'Thou hast'--'I will.' The past is for this Psalmist a mirror in which
he sees reflected the approaching form of the veiled future. God's past
is the guarantee of God's future. Godless people, who get wearied of the
monotony of life, begin to say before they have gone far in it, 'Oh!
there is nothing new. That which is to be hath already been. It is just
one continual repetition of the same sort of thing.' But that is only
partially true. There is only one man in the world who can truly and
certainly say, 'To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant';
and that is the man who says; 'He delivered my soul from death, mine
eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.' For the continuance of
things here is not guaranteed to us by the fact that they have lasted
for so long. Why, nobody knows whether the sun will rise to-morrow or
not--whether there will be a to-morrow or not. There will come one day
when the sun sets for the last time. What people call the 'uniformity of
nature' affords no ground on which to build certainty as to the future.
We all do it, but we have no right to do it. But when we bring God into
the future, that makes all the difference. His past is the guarantee and
the revelation of His future, and every person that grasps Him in faith
has the right to pray with assurance, 'Thou hast been my Helper; leave
me not, neither forsake me,' and to declare triumphantly, 'The Lord will
perfect that which concerneth me.'
So, brethren! all the past, as it is recorded for us in Scripture, lives
and throbs with faithful promises for us to-day. Though the methods of
the manifestation may alter, the essence of it remains the same. As one
of the Apostles says, 'Whatsoever things were written aforetime were
written for our advantage, that we, through the encouragement ministered
by the Scriptures, might have hope'; and looking forward into all the
future, might discern its wastes unknown, all lighted up by the one glad
certainty that He that is 'the same yesterday and to-day and for ever'
will be there, and we shall be beside Him. What God has done, He will
keep on doing. 'The Lord hath delivered mine eyes from tears, and my
feet from falling,' and therefore 'I shall walk before the Lord in the
land of the living.'
Our experience yields fuel for our faith. We have been near death many a
time; we have never fallen into it. Our eyes have been wet many a time;
God has dried them. Our feet have been ready to fall many a time, and if
at the moment when we were tottering on the edge of the precipice, we
have cried to Him and said, 'My feet have well-nigh slipped,' a strong
Hand has been held out to us. 'The Lord upholdeth them that are in the
act of falling,' as the old psalm, rightly rendered, has it, and if we
have pushed aside His hand, and gone down, then the next clause of the
same verse applies, for He 'raiseth up those that have fallen,' and are
lying prostrate.
As it has been, so it will be. 'Thou hast been with me in six troubles,'
therefore 'in the seventh Thou wilt not forsake me.' We can wear out
men; and we cannot argue that because a man has had long patience with
some unworthy recipient of his goodness, his patience will never give
out. But it is safe to argue thus about God. 'I say not unto thee, until
seven times, but until seventy times seven'--the two perfect numbers
multiplied into each other, and the product again multiplied by one of
them, to give the measureless measure of the exhaustless divine love,
and the sure guarantee that to His servant 'to-morrow shall be as this
day, and much more abundant.'
Then, again, if we put a little different meaning into the Psalmist's
words (and as I said, I think both meanings lie in them), they suggest
that he did not look forward into the future only with expectation, but
that along with expectation there was resolve. So we have here