There is, if we may reverently say so, a tone of satisfaction in the
words, 'Because he hath set his love upon Me,' and 'because he hath
known My name.' Thus, then, there are two things that the great Father's
heart seeks, and wheresoever it finds them, in however imperfect a
degree, He is glad, and lavishes upon such a one the most precious
things in His possession.
What are these two things? Let us look at each of them. Now the word
rendered 'set his love' includes more than is suggested by that
rendering, beautiful as it is. It implies the binding or knitting
oneself to anything. Now, though love be the true cement by which men
are bound to God, as it is the only real bond which binds men to one
another, yet the word itself covers a somewhat wider area than is
covered by the notion of love. It is not my love only that I am to
fasten upon God, but my whole self that I am to bind to Him. God
delights in us when we cling to Him. There is a threefold kind of
clinging, which I would urge upon you and upon myself.
Let us cling to Him in our thoughts, hour by hour, moment by moment,
amidst all the distractions of daily life. Whilst there are other things
that must legitimately occupy our minds, let us see to it that, ever and
anon, we turn ourselves away from these, and betake ourselves, with a
conscious gathering in of our souls, to Him, and calm and occupy our
hearts and minds with the bright and peaceful thoughts of a present God
ever near us, and ever gracious to us. Life is but a dreary stretch of
wilderness, unless all through it there be dotted, like a chain of ponds
in a desert, these moments in which the mind fixes itself upon God, and
loses sorrows and sins and weakness and all other sadnesses in the calm
and blessed contemplation of His sweetness and sufficiency. The very
heavens are bare and lacking in highest beauty, unless there stretch
across them the long lines of rosy-tinted clouds. And so across our
skies let us cast a continuous chain of thoughts of God, and as we go
about our daily work, let us try to have our minds ever recurring to
Him, like the linked pools that mirror heaven in the midst of the barren
desert, and bring a reflection of life into the midst of its death.
Cleave and cling to God, brother! by frequent thoughts of Him, diffused
throughout the whole continuity of the busy day.
Then again, we might say, let us cleave to Him by our love, which is the
one bond of union, as I said, between man and God, as it is the one bond
of union between man and man. 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all
thy strength,' was from the beginning the Alpha, and until the end will
be the Omega, of all true religion; and within the sphere of that
commandment lie all duty, all Christianity, all blessedness, and all
life. The heart that is divided is wretched; the heart that is
consecrated is at rest. The love that is partial is nought; the love
that is worth calling so is total and continuous. Let us cling to Him
with our thoughts; let us cling to Him with the tendrils of our hearts.
Let us cleave to Him, still further, by the obedient contact of our
wills with His, taking no commandments from men, and no overpowering
impressions from circumstances, and no orders from our own fancies and
inclinations and tastes and lusts, but receiving all our instructions
from our Father in heaven. There is no real contact between us and God,
no real cleaving to Him, howsoever the thought of God may be in our
minds, and some kind of imperfect love to Him may be supposed to be in
our hearts, unless there be the absolute submission of our wills to His
authority; and only in the measure in which we are able to say, What He
commands I do, and what He sends I accept, and my will is in His hands
to be moulded, do we really get close and keep close to our Father in
the heavens. He that hath brought himself into loving touch with God,
and clings to Him in that threefold fashion, by thought, love, and
submission, he, and only he, is so joined to the Lord as to be one
Spirit.
Now that is not a state to be won and kept without much vigorous,
conscious effort. The nuts in a machine work loose; the knots in a rope
'come untied,' as the children say. The hand that clasps anything, by
slow and imperceptible degrees, loses muscular contraction, and the grip
of the fingers becomes slacker. Our minds and affections and wills have
that same tendency to slacken their hold of what they grasp. Unless we
tighten up the machine it will work loose; and unless we make conscious
efforts to keep ourselves in touch with God, His hand will slip out of
ours before we know that it is gone, and we shall fancy that we feel the
impression of the fingers long after they have been taken away from our
negligent palms.
Besides our own vagrancies, and the waywardness and wanderings of our
poor, unreliable natures, there come in, of course, as hindrances, all
the interruptions and distractions of outside things, which work in the
same direction of loosening our hold on God. If the shipwrecked sailor
is not to be washed off the raft he must tie himself on to it, and must
see that the lashings are reliable and the knots tight; and if we do not
mean to be drifted away from God without knowing it, we must make very
sure work of anchor and cable, and of our own hold on both. Effort is
needed, continuous and conscious, lest at any time we should slide away
from Him. And this is what God delights to find: a mind and will that
bind themselves to Him.
There is another thing in the text which, as I take it, is a consequence
of that close union between man in his whole nature and God: 'I will set
him on high because he hath known My name.' Notice that the knowledge of
the name comes after, and not before, the setting of the love or the
fixing of the nature upon God. God's 'name' is the same thing as His
self-revelation or His manifested character. Then, does not every one to
whom that revelation is made know His name? Certainly not. The word
'know' is here used in the same deep sense in which it is employed all
but uniformly in the New Testament--the same sense in which it is used
in the writings of the Apostle John. It describes a knowledge which is a
great deal more than a mere intellectual acquaintance with the facts of
divine revelation. Or, to put the thought into other words, this is a
knowledge which comes after we have set our love upon God, a knowledge
which is the child of love. We forget sometimes that it is a Person, and
not a system of truth, whom the Bible tells us we are to know. And how
do you know people? Only by familiar acquaintance with them. You might
read a description of a man, perfectly accurate, sufficiently full, but
you would not therefore say you knew him. You might know about him, or
fancy you did, but if you knew him, it would be because you had summered
and wintered with him, and lived beside him, and were on terms of
familiar acquaintance with him. As long as it is God and not theology,
the knowledge of whom makes religion, so long it will not be the head,
but the heart or spirit, that is the medium or organ by which we know
Him. You have to become acquainted with Him and be very familiar with
Him--that is to say, to fix your whole self upon Him--before you 'know'
Him; and it is only the knowledge which is born of love and familiarity
that is worth calling knowledge at all. Just as with our earthly
relationships and acquaintances, only they who love a man or a woman
know such a one right down to the very depth of their being, so the one
way to know God's name is to bind myself to Him with mind and heart and
will, as friends cleave to one another. Then I shall know Him and be
known of Him.
Still further, this knowledge which God delights to find in us men, is a
knowledge which is experience. There is all the difference between
reading about a foreign country and going to see it with your own eyes.
The man that has been there knows it; the man that has not knows about
it. And only he knows God to whom the commonplaces of religion have
turned into facts which he verifies by his own experiences.
It is a knowledge, too, which influences life. Obviously the words of my
text look back to what the saint was represented as saying in an earlier
portion of the psalm. Why does God declare that the man has set his love
upon Him, and knows His name? Because the saint professed this, 'I will
say of the Lord, He is my Refuge and my Fortress.' These are His name.
The man knows it; he has it not only upon his lips, but in his heart,
and feels that it is true, and acts accordingly. 'He is my Refuge and my
Fortress; my God, in Him will I trust.' The knowledge which God regards
as knowledge of Him is one based upon experience and upon familiar
acquaintance, and issuing in joyful recognition of my possession of Him
as mine, and the outgoing of my confidence to Him. These are the things
that God desires and delights to find in men.
II. Note, secondly, what God gives to the man in whom He finds such
things.
'I will deliver him'; 'I will set him on high.' These two clauses are
substantially parallel, and yet there is a difference between them, as
is the nature of the parallelism of Hebrew poetry, where the same ideas
are repeated with a shade of modification, and the second of them
somewhat surpassing the first. 'I will deliver him,' says the promise.
That confirms the view that the promise in the previous verse, 'There
shall no plague come nigh thy dwelling,' does not mean exemption from
sorrow and trial because, if so, there would be no relevancy or
blessedness in the promise of deliverance. He who needs 'deliverance' is
the man who is surrounded by evils, and God's promise is not that no
evil shall come to the man who trusts Him, but that he shall be
delivered out of the evil that does come, and that it will not be truly
evil.
And why is he to be delivered? 'Because he has bound himself to Me,'
says God, 'therefore will I deliver him.' Of course, if I am fastened to
God, nothing that does not hurt Him can hurt me. If I am knit to Him as
closely as this psalm contemplates, it is impossible but that out of His
fulness my emptiness shall be filled, and with His rejoicing strength my
weakness will be made strong. It is just the same idea as is given to us
in the picture of Peter upon the water, when the cold waves are up to
his knees, and the coward heart says, 'I am ready to sink,' but yet,
with the faith that comes with the fear, he puts out his hand and grasps
Christ's hand, and as soon as he does, and the two are united, he is
buoyant, and rises again, and the water is beneath the soles of his
feet. 'He sent from above, He took me; He drew me out of many waters.'
Whoever is joined to God is lifted above all evil, and the evil that
continues to eddy about him will change its character, and bear him
onwards to his haven. For he who is thus knit to God in the living,
pulsating bond of thought and affection and submission, will be
delivered from sin.
When a boy first learns to skate, he needs some one to go behind him and
hold him up whilst he uses his unaccustomed limbs; and so, when we are
upon the smooth, treacherous ice of this wicked world, it is by leaning
on God that we are kept upright. 'He hath set himself close to Me, I
will deliver him,' says God. 'Yea! he shall not fall, for the Lord is
able to make him stand.'
Still further, we have another great promise, which is the explanation
and extension of the former, 'I will set him on high, because he hath
known My name.' That is more than lifting a man up above the reach of
the storms of life by means of any external deliverance. There is a
better thing than that--namely, that our whole inward life be lived
loftily. If it is true of us that we know His name, then our lives are
'hid with Christ in God,' and far below our feet will be all the riot of
earth and its noise and tumult and change. We shall live serene and
uplifted lives on the mount, if we know His name and have bound
ourselves to Him, and the troubles and cares and changes and duties and
joys of this present will be away down below us, like the lowly cottages
in some poor village, seen from the mountain top, the squalor out of
sight, the magnitude diminished, the noise and tumult dimmed to a mere
murmur that interrupts not the sacred silence of the lofty peak where we
dwell with God. 'I will set him on high because he knows My name.'
Then, perhaps, there is a hint in the words, as there is in subsequent
words of the verse, of an elevation even higher than that, when, life
ended and earth done, He shall receive into His glory those whom He hath
guided by His counsel. 'I will set him on high, because he hath known My
name,' says the Jehovah of the Old Covenant. 'To him that overcometh
will I grant to sit with Me on My throne,' says the Jesus of the New,
who is the Jehovah of the Old.