You will observe that I have made a slight alteration in the translation
of the words. In our Authorised Version they stand thus: 'Thou hast
delivered my soul from death; _wilt_ Thou not deliver my feet from
falling?' as if some prior deliverance was the basis upon which the
Psalmist rested his expectation of that which was still to come. But
there is no authority in the original for that variation of tenses, and
both clauses obviously refer to the same period and the same
deliverance. Therefore we must read: 'Thou hast delivered my soul from
death: _hast_ Thou not delivered,' etc.; the question being equivalent
to a strong affirmation, 'Yea, Thou hast delivered my feet from
falling.' This reference of both clauses to the same period and the same
delivering act, is confirmed by the quotation of these words in a very
much later psalm, the 116th, where we read, with an addition, 'Thou hast
delivered my soul from death, _mine eyes from tears_, and my feet from
falling.'
So, then, the Psalmist is so sure of the deliverance that is coming that
he sings of it as past. He is still in the very thick of the trouble and
the fight, and yet he says, 'It is as good as over. Thou _hast_
delivered.'
How does he come to that confidence? Simply because his future is God;
and whoever has God for his future can turn else uncertain hopes into
certain confidences, and make sure of this, that however Achish and his
giant Philistines of Gath, wielding Goliath's arms, spears like a
weaver's beam, and brazen armour, may compass him about, in the name of
the Lord he will destroy them. They are all as good as dead, though they
are alive and hostile at this moment. In the midst of trouble we can
fling ourselves into the future, or rather draw the future into the
present, and say, 'Thou _hast_ delivered my soul from death.' It is safe
to reckon on to-morrow when we reckon on God. We to-day have the same
reasons for the same confidence; and if we will go the right way about
it, we, too, may bring June's sun into November's fogs, and bask in the
warmth of certain deliverance even when the chill mists of trouble
enfold us.
But then note, too, here, the substance of this future intervention
which, to the Psalmist's quiet faith, is present:--'My soul from death,'
and after that he says, 'My feet from falling,' which looks very like an
anticlimax and bathos. But yet, just because to deliver the feet from
falling is so much smaller a thing than delivering a life from death, it
comes here to be a climax and something greater. The storm passes over
the man. What then? After the storm has passed, he is not only alive,
but he is standing upright. It has not killed him. No, it has not even
shaken him. His feet are as firm as ever they were, and just because
that is a smaller thing, it is a greater thing for the deliverance to
have accomplished than the other. God does not deliver by halves; He
does not leave the delivered man maimed, or thrown down, though living.
Remember, too, the expansion of the text in the psalm to which I have
already referred, one of a much later date, which by quoting these words
really comments upon them. The later Psalmist adds a clause. 'Mine eyes
from tears,' and we may follow on in the same direction, and note the
three spheres in which the later poet hymns the delivering hand of God
as spiritualising for us all our deeper Christian experience. 'Thou hast
delivered my soul from death,' in that great redemption by which the Son
has died that we may never know either the intensest bitterness of
physical death, or the true death of which it is the shadow and the
emblem. 'Thou hast delivered mine eyes from tears'; God wipes away tears
here, even before we come to the time when He wipes away all tears from
off all faces, and no eyes are delivered from tears, except eyes that
have looked through tears to God. 'And my feet from falling'--redeeming
grace which saves the soul; comforting grace which lightens sorrow;
upholding grace which keeps us from sins--these are the elements of what
God has done for us all, if our poor feeble trust has rested on Him.
How did David get to this confidence? Why, he prayed himself into it. If
you will read the psalm, you will see very clearly the process by which
a man comes to that serene, triumphant trust that the battle is won even
whilst it is raging around him. The previous portion of the psalm falls
into two parts, on which I need only make this one remark, that in both
we have first of all an obvious disquieting fact, and then a flash of
victorious confidence. Let me just read a word or two to you. The
Psalmist begins in a very minor key. 'Be merciful unto me, O God! for
man would swallow me up'--that is Achish and his Philistines. 'He
fighting daily oppresseth me; mine enemies daily would swallow me up.'
He reiterates the same thought with the dreary monotony of sorrow, 'for
there be many that fight against me, O Thou most High!' But swiftly his
note changes into 'What time I am afraid I will trust in Thee. In God I
will praise His word'; that is to say, His promise of deliverance, 'in
God I have put my trust.' He has climbed to the height, but only for a
moment, for down he drops again, and begins anew the old miserable
complaint. The sorrow is too clinging to be cast off at one struggle. It
has been dammed out for the moment, but the flood rushes too heavily,
and away goes the dam, and back pours the black water. 'Every day they
wrest my words; all their thoughts are against me for evil.' And he goes
on longer on his depressing key this second time than he did the first,
but he rises above it once more in the same fashion, and the refrain
with which he had closed the first part of the psalm closes the second.
'In God will I praise His word; in the Lord will I praise His word.' Now
he has won the height and keeps it, and breaks into a paean of victory in
words of the text.
That is to say, pray yourselves into confidence, and if it does not come
at first, pray again. If the consolation seems to glide away, even
whilst you are laying hold of it, grasp it once more, and close your
fingers more tightly on it. Do not be afraid of going down into the
depths a second time, but be sure that you try to rise out of them at
the same point as before, by grasping the assurance that in God, in His
strength, and by His grace, you will be able to set your seal to the
truth of His great promise. Thus will you rise to this confidence which
calleth things that are not as though they were, and brings the
to-morrow that is sure to dawn with all its brightness and serenity into
the turbulent, tempestuous, and clouded atmosphere of to-day. We shall
one day escape from all that burdens, and tries, and tasks us; and until
then this blessed assurance, the fruit of prayer, is like the food that
the ravens brought to the prophet in the ravine, or the bread and water
that the angel awoke him to partake of when he was faint in the
wilderness. The true answer to David's prayer was the immediate access
of confidence unshaken, though the outward answer was a long time in
coming, and years lay between him and the cessation of his persecutions
and troubles. So we may have brooks by the way, in quiet confidence of
deliverance ere yet the deliverance comes. Then note,