'I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills'--a resolution, and a
resolution born of intense longing. Now the hills that the Psalmist is
thinking about were visible from no part of that long-extended plain
where he dwelt; and he might have looked till he wore his eyes out, ere
he could have seen them on the horizon of sense. But although they were
unseen, they were visible to the heart that longed for them. He directs
his desires further than the vision of his eyeballs can go. Just as his
possible contemporary, Daniel, when he prayed, opened his window towards
the Jerusalem that was so far away; and just as Mohammedans still, in
every part of the world, when they pray, turn their faces to the
_Kaabah_ at Mecca, the sacred place to which their prayers are directed;
and just as many Jews still, north, east, south or west though they be,
face Jerusalem when they offer their supplications--so this psalmist in
Babylon, wearied and sick of the low levels that stretched endlessly and
monotonously round about him, says, 'I will look at the things that I
cannot see, and lift up my eyes above these lownesses about me, to the
loftinesses that sense cannot behold, but which I know to be lying
serene and solid beyond the narrowing horizon before me.'
There was the look of longing, and the longing which made non-vision
into a look; and there was the effort to divert his attention from the
things around him to the things afar off; and there was the realisation,
by reason of the effort, of these distant but most certain realities.
Now this Psalmist's home-sickness, if I may so call it, had nothing at
all religious about it. It was simply that he wanted to get to his own
country--his own, though he had been born in exile; and there was
nothing more devout or spiritual or refining about his longing than
there is about the wish to return to his native country that any
foreigner in a distant land feels. But when we take these words, as we
all ought to do, as the motto of our lives, we must necessarily attach
the loftiest religious meaning to them. And here start up the plain,
simple, but tight-gripping and stimulating questions, 'Do I see the
Unseen? Does that far-off, dim land assume substance and reality to me?
Do I walk in the light of it raying out to me through earth's darkness?
Do I dwell contented with never a glimpse of it?' It comes to be a very
sharp question with us professing Christians, whether the horizon of our
inward being is limited by, and coterminous with, the horizon of our
senses, or whether, far beyond the narrow limits to which these can
reach, our spirits' desire stretches boundless. Are, to us, the things
unseen the solid things, and the things visible the shadows and the
phantoms? The Apocalyptic seer, in his rocky Patmos, was told that he
was to be shown 'the things which _are_'; and what was it that he saw? A
set of what people call unreal and symbolic visions. 'The things which
are,' the world would have said, 'are the rocks that you are standing
on, and the sea that is dashing upon them, and all the solid-seeming
Roman world, and the power that has got you in its grip. These are the
realities, and these things that you think you see, these are the
dreams.' But it is exactly the other way. The world and all that is
about us, Manchester and its hubbub, warehouses crammed with cloth, and
mills full of jennies and throstles--these are the shadows; and the
things that only the believing eye beholds, that are wrapped in the
invisibility of their own greatness, these, and these only, are the
realities. We see with the bodily eyes the shadows on the wall, as it
were, but we have to turn round and see with the eyes of our minds the
light that flings the shadows. 'I will lift up my eyes' from the
mud-flats where I live to the hills that I cannot see, and, seeing them,
I shall be blessed.
Further, do we know anything of that longing that the Psalmist had? He
was perfectly comfortable in Babylon. There was abundance of everything
that he wanted for his life. The Jews there were materially quite as
well off, and many of them a great deal better off, than ever they had
been in their narrow little strip of mountain land, shut in between the
desert and the sea. But for all that, fat, wealthy Babylon was not
Palestine. So amidst the lush vegetation, the wealth of water and the
fertile plains, the Psalmist longed for the mountains, though the
mountains are often bare of green things. It was that longing that led
to his looking to the hills. Do we know anything of that longing which
makes us 'that are in this tabernacle to groan, being burdened'? 'Absent
from the Lord,' and 'present in the body,' we should not be at ease, nor
at home. Unless our Christianity throws us out of harmony and
contentment with the present, it is worth very little. And unless we
know something of that immortal longing to be nearer to God, and fuller
of Christ, and emancipated from sense, and from the burdens and
trivialities of life, we have yet to learn what the meaning of 'walking
not after the flesh but after the Spirit' really is.
Further, do we make any effort like that of this Psalmist, who
encourages and stimulates himself by that strong 'I _will_ lift up my
eyes'? You will not do it unless you make a dead lift of effort. It is a
great deal easier for a man to look at what is at his feet than to crane
his neck gazing at the stars.
And so, unless we take up and persevere in maintaining a habitual
attitude of stirring up and lifting up ourselves, gravitation will be
too much for us, and down will go the head, and down the eyes; and down
will go the desires, and we shall be like men that live in some
mountainous country, who never lift their gaze to the solemn white
summits that travellers come across half Europe to see. Christian men
and women too often walk beneath the very peaks of the mountains of God,
and rarely lift their vision there. They perhaps do so for an hour and a
half on a Sunday morning, or an hour on a Wednesday evening, when there
is no other engagement, or for a minute or two in the morning before
they hurry down to breakfast, or a minute or two at night when they are
dead beat and unfit for anything. For the rest of the time, _there_ are
the mountains and _here_ is the saint, and he seldom or never turns his
head to look at them! Is that the sort of Christianity that is likely to
be a power in the world, or a blessing to its possessor?