'Let my prayer be set forth before Thee as incense, and the lifting
up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.'--PSALM cxli. 2.
The place which this psalm occupies in the Psalter, very near its end,
makes it probable that it is considerably later in date than the prior
portions of the collection. But the Psalmist, who here penetrates to the
inmost meaning of the symbolic sacrificial worship of the Old Testament,
was not helped to his clear-sightedness by his date, but by his
devotion. For throughout the Old Testament you find side by side these
two trends of thought--a scrupulous carefulness for the observance of
all the requirements of ritual worship, and a clear-eyed recognition
that it was all external and symbolical and prophetic. Who was it that
said 'Obedience is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of
rams'? Samuel, away back in the times when many scholars tell us that
the loftier conceptions of worship had not yet emerged. Similar
utterances are scattered throughout the Old Testament, and the
prominence given to the more spiritual side depends not on the speaker's
date but on his disposition and devotion. So here this Psalmist, because
his soul was filled with true longings after God, passes clear through
the externals and says, 'Here am I with no incense, but I have brought
my prayer. I am empty-handed, but because my hands are empty, I lift
them up to Thee; and Thou dost accept them, as if they were--yea, rather
than if they were--filled with the most elaborate and costly
sacrifices.'
So here are two thoughts suggested, which sound mere commonplace, but if
we realised them, in our religious life, that life would be
revolutionised; first, the incense of prayer; second, the sacrifice of
the empty-handed. Let us look at these two points.