'That I may walk before God in the light of the living'; that is God's
purpose in all His deliverances, that we may thereby be impelled to
trustful and grateful service. And David makes that purpose into a vow,
for the words might almost as well be translated, 'I _will_ walk before
Him.' Let us see to it that God's purpose is our resolve, and that we do
not lose the good of any of the troubles or discipline through which He
passes us; for the worst of all sorrows is a wasted sorrow.
'Thou hast delivered my feet that I may walk.' What are feet for?
Walking. Further, notice the precise force of that phrase, 'that I may
walk _before God_.' It is not altogether the same as the cognate one
which is used about Enoch, that 'he walked _with_ God.' That expresses
communion as with a friend; this, the ordering of one's life before His
eye, and in the consciousness of His presence as Judge and as
Taskmaster. So you find the expression used in almost the only other
occasion where it occurs in the Old Testament, where God says to
Abraham, 'Walk before Me, and'--because thou dost order thy life in the
consciousness that I am looking at thee--'be thou perfect.' So, to walk
before God is to live even in all the distracting activities of daily
life, with the clear realisation, and the continued thought burning in
our minds that we are doing them all in His presence. Think of what a
regiment of soldiers on parade does as each file passes in front of the
saluting point where the commanding officer is standing. How each man
dresses up, and they pull themselves together, keeping step, sloping
their rifles rightly. We are not on parade, but about business a great
deal more serious than that. We are doing our fighting with the Captain
looking at us, and that should be a stimulus, a joy and not a terror.
Realise God's eye watching you, and sin, and meanness, and negligence,
and selfishness, and sensuality, and lust, and passion, and all the
other devils that are in you will vanish like ghosts at cockcrow. 'Walk
before Me,' and if you feel that I am beside you, you cannot sin. 'Walk
before Me, and be thou perfect.' Notice,
III. The region in which that observance of the divine eye is to be
carried on.
'In the light of the living,' says the Psalmist. That seems to
correspond to the first clause of his hope; just as the previous word
that I have been commenting upon, 'walking before Him,' corresponds to
the second, where he speaks about his feet. 'Thou hast delivered my soul
from death.... I will walk before Thee in the light of the
living'--where Thou dost still permit my delivered soul to be. And the
phrase seems to mean the sunshine of human life contrasted with the
darkness of _Sheol_.
The expression is varied in the 116th Psalm, which reads 'the land of
the living.' The really living are they who live in Jesus, and the real
light of the living is the sunshine that streams on those who thus live,
because they live in Him who not only pours His light upon their hearts,
but, by pouring it, turns themselves into 'light in the Lord.' We, too,
may have the brightness of His face irradiating our faces and
illuminating our paths, as with the beneficence of a better sunshine.
The Psalmist points us the way thus to walk in light. He vows that,
because his heart is full of the great mercies of his delivering God, he
will order all his active life as under the consciousness of God's eye
upon him, and then it will all be lightened as by a burst of sunshine.
Our brightest light is the radiance from the face of God whom we try to
love and serve, and the Psalmist's confidence is that a life of
observance of His commandments in which gratitude for deliverance is the
impelling motive to continual realisation of His presence, and an
accordant life, will be a bright and sunny career. You will live in the
sunshine if you live before His face, and however wintry the world may
be, it will be like a clear frosty day. There is no frost in the sky, it
does not go above the atmosphere, and high above, in serene and wondrous
blue, is the blaze of the sunshine. Such a life will be a guided life.
There will still remain many occasions for doubt in the region of
belief, and for perplexity as to duty. There will often be need for
patient and earnest thought as to both, and there will be no lack of
calls for strenuous effort of our best faculties in order to apprehend
what our Guide means us to do, and where He would have us go, but
through it all there will be the guiding hand. As the Master, with
perhaps a glance backwards to these words, said, 'He that followeth Me
shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.' If He is
in the light let us walk in the light, and to us it will be purity and
knowledge and joy.