'Every living thing--' life makes a claim on God, and whatever desires
arise in the living creature by reason of its life, God would be untrue
to Himself, a cruel Parent, an unnatural Father, if He did not satisfy
them. We do not half enough realise the fact that the condescension of
creation lies not only in the act of creating, but in the willing
acceptance by the Creator of the bonds under which He thereby lays
Himself; obliging Himself to see to the creatures that He has chosen to
make. And so, as one of the New Testament writers puts it, in his simple
way, with a profound truth, 'He is a faithful Creator'; and wherever
there is a creature that He has made to need anything, He has thereby
said, 'As I live, that creature shall have what it needs.'
Then, take the other class, 'them that fear Him'; or as they are
described in the context--by contrast with 'the wicked who are
destroyed'--'the righteous.' That is to say, whilst, because we are
living things, like the bee and the worm, we have a claim on God
precisely parallel with theirs for what we may need by reason of His
gift, which we never asked for, His gift of life, we shall have a
similar but higher claim on Him if we are 'they that fear Him' with that
loving reverence which has no torment in it, and that love Him with that
reverential affection which has no presumption in it, and whose love and
fear coalesce in making them long to be righteous like the Object of
their love, to be holy like the Object of their fear. And just as the
fact of physical life binds God to care for it, and to give all that is
needed for its health, growth, blessedness, so the fact of man's having
in his heart the faintest tremor of reverential dread, the feeblest
aspiration of outgoing affection, the most faltering desire after purity
of life and conduct, binds God to answer these according to the man's
need. Of all incredibilities in the world, there is nothing more
incredible, because there is nothing more contrary to the very depths of
the divine nature, than that desires, longings, expectations, which are
the direct result of the love and fear of God, and the hunger and thirst
after righteousness, should not be answered.
Now that is a very wide principle, and I do not believe that it is
trusted enough by many. It comes to this--wherever you find in people a
confidence which grows with their love of God, be sure that there is,
somewhere or other in the universe of things, that which answers it.
Take a case. If there was not a word in the New Testament about Jesus
Christ's resurrection, the fact that just in proportion as men grow in
devotion, in love of God, in fear of Him, in longing to be good and to
appear like Him, in that same proportion does their conviction that
there must be a life beyond the grave become firm and certain--that
fact would be enough to make any one who believed in God sure that the
hope thus rooted in love to Him, and fed by everything that draws us
nearer to Him, could not be a delusion, nor be destined to be left
unfulfilled.
And we might go round the whole circle of dim religious aspirations and
desires, and find in all of them illustrations of the principle so
profoundly and so simply put in our psalm, that the same Love which, in
the realm of the physical world, binds itself to satisfy the life which
it imparts, is at work in the higher regions, and will 'fulfil the
desires of them that fear Him.'