'Every one of them in Zion appeareth before God.' Then there is one road
on which whosoever travels is sure to reach his goal. On all others
caravans get lost, overwhelmed in a sandstorm, or slain by robbers; and
the bleached bones of men and camels lie there on the sand for
centuries. This caravan always arrives. For no man ever wanted God who
did not possess Him, and the measure of our desire is the prophecy of
our possession. Surely it is worth while, even from the point of view of
self-interest, to forsake all these lower aims in which success is
absolutely problematical, or, while pursuing them as far as duty and
necessity require, in and through them, as well as above and beyond
them, to press towards the one aim in which failure is impossible. You
cannot say about say other course--'Blessed is the man that enters on
it, for he is sure to reach what he desires.' Other goals are elusive;
the golden circlet may never drop upon your locks. But there is one path
on which all that you seek you shall have, and you are on it if 'in your
hearts are the _ways_.'
I need not say a word about the ultimate fulfilment of this great
promise of our text; how that there is not only in our psalm, gleaming
through it, a reference to the communion of earth rather than to the
external Presence in the sanctuary, but there is also hinted, though
less consciously, to the Psalmist himself, yet necessarily from the
nature of the case the perfecting of that earthly communion in the
higher house of the Lord in the heavenly Zion. Are all these desires,
these longings, these efforts after God which make the nobleness and the
blessedness of a life on earth, and which are always satisfied, and yet
never satiated, to be crushed into nothingness by the accident of bodily
dissolution? Then, then, the darkest of all clouds is drawn over the
face of God, and we are brought into a state of absolute intellectual
bewilderment as to what life, futile and frail, has been for at all. No,
brother! God never gives mouths but He sends meat to fill them; and He
has not suffered His children to long after Him, to press after Him,
only in order that the partial fulfilment of their desires and yearnings
which is possible upon earth should be all their experience.
'He thinks he was not made to die,
And Thou hast made him; Thou art just.'