'Behold, bless ye the Lord, all ye servants of the Lord, which by
night stand in the House of the Lord. 2. Lift up your hands in the
Sanctuary, and bless the Lord. 3. The Lord that made Heaven and
earth bless thee out of Zion.'--PSALM cxxxiv.
This psalm, the shortest but one in the whole Psalter, will be more
intelligible if we observe that in the first part of it more than one
person is addressed, and in the last verse a single person. It begins
with 'Bless _ye_ the Lord'; and the latter words are, 'The Lord bless
_thee_.' No doubt, when used in the Temple service, the first part was
chanted by one half of the choir, and the other part by the other. Who
are the persons addressed in the first portion? The answer stands plain
in the psalm itself. They are, 'All ye servants of the Lord, which by
night stand in the House of the Lord.' That is to say, the priests or
Levites whose charge it was to patrol the Temple through the hours of
night and darkness, to see that all was safe and right there, and to do
such other priestly and ministerial work as was needful; they are called
upon to 'lift up their hands in'--or rather _towards_--'the Sanctuary,
and to bless the Lord.'
The charge is given to these watching priests, these nightly warders, by
some single person--we know not whom. Perhaps by the High Priest,
perhaps by the captain of their band. They listen to the exhortation to
praise, and answer, in the last words of this little psalm, by invoking
a blessing on the head of the unnamed speaker who gave the charge. So we
have in this antiphonal choral psalm a little snatch of musical ritual
falling into two parts--the charge to the watchers and the answering
invocation. We may find a good deal of practical teaching in it. Let us
look, then, at this choral charge and the response to it.
The charge to the watchers.
We do not know what the office of these watchers was, but in the second
Temple, to the period of which this psalm may possibly belong, their
duties were carefully defined, and Rabbinical literature has preserved a
minute account of the work of the nightly patrol.
According to the authorities, two hundred and forty priests and Levites
were the nightly guard, distributed over twenty-one stations. The
captain of the guard visited these stations throughout the night with
flaming torches before him, and saluted each with 'Peace be unto thee.'
If he found the sentinel asleep he beat him with his staff, and had
authority to burn his cloak (which the drowsy guard had rolled up for a
pillow). We all remember who warned His disciples to watch, lest coming
suddenly He should find them asleep. We may remember, too, the blessing
pronounced in the Apocalypse on 'Him who watcheth and keepeth his
garments, lest he walk naked.' Shortly before daybreak the captain of
the guard came, as the Talmud says: 'All times were not equal. Sometimes
he came at cockcrow, or near it, before or after it. He went to one of
the posts where the priests were stationed, and opened a wicket which
led into the court. Here the priests, who marched behind him torch in
hand, divided into two companies which went one to the east, and one to
the west, carefully ascertaining that all was well. When they met each
company reported "It is peace." Then the duties of the watch were ended,
and the priests who were to prepare for the daily sacrifice entered on
their tasks.'
Our psalm may be the chant and answering chant with which the nightly
charge was given over to the watchers, or it may be, as some
commentators suppose, 'the call and counter-call with which the watchers
greeted each other when they met.'
Figure then, to yourselves, the band of white-robed priests gathered in
the court of the Temple, their flashing torches touching pillar and
angle with strange light, the city sunk in silence and sleep, and ere
they part to their posts the chant rung in their ears:--'Bless ye the
Lord, all ye servants of the Lord which by night stand in the House of
the Lord! Lift up your hands to the Sanctuary, and bless the Lord!'
Notice, then, that the priests' duty is to praise. It is because they
are the servants of the Lord that, therefore, it is their business to
bless the Lord. It is because they stand in the House of the Lord that
it is theirs to bless the Lord. They who are gathered into His House,
they who hold communion with Him, they who can feel that the gate of the
Father's dwelling, like the gate of the Father's heart, is always open
to them, they who have been called in from their wanderings in a
homeless wilderness, and given a place and a name in His House better
than of sons and daughters, have been so blessed in order that, filled
with thanksgiving for such an entrance into God's dwelling and of such
an adoption into His family, their silent lips may be filled with
thanksgiving and their redeemed hands be uplifted in praise.
So for us Christians. We are servants of the Lord--His priests. That we
'stand in the House of the Lord' expresses not only the fact of our
great privilege of confiding approach to Him and communion with Him,
whereby we may ever abide in the very Holy of Holies and be in the
secret place of the Most High, even while we are busy in the world, but
it also points to our duty of ministering; for the word 'stand' is
employed to designate the attendance of the priests in their office, and
is almost equivalent to 'serve.' 'To bless the Lord,' then, is the work
to which we are especially called. If we are made a 'royal priesthood,'
it is that we 'should show forth the praises of Him who has called us
out of darkness into His marvellous light.' The purpose of that full
horn of plenty, charged with blessings which God has emptied upon our
heads, is that our dumb lips may be touched into thankfulness, because
our selfish hearts have been wooed and charmed into love and life.
The Rabbis had a saying that there were two sorts of angels: the angels
that served, and the angels that praised; of which, according to their
teaching, the latter were the higher in degree. It was only a
half-truth, for true service is praise.
But whatever the form in which praise may come, whether it be in the
form of vocal thanksgiving, or whether it be the glad surrender of the
heart, manifested in the conscious discharge of the most trivial duties,
whether we 'lift up our hands in the Sanctuary, and bless the Lord' with
them, or whether we turn our hands to the tools of our daily occupation
and handle them for His sake, alike we maybe praising Him. And the thing
for us to remember is that the place where we, if we are Christians,
stand, and the character which we, if we are Christians, sustain, bind
us to live blessing and praising Him whilst we live. 'Behold!'--as if He
would point to all the crowded list of God's great mercies--'Bless ye
the Lord, all ye servants of the Lord that ... stand in the house of the
Lord.'
And then there is another point that comes out of this charge to the
watchers, viz. the necessity of strenuously trying to unite together
service of God and communion with God. These priests might have
said--'When we go our rounds through the empty and echoing corridors of
the dark Temple, we perform the charge which God gave us; and it needs
not that we pray. We are working for Him and doing the work which He
appointed us; and that is better than all external ritual.' But this
unknown speaker who charges them knew better than that. The priests'
service under the Old Covenant was very unspiritual service. Their work
was sometimes very repulsive and always purely external work, which
might be done without one trace of religion or devotion in it. And so
the speaker here warns them, as it were, against the temptation which
besets all men that are concerned in the outward service of the house of
God, to confound the mere outward service with inward devotion. The
charge bids us remember that the more sedulously our hands and thoughts
are employed about the externals of religious duties, the more must we
see to it that our inmost spirits are baptized into fellowship with God.
It is not enough to patrol the Temple courts unless we 'lift up our
hands to the sanctuary,' and with our hearts 'bless the Lord.' And all
we who in any degree and any department are officially or
semi-officially connected with the work of the Christian Church have
very earnestly and especially to lay this to heart. We ministers,
deacons, Sunday-school teachers, tract distributors, have much need to
take care that we do not confound watching in the courts of the Temple
with lifting up our own hands and hearts to our Father that is in
heaven; and remember that the more outward work we do, the more inward
life we ought to have. The higher the stem of the tree grows and the
broader its branches spread the deeper must strike and the wider must
extend its underground roots, if it is not to be blown over and become a
withered ruin.
And so all you Christian men and women! will you take the plain lesson
that is here? All ye that stand ready for service, and doing service,
all 'ye that stand in the house of the Lord, behold' your peril and your
duty--and 'bless ye the Lord,' and remember that the more work the more
prayer to keep it from rotting; the more effort the more communion; and
that at the end we shall discover with alarm, and with shame confess 'I
kept others' vineyards and my own vineyard have I not kept'; unless,
like our Master, we prepare for a day of work and toil in the Temple by
a night of quiet communion with our Father on the mountainside.
And then there is another lesson here which I only touch, and that is
that all times are times for blessing God. 'Ye who _by night_ stand in
the house of the Lord, bless the Lord': so though no sacrifice was
smoking on the altar, and no choral songs went up from the company of
praising priests in the ritual service; and although the nightfall had
silenced the worship and scattered the worshippers, yet some low murmur
of praise would be echoing through the empty halls all the night long,
and the voice of thanksgiving and of blessing would blend with the clank
of the priests' feet on the marble pavements as they went their
patrolling rounds; and their torches would send up a smoke not less
acceptable than the wreathing columns of the incense that had filled the
day. And so as in some convents you will find a monk kneeling on the
steps of the altar at each hour of the four-and-twenty, adoring the
Sacrament exposed upon it, so (but in inmost reality and not in a mere
vulgar outside form that means nothing) in the Christian heart there
should be a perpetual adoration and a continual praise--a prayer without
ceasing. What is it that comes first of all into your minds when you
wake in the middle of the night? Yesterday's business, to-morrow's
vanities, or God's present love and your dependence upon Him?
In the night of sorrow, too, do our songs go up, and do we hear and obey
the charge which commands not only perpetual adoration, but bids us fill
the night with music and with praise? Well for us if it be, anticipating
the time when 'they rest not day nor night saying, Holy! Holy! Holy!'
Now, that is the priests' charge. Look for a moment at the answering
blessing: 'The Lord that made heaven and earth bless thee out of Zion.'
'Thee?' Whom? Him who gave the solemn charge. Their obedience to it is
implied in the blessing which the priests invoke on the head of the
unnamed speaker. So they express their joyful consent to his charge, and
their desires for his welfare whose clear voice has summoned them to
their high duty and privilege. They obey, and their first prayer is a
prayer for him.
May we venture to draw from this interchange of counsel and benediction
a simple lesson as to the best form in which mutual goodwill and
friendship may express itself? It is by the interchange of stimulus to
God's service and praise, and of grateful prayer. He is my best friend
who stirs me up to make my whole life a strong sweet song of
thanksgiving to God for all His numberless mercies to me. Even if the
exhortation becomes rebuke, faithful are such wounds. It is but a
shallow affection which can be eloquent on other subjects of common
interests, but is dumb on this, the deepest of all; which can counsel
wisely and rebuke gently in regard to other matters, but has never a
word to say to its dearest concerning duty to the God of all mercies.
And the true response to any loving exhortation to bless God, or any
religious impulse which we receive from one another, is to invoke God's
blessing on faithful lips that have given us counsel.
This is the best recompense to Christian teachers. If any poor words of
ours have come to any of your hearts with power for conviction, or
instruction, or encouragement, let your response be, I beseech you, 'The
Lord that hath made heaven and earth bless _thee_.' We need your
prayers. We are weak, often sad, often discouraged. We are tempted ever
to handle God's truth professionally, instead of living on it for
ourselves. We are tempted to think that our work is in vain, and to lose
heart because we do not see the spiritual results which we would fain
reap. And in many an hour of languor and despondency, when the wheels of
life turn heavily and the sky seems very far away, and our message seems
to have lost its grandeur and certainty to ourselves, and our handling
of it looks as if it had been one long failure, then we need and may be
helped by the voice of cheer coming through the night from those whom we
have tried to counsel: 'The Lord that made heaven and earth bless thee.'
But observe, further, the two kinds of blessing which answer to one
another--God's blessing of man, and man's blessing of God. The one is
communicative, the other receptive and responsive. The one is the great
stream which pours itself over the precipice; the other is the basin
into which it falls and the showers of spray which rise from its
surface, rainbowed in the sunshine, as the cataract of divine mercies
comes down upon it. God blesses us when He gives. We bless God when we
thankfully take, and praise the Giver. God's blessing then, must ever
come first. 'We love Him because He first loved us.' Ours is but the
echo of His, but the acknowledgment of the divine act, which must
precede our recognition of it as the dawn must come in order that the
birds may wake to sing.
Our highest service is to take the gifts of God, and with glad hearts to
praise the Giver.
Our blessings are but words. God's blessings are realities. We wish good
to one another when we bless each other. But He does good to men when He
blesses them. Our wishes may be deep and warm, but, alas! how
ineffectual. They flutter round the heads of those whom we would bless,
but how seldom do they actually rest upon their brows. But God's
blessings are powers. They never miss their mark. Whom He blesses are
blessed indeed.
That experience of the ineffectual emptiness of blessings from the most
loving hearts gives point to the emphatic designation here of 'the Lord
which made heaven and earth,' a formula which is common in this
connection. It brings before the eye of faith the mighty Name, and the
mighty work of Him in whose blessing we shall be rich. He is the Lord,
the Eternal and the Covenant King. He has made heaven and earth. If He
who lives above all limitations of time, the Source of life, who has the
fulness of life in Himself, He who has revealed Himself to Israel and
bound Himself to fulfil His covenant with all who plead it, He whose
sovereign effortless power willed and spake into being the azure deeps
of heaven with all its stars, and the solid earth with its tribes--if
He, with such infinite resources to bestow on us as we need, if He
blesses us, it will be with no vain wishes nor with the invoking of the
goodwill of a higher power, but with the veritable communication of
good, and we shall be blessed indeed.
Observe, too, the channel through which God's blessings come--'out of
Zion.' For the Jew, the fulness of divine glory dwelt between the
Cherubim, and the richest of the divine blessings were bestowed on the
waiting worshippers there, and no doubt it is still true that God dwells
in Zion, and blesses men from thence. The New Testament analogue to the
Old Testament Temple is no outward building. That would be absurd
confusing of the very nature of type and antitype. A material type must
have a spiritual fulfilment. A rite cannot correspond to a rite, nor a
building to a building. But the correspondence in Christianity to the
Temple where God dwelt, and from which He scattered His blessings is
twofold--one proper and original, the other secondary and derived. In
the true sense, Jesus Christ is the Temple. In Him God dwelt; in Him,
man meets God; in Him was the place of revelation; in Him the place of
sacrifice. 'In this place is one greater than the Temple,' and the
abiding of Jehovah above the mercy-seat was but a material symbol,
shadowing and foretelling the true indwelling of all the fulness of the
Godhead bodily in that true Tabernacle which the Lord hath pitched and
not man. So the great fountain of all possible good and benediction
which was opened for the believing Jew in 'Zion,' is opened for us in
Jesus Christ who stood in the very court of the Temple, and called in
tones of clear, loud invitation: 'If any man thirst let him come unto Me
and drink.' We may each pass through the rent veil into the holiest of
all, and there, laying our hand on Jesus, touch God, and opening our
empty palm extended to Him, can receive from Him all the blessing that
we need.
There is another application of the Temple symbol in the New
Testament--a derivative and secondary one--to the Church, that is, to
the aggregate of believers. In it God dwells through Christ. Receiving
His Spirit, instinct with His life, it is His Body, and as in His
earthly life 'He spake of the Temple of His "literal" body,' so now that
Church becomes the Temple of God, being builded through the ages. In
that Zion all God's best blessings are possessed and stored, that the
Church may, by faithful service, impart them to the world. Whosoever
desires to possess these blessings must enter thither--not by any
ceremonial act, or outward profession, but by becoming one of those who
put their whole heart's confidence in Jesus Christ. Within that sacred
enclosure we receive whatever divine love and power can give. If we are
knit to Christ by our faith, we share in proportion to our faith in all
the wealth of blessing with which God has blessed Him. We possess Christ
and in Him all. The ancient benediction, which came from the lips of the
priestly watchers, and rang through the empty corridors of the darkened
Temple, asked for much: 'The Lord who made heaven and earth bless thee
out of Zion.' But the Apostolic assurance sounds a yet deeper and more
wonderful note of confidence when it proclaims that already, however to
ourselves we may seem sad and needy, and however little we may have
counted our treasures or made them our own, 'God hath blessed us with
all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.'