth as 'trust.' 'None of them that trust in Him shall
be condemned.'
But there is one more remark to make on this matter, and that is that a
great flood of light, and of more than light, of encouragement and of
stimulus, is cast upon that saving exercise of trust by noticing the
literal meaning of the word that is rightly so rendered here. All those
words, especially in the Old Testament, that express emotions or acts of
the mind, originally applied to corporeal acts or material things. I
suppose that is so in all language. It is very conspicuously so in the
Hebrew. And the word that is here translated, rightly, 'trust,' means
literally to fly to a refuge, or to betake oneself to some defence in
order to get shelter there.
There is a trace of both meanings, the literal and the metaphorical, in
another psalm, where we read, amidst the Psalmist's rapturous heaping
together of great names for God: 'My Rock, in whom I will trust.' Now
keep to the literal meaning there, and you see how it flashes up the
whole into beauty: 'My Rock, to whom I will flee for refuge,' and put my
back against it, and stand as impregnable as it; or get myself well into
the clefts of it, and then nothing can touch me.
'Rock of Ages! cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.'
Then we find the same words, with the picture of flight and the reality
of faith, used with another set of associations in another psalm, which
says: 'He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt
thou trust.' That grates, one gets away from the metaphor too quickly;
but if we preserve the literal meaning, and read, 'under His wings shalt
thou flee for refuge,' we have the picture of the chicken flying to the
mother-bird when kites are in the sky, and huddling close to the warm
breast and the soft downy feathers, and so with the spread of the great
wing being sheltered from all possibility of harm. This psalm is
ascribed to David when he was in hiding. The superscription says that it
is 'a psalm of David, when he changed his behaviour before Abimelech;
who drove him away, and he departed.' And where did he go? To the cave
in the rock. And as he sat in the mouth of it, with the rude arch
stretching above him, like the wings of some great bird, feeling himself
absolutely safe, he said, 'None of them that take refuge in Thee shall
be condemned.'
Does not that metaphor teach us a great deal more of what faith is, and
encourage us far more to exercise it, than much theological
hair-splitting? What lies in the metaphor? Two things, the earnest
eagerness of the act of flight, and the absolute security which comes
when we have reached the shadow of the great Rock in a weary land.
But there is one thing more that I would notice, and that is that this
designation of the persons as 'them that trust in Him' follows last of
all in a somewhat lengthened series of designations for good people.
They are these: 'the righteous'--'them that are of a broken
heart'--'such as be of a contrite spirit'--'His servants,' and then,
lastly, comes, as basis of all, as, so to speak, the keynote of all,
'none of them that _trust_ in Him.' That is to say--righteousness, true
and blessed pulverising of the obstinate insensibility of self alienated
from God, true and blessed consciousness of sin, joyful surrender of
self to loving and grateful submission to God's will, are all connected
with or flow from that act of trust in Him. And if you are trusting in
Him, in anything more than the mere formal, dead way in which multitudes
of nominal Christians in all our congregations are doing so, your trust
will produce all these various fruits of righteousness, and lowliness,
and joyful service. 'Faith' or 'trust' is the mother of all graces and
virtues, and it produces them all because it directly kindles the
creative flame of an answering love to Him in whom we trust. So much,
then, for the first part of my remarks. Consider, next--