'Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I
desire besides Thee. 26. My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is
the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.'
--PSALM lxxiii. 25, 26.
We have in this psalm the record of the Psalmist's struggle with the
great standing difficulty of how to reconcile the unequal distribution
of worldly prosperity with the wisdom and providence of God. That
difficulty pressed more acutely upon men of the Old Dispensation than
even upon us, because the very promise of that stage of revelation was
that Godliness brought with it outward well-being. Our Psalmist reaches
a solution, not exactly by the same path by which the writers of the
Books of Job and Ecclesiastes find an answer to the problem. This man
gives up the endeavour to solve the question by reflection and thought,
and as he says, 'goes into the sanctuary of God,' gets into communion
with his Father in heaven, and by reason of that communion reaches a
conclusion which is, at all events, an approximate solution of his
difficulty, viz. the belief of a future life, 'Then understood I their
end.' The solemn vision of a life beyond the present, which should be
the outcome and retribution of this, rises before him from out of his
agitated thoughts, like the moon, pale and phantom-like, from a stormy
sea. That truth, if revealed at all to the Psalmist's contemporaries,
certainly did not occupy the same position of clearness or of prominence
as it does in our religious beliefs. But here we see a soul led up by
its wrestlings to apprehend it, and as was said of a statesman, 'calling
a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old.' So we get
here a soul taught by God, and filled with Him by communion, therefore
lifted to the height of a faith in a future life, and so made able to
look out upon all the perplexities and staggering mysteries of earth's
mingled ill and good, if not with distinct understanding, at least with
patient faith.
The words of my text indicate for us the very high-water mark of
religious experience, the very apex and climax of what some people would
call mystical religion to which this man has climbed, because he fought
with his doubts, and by God's grace was able to lay them. To him the
world's uncertain ill or good becomes infinitely insignificant, because
for the future he has a clear vision of a continued life with God, and
because for the present he knows that to have God in his heart is all
that he really needs.
I. We have here, first, a necessity which, misdirected, is the source of
man's misery.
'Whom have I in heaven but Thee? there is none upon earth that I desire
besides Thee.' If men would interpret the deepest voices of their own
souls that is what they would all say, because, from the very make of
our human nature there is not one of us, howsoever weak and sinful and
small, but is great enough to be too great to be filled with anything
smaller than God. Our thoughts, even the thoughts of the least
enlightened amongst us, go wandering through eternity; and as the writer
of the Book of Ecclesiastes says:--'He hath set eternity in men's
hearts.' We all of us need, though, alas! so few of us know that we
need, a living possession of a living perfect Person, for mind, for
heart, for will. Nothing short of the 'fulness of God' is enough for the
smallest amongst us. So, because we do not believe this, because
hundreds of you do not know what it is for which your souls are crying
out, 'the misery of man is great upon him.' You try to fill that deep
and aching void in your hearts, which is a sign of your possible
nobleness, and a pledge of your possible blessedness, with all manner of
minute rubbish, which can never fill up the gap that is there. Cartload
after cartload may be tilted into the bottomless bog, and there is no
more solid ground on the surface than there was at the beginning. Oh, my
brother! consult thine own deepest need; listen to that voice, often
stifled, often neglected, and by some of you always misunderstood, which
speaks in your wills, minds, consciences, hopes, desires, hearts; and is
it not this: 'My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God'?
There is none in the heaven, with all its stars and angels, enough for
thee but Him. There is none upon earth, with all its flowers, and
treasures, and loves, that will calm and still thy soul but only God.
The words of my text spring from a necessity felt by every man,
misdirected by a tragical majority of men, and therefore the source of
restlessness and misery.
II. Secondly, we see here the longing which, rightly directed and
cherished, is the very spirit of religion.
He, and only he, is the religious man, who can take these words of my
text for the inmost words of his conscious effort and life. Only in the
measure in which you and I recognise that God is our sole and
all-sufficient good, in that measure have we any business to call
ourselves devout or Christian people. That is a sharp test, is it not?
Is it not a valid and an accurate one? Is that not what really makes a
religious man, namely, the supreme admiration of, and aspiration after,
and possession of God, and God alone? What a contrast that forms to our
ordinary notions of what religion is! High above all creeds which are
valuable as leading up to this enthusiasm of longing and rapture of
possession, high above all preliminaries and preparations in the way of
outward services and ceremonial or united acts of worship, which are
only helps to this inward possession, rises such a thought of religion
as this. You are not a Christian because you believe a creed. The very
death of Jesus Christ is a means to this end. In order that we might
come into personal, rapturous, and hallowing possession of God, His very
Self in our hearts and spirits, Jesus Christ died and rose again. Do not
mistake the staircase for the presence-chamber. Do not fancy that you
are Christian people because you hold certain opinions or beliefs in
regard of certain doctrines. Do not fancy that religion consists in
either the mere outward practice of, or abstinence from, certain forms
of conduct. Such things are the means to, or the outcome of, this inward
devotion, but the true essence of our religion is that we recognise God
as our only good, and that in Him we find absolute rest and perfect
sufficiency.
Is that your religion, my brother? What a contrast these words of my
text present not only to our notions of what constitutes religion, but
to our practice! What is the thing that you and I crave most to have?
What is the thing that we lament most of all when we lose? Where do our
desires go when we take the guiding hand off them, and let them run as
they will? For some of us there are dearer hearts on earth than His,
Perhaps for some of us there are more dearly loved faces in heaven than
His. Taking the two extreme possible cases, and supposing at the one end
of the scale a man that had everything but God, and at the other end a
man that had nothing but God, do we live as if we believed that the man
that had everything _minus_ God is a pauper; and the other who has God
_minus_ everything is 'rich to all the intents of bliss'? Let us shape
our desires, aspirations, efforts, according to that certain truth.
I do not need to remind you that this lofty height of conscious longing,
not unblest with contemporaneous fruition, is above the height to which
we habitually rise. But what I would now insist upon is only this, that
whilst there will be variations, whilst there will be ups and downs, the
periods in our lives when we do not consciously recognise Him as our
supreme and single good are the periods that drop below duty and
blessedness. Acknowledge the imperfections, but Oh, my friends! you
Christian men and women, who know that these hours of high communion
with a loving God are not diffused through your whole life, do not sit
down contented, and say that it must be so; but confess them as being
imperfections which are your own fault, and remember that just as much,
and not one hairsbreadth more than, we can take these words of my text
for ours, so much and no more, have we a right to call ourselves
religious men and women.
III. Again, we have here the blessed possession, which deadens earthly
desires.
That clause, 'There is none upon earth that I desire besides Thee,'
might, I think, be rendered more accurately 'With Thee'--that is to say,
'possessing Thee,'--I desire none 'upon earth.' If we thus have been
longing after God, and fuller possession of Him, and if in some measure,
in answer to the desire, as is always the case, we have received into
mind and heart and will more of His preciousness and sweetness, then
that will kill the desires that otherwise would conflict with it. Our
great poet, speaking about a supreme earthly love, says--
'That rich golden shaft
Hath killed the flock of all affections else,
That lived in her.'
And the same thing is true about this higher life. This new affection
will deaden, and in some sense destroy, the desires that turn to lower
and to earthly things. The sun when it rises quenches the brightest
stars that can but fade in his light and die. And so when, in answer to
our longing, God lifts the light of His countenance--a better
sunrise--upon us, that new affection dims and quenches the brightness of
these little, though they be lustrous points, that shed a fragmentary
and manifold twinkling over the darkness of our former night. 'Walk in
the light,' and your heaven will be naked of all competing brightness.
Only remember that this supreme, and in some sense exclusive, love and
longing does not destroy the sweetness of lower possessions and
blessings. A new deep love in a man or a woman's heart does not make
their former affections less, but more, sweet and noble and strong. And
so when we get to love God best, and to love all other persons and
things in Him, and Him in them, then they become sources of dignity and
nobleness, of sweetness and strength, in our lives, which they otherwise
never would be. If you want to make all your family affections, for
instance, more permanent, more lofty, and more blessed, let them be all
in God:
'I trust he lives in God, and there
I find him worthier to be loved,'
says the poet about one that had been carried into the other life. It is
true about us in our relations to one another, even whilst we remain
here. Let God be first, and the second rises higher in the scale than
when we thought it first. The more our hearts are knit to Him and all
other desires are subordinated to Him, the more do they become precious,
and powers for good in our lives.
IV. And so, lastly, we have here the possession which is the pledge of
perpetuity.
The Psalmist, in the last verse of my text, supposes an extreme, and in
some sense, an impossible case. 'My flesh'--my bodily frame--'and my
heart'--some portion of my immaterial being--'faileth.' The clause
should probably be taken as hypothetical. 'Even supposing that it has
come to this,' says he, 'that I had been separated from my body, and
that along with the body there had also been "consumed" (as is the
meaning of the original word) some portion of my spiritual being, even
then, though there were only a thin thread of personality left, enough
to call "me" and no more, so to speak, I should cling with that to God,
and I know that then I should have enough, for "God is the Rock of my
heart, and my Portion for ever."'
These two last words are obviously here to be taken in their widest
extension. The whole context requires us to suppose that the Psalmist's
eye is looking across the black gorge of death to the shining table-land
beyond. So here we are admitted to see faith in the future life in the
very act of growth. The singer soars to that sunlit height of confidence
in the endless blessedness of union with God, just because he feels so
deeply the sacredness and the blessedness of his present communion with
God.
Next to the resurrection of Jesus Christ the best proof of immortality
lies in the present experience of communion with God. Anything is more
reasonable than to believe that a soul which can grasp God for its good,
which can turn itself to, and be united with, an infinite Being; and
itself is capable of indefinite approximation towards that Being, should
have its course and career cut short by such a surface thing as death.
If there be a God at all, anything is more reasonable than to believe
that the union, formed between Him and me by faith here, can ever come
to an end until I have exhausted Him, and drawn all His fulness into
myself. This communion, by its 'very sweetness yieldeth proof that it
was born for immortality.' And the Psalmist here, just because to-day
God is the Rock of his heart, is sure that that relation must last on,
through life, through death, ay! and for ever, 'when all that seems
shall suffer shock.'
So, my brethren! here is the choice and alternative presented before us.
And I ask you which is the wise man, he who clutches at external
possessions which cannot abide, or he who hungers for that indwelling
God, who sinks into the very substance of his soul, and is more
inseparable from him than his very body? Which is the wise man, he of
whom it shall one day be said, 'This night thy soul shall be required of
thee,' and 'His glory shall not descend after him,' or the man who knows
for what his heart hungers, and knowing it turns to God in Christ, by
simple faith and lowly aspiration, as his enduring Treasure; and then,
and therefore, can look out with a calm smile of security over all the
tumbling sea of change, and beyond the dark horizon there where sight
fails; and can say, 'I am persuaded that neither things present, nor
things to come, nor life, nor death, nor any other creature, shall be
able to separate me from the God who is my Treasure, and the Life of my
very self'?