The word here that is rightly translated 'trust,' like most expressions
in the Old Testament for religious emotion, has a distinctly
metaphorical colouring about it. It literally means to 'hang upon'
something, and so, beautifully, it tells us what faith is--just hanging
upon God. Whoever has laid his tremulous hand on a fixed something,
partakes, in the measure in which he does grasp it, of the fixity of
that on which he lays hold; so 'they that trust in the Lord shall be as
Mount Zion,' that stands there summer and winter, day and night, year
out and year in, with its strong buttresses and its immovable mass, the
very emblem of solidity and stability.
Ay! and this is true about these tremulous hearts of ours. There is one
way to make them stable, and only one; and that is that they shall be
fastened, as it were, to that which is stable, and so be steadfast
because they hold by what is steadfast. There is no other means by which
any heart can be made immovable, except in so far as it may be moved by
holy impulses and sweet drawings of love and loftinesses of aspiration
towards God; there is no other means by which a heart, with all its
inward perturbations and all its outward sources of agitation, can be
made calm and still, except by living, deep, continual fellowship with
Him who is the Eternal Calm, and from whose stable Being we mutable men
can derive serenity which is a faint likeness of His immutability. 'We
which have believed do enter into rest.'
How can I still these hot desires of mine, this self-asserting will, all
these various passions and emotions which sweep through my soul, and
which must not be made mute and dead--or else there will come corruption
and stagnation--but must be made so to move as that in their very motion
shall be rest? How can I do that? By one way, and one only. Live in
fellowship with God, and that will quiet perturbations within and
tumults without. The foot of the Master on the midnight stormy sea will
smooth the waves which the moonbeams have not power to still, but only
to reveal their heavings. 'They that trust in the Lord shall be like
Mount Zion, which cannot be moved,' and yet is not torpid in its
immobility, but full of fertility and of beauty wedded to its
steadfastness.
In like manner, the only way by which not only the inward storms can be
quieted, but the outward assaults of perturbing circumstances,
disasters, changes, difficult duties, and the like, can ever be received
with tranquillity is, that they should be received in quiet faith. And,
in like manner, the only way by which men can be made steadfast and
immovable in brave, pertinacious adherence to the simple law of right,
whatsoever temptations may try to draw them aside, and whatsoever frowns
may gather upon the face of affairs so as to frighten them from the path
of rectitude--the only way by which they can conquer evil, so as not to
be hurried into forbidden paths, is this same making sure of their hold
upon God, and carrying with them day by day, and moment by moment, into
all the little difficulties and small temptations that would lead to
trivial faults, the one solemn thought that bids all these back into
their lairs--God is near me and I am with Him.
Oh, brethren! if we could live in touch with Him and, as this great word
for 'trust' suggests, be fastened to Him, as a man, swinging from a
cliff over the crawling sea, fathoms below him, clutches the rope that
is his safety--then we should live in tranquillity, and be steadfast,
immovable.
They say that in the great church of St. Peter there is only one
temperature in summer and winter; that the fiercest heat may be pouring
down in the colonnades, or the sharpest frost may have silenced the
tinkling fall of the fountains in the Piazza; but within the great
portal the thermometer stands the same. Thus, if we live in the Temple,
and keep inside its doors, the thermometer in our hearts will be fixed;
and the anemometer--the measurer of the wind--will point to calm all the
year round. 'They that trust in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion, which
cannot be moved.'
II. Again, this same attitude of realising the divine Presence, Will,
and Help, will bring around us encircling defences.
I have already said that one peculiarity of the topography of the sacred
city is that, at first sight, the metaphor of my text seems to break
down, for nobody, looking at the situation of the city with uninstructed
eye, would say that it was compassed all around with mountains. On two
sides it manifestly is; on two sides it apparently is not, though the
land rises on the north and west till it is higher than the tops of the
houses. We may not be fanciful in taking that as a parable. 'As the
mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about His
people'--a very real defence, but a defence that it takes an instructed
eye to see; no obvious protection, palpable to the vulgar touch, and
manifest to the sensuous eye, but something a great deal better than
that--a real protection, through which we may be sure that nothing which
is evil can ever pass.
Whatsoever does get over the encircling mountains, and reaches us, we
may be sure, is not an evil but a very real good. Only we have to
interpret the protection on the principles of faith, and not on those of
sense. When, then, there come down upon us--as there do upon us all,
thank God!--dark days, and sad days, and solitary days, and losses and
bitternesses of a thousand kinds, do not let us falter in the belief
that if we have our hearts set on God, nothing has come to us but what
He has let through. Our sorrows are His angels, though their faces are
dark, and though they bear a sword that flames and turns every way. It
is hard to believe; it is certainly true, and if we could carry the
confidence of it as a continual possession into our ordinary lives, they
would be very different from what they are to-day.
III. And then, remember the other thing that I said. My text suggests
that--
Simple trust in God, in some measure, assimilates the protected to the
Protector.
The mountains girdle a mountain, and so my trust opens my heart to the
entrance into my heart of something akin to God. As the Apostle Peter,
in his brave way, is not afraid to say, it makes us 'partakers of the
divine nature.' The immovableness of the trustful man is not all unlike
the calmness of the trusted God; and the steadfastness of the one is a
reflex of the unchangeableness of the other. We have not understood the
meaning of faith, nor have we risen to the experience of its best
effects upon ourselves, unless we understand that its great blessing and
fruit, and the purpose for which we are commanded to cherish it, is that
thereby we may become like Him in whom we trust. 'They that make them
are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them.' That is the
key to the degradations that inhere in idolatrous worship, and that
principle is true about all worship--as the god so is every one that
trusteth in it. 'As the mountains are round about Mount Zion,' God is
round about the people that are becoming Godlike.
IV. Mark further the significant repetition of the same expression in
reference to the stability of the man protected and the continuance of
the protection. Both are 'for ever'. That is to say, if it is true that
God is round about me, and that, in some humble measure, my heart has
been opening to be calmed and steadied by the influx of His own life,
then His 'for ever' is my 'for ever,' and it cannot be that He should
live and I should die. The guarantee of the eternal being of the
trustful soul is the experience to-day of the reality of the divine
protection. And thus we may face everything--life, death, whatsoever may
come, assured that nothing touches the continuity and the perpetuity of
the union between the trusting soul and the trusted God. 'The mountains
shall depart and the hills be removed, but My lovingkindness shall not
depart from thee; nor shall the covenant of My peace be removed, saith
the Lord.' The earthquake comes. It shatters a continent and changes the
face of nature; makes valleys where there were mountains, and mountains
where there were vales, and open seas where there were fertile plains
and covers everything with ruin and with rubbish. But there emerge from
the cloudy and chaotic confusion the city perched on the hill and its
encompassing heights. 'The world passeth away, and the fashion thereof,
but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.'