Read Ebook: Four Psalms XXIII. XXXVI. LII. CXXI. Interpreted for practical use by Smith George Adam

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GOD OUR SHEPHERD

The twenty-third Psalm seems to break in two at the end of the fourth verse. The first four verses clearly reflect a pastoral scene; the fifth appears to carry us off, without warning, to very different associations. This, however, is only in appearance. The last two verses are as pastoral as the first four. If these show us the shepherd with his sheep upon the pasture, those follow him, shepherd still, to where in his tent he dispenses the desert's hospitality to some poor fugitive from blood. The Psalm is thus a unity, even of metaphor. We shall see afterwards that it is also a spiritual unity; but at present let us summon up the landscape on which both of these features--the shepherd on his pasture and the shepherd in his tent--lie side by side, equal sacraments of the grace and shelter of our God.

On such a wilderness, it is evident that the person and character of the shepherd must mean a great deal more to the sheep than they can possibly mean in this country. With us, sheep left to themselves may be seen any day--in a field or on a hill-side with a far-travelling fence to keep them from straying. But I do not remember ever to have seen in the East a flock of sheep without a shepherd.

On such a landscape as I have described he is obviously indispensable. When you meet him there, 'alone of all his reasoning kind,' armed, weather-beaten, and looking out with eyes of care upon his scattered flock, their sole provision and defence, your heart leaps up to ask: Is there in all the world so dear a sacrament of life and peace as he?

There is, and very near himself. As prominent a feature in the wilderness as the shepherd is the shepherd's tent. To Western eyes a cluster of desert homes looks ugly enough--brown and black lumps, often cast down anyhow, with a few loutish men lolling on the trampled sand in front of the low doorways, that a man has to stoop uncomfortably to enter. But conceive coming to these a man who is fugitive--fugitive across such a wilderness. Conceive a man fleeing for his life as Sisera fled when he sought the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. To him that space of trampled sand, with the ragged black mouths above it, mean not only food and rest, but dear life itself. There, by the golden law of the desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat in peace, that though his enemies come up to the very door, and his table be spread as it were in their presence, he need not flinch nor stint his heart of her security.

Every one feels that the Psalm was written by a shepherd, and the first thing that is obvious is that he has made his God after his own image.

There are many in our day who sneer at that kind of theology--pretty, indeed, as the pearl or the tear, but like tear or pearl a natural and partly a morbid deposit--a mere human process which, according to them, pretty well explains all religion; the result of man's instinct to see himself reflected on the cloud that bounds his view; man's honest but deluded effort to put himself in charge of the best part of himself, filling the throne of an imaginary heaven with an impossible exaggeration of his own virtues.

Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, That I doubt His own love can compete with it? ... Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man; And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can? Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich, To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would--knowing which I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now! Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou--so wilt thou!

Do not say that this talk of surrender to God is unreal to you. Happiness, contentment, the health and growth of the soul, depend, as men have proved over and over again, upon some simple issue, some single turning of the soul. Lives are changed by a moment's listening to conscience, by a single and quiet inclination of the mind. We must submit ourselves to God. We must bring our wills under His. Here and now we can do this by resolution and effort, in the strength of His Spirit, which is nearer us than we know. The thing is no mystery, and not at all vague. The mistake people make about it is to seek for it in some artificial and conventional form. We have it travestied to-day under many forms--under the form of throwing open the heart to excitement in an atmosphere removed from real life as far as possible: under the form of assent to a dogma: under the form of adherence to a church.

But do you summon up the most real things in your life--the duty that is a disgust: the sacrifice for others from which you shrink. Summon up your besetting sin--the temptation which, for all your present peace, you know will be upon you before twenty-four hours are past. Summon up these grim realities of your life,--and in face of them give yourself to God's will, put your weakness into the keeping of His grace. He is as real as they are, and the act of will by which you give yourself to Him and His Service will be as true and as solid an experience as the many acts of will by which you have so often yielded to them.

Otherwise this beautiful name, this name Shepherd, must remain to you the emptiest of metaphors: this Psalm only a fair song instead of the indestructible experience which both Name and Psalm become to him who gives himself to God.

Men and women, who in this Christian land have grown up with this Psalm in your hearts, in all the great crises of life that are ahead shall this Psalm revisit us. In perplexity and doubt, in temptation and sorrow, and in death, like our mother's face shall this Psalm she put upon our lips come back to us. Woe to us then, if we have done nothing to help us to believe it! As when one lies sick in a foreign land, and music that is dear comes down the street and swells by him, and lifts his thoughts a little from himself, but passes over and melts into the distance, and he lies colder and more forsaken than before--so shall it be with us and this Psalm.

This is probably what the Psalmist himself felt when he did not close with the fourth verse, otherwise so natural a climax. He knew that weariness and death are not the last enemies of man. He knew that the future is never the true man's only fear. He remembered the inexorableness of the past; he remembered that blood-guiltiness, which sheep never feel, is worse to men than death. As perchance one day he lifted his eyes from his sheep and saw a fugitive from the avenger of blood crossing the plain, while his sheep scattered right and left before this wild intruder into their quiet world,--so he felt his fair and gentle thoughts within him scattered by the visitation of his past; so he felt how rudely law breaks through our pious fancies, and must be dealt with before their peace can be secure; so he felt, as every true man has felt with him, that the religion, however bright and brave, which takes no account of sin, is the religion which has not a last nor a highest word for life.

Consider this system of blood revenge. It was the one element of law in the lawless life of the desert. Everything else in the wilderness might swerve and stray. This alone persisted and was infallible. It crossed the world; it lasted through generations. The fear of it never died down in the heart of the hunted man, nor the duty of it in the heart of the hunter. The holiest sanctions confirmed it,--the safety of society, the honour of the family, love for the dead. And yet, from this endless process, which hunted a man like conscience, a shelter was found in the custom of Eastern hospitality--the 'golden piety of the wilderness,' as it has been called. Every wanderer, whatever his character or his past might be, was received as the; 'guest of God'--such is the beautiful name which they still give him,--furnished with food, and kept inviolate, his host becoming responsible for his safety.

Yet it is the abounding message of the whole Bible, of which our twenty-third Psalm is but a small fragment, that for this conscience and this habit of sin God hath made provision, even as sure as those thoughts of His guidance which refresh us in the heat of life and comfort us amidst its shadows.

THE GREATER REALISM

Like the twenty-third Psalm, the thirty-sixth seems to fall into two unconnected parts, but with this difference, that while both of the twenty-third are understood by us, and heartily enjoyed, of the thirty-sixth we appreciate only those verses, 5-10, which contain an adoration of God's mercy and righteousness. Verses 1-4, a study of sin, are unintelligible in our versions, and hardly ever sung, except in routine, by a Christian congregation. So sudden is the break between the two parts, and so opposite their contents, that they have been taken by some critics to be fragments of independent origin. This, however, would only raise the more difficult question: Why, being born apart, and apparently so unsympathetic, were they ever wedded? To a more careful reading the Psalm yields itself a unity. The sudden break from the close study of sin to the adoration of God's grace is designed, and from his rhapsody the Psalmist returns to pray, in verses 10-12, against that same evil with which he had opened his poem. Indeed, it is in this, its most admirable method, more than in details, that the Psalm is instructive and inspiring.

The Psalmist's analysis of sin has been spoiled in translation. Take our Old Version, or the Revised one, and you will find no meaning in the first two verses, but take the rendering offered on the margin by the Revisers , and you get a meaning intelligible, profound, and true to experience:

The second verse is also obscure. It seems to describe the terrible power which sin has of making men believe that though they continue to do evil they may still keep their conscience. The verse translates most readily, though not without some doubt:

While sin takes from a man his healthy taste for what is good, and his power to loathe evil, it deludes him with the fancy that he still enjoys them. Temptation, when we yield, is succeeded by self-delusion.

The third and fourth verses follow clearly with the aggravated effects. Sin ceases to flatter, and the man's habits are openly upon him. Truth, common-sense and all virtue are left behind:

So he becomes presumptuous and obstinate.

There we have the whole biography of sin from its first whisper in the centre of man's being, where it seems to speak with the mystery and power of God's own word, to the time when, through the corruption of every instinct and quality of virtue, it reaches the border of his being and destroys the last possibility of penitence. It is the horror of Evil in the four stages of its growth: Temptation, Delusion, Audacity, and Habit ending in Death.

The prayer follows, and closes with the assurance of victory as if already experienced:

Two remarks remain.

A prevailing temper of our own literature makes the method of this Psalm invaluable to us. A large and influential number of our writers have lent themselves, with ability and earnestness, to such an analysis of sin as we find in the first four verses of the Psalm. The inmost lusts and passions of men's hearts are laid bare with a cool and audacious frankness, and the results are inexorably traced in all their revolting vividness of action and character. I suppose that there has not been a period, at least since the Reformation, which has had the real facts of sin so nakedly and fearfully laid before it. The authors of the process call it Realism. But it is not the sum of the Real, nor anything like it. Those studies of sin and wickedness, which our moral microscopes have laid bare, are but puddles in a Universe, and the Universe is not only Law and Order, but is pervaded by the character of its Maker. God's mercy still reaches to the heavens, and His faithfulness to the clouds. We must resolutely and with 'pious obstinacy' lift our hearts to that, else we perish. I think of one very flagrant tale, in which the selfishness, the lusts and the cruelties of modern men are described with the rarest of power, and so as to reduce the reader to despair, till he realises that the author has emptied the life of which he treats of everything else, except a fair background of nature which is introduced only to exhibit the evil facts in more horrid relief. The author studies sin in a vacuum, an impossible situation. God has been left out, and the conviction of His pardon. Left out are the power of man's heart to turn, the gift of penitence, the mysterious operations of the Spirit, and the sense of the trustfulness and patience of God with the worst souls of men. These are not less realities than the others; they are within the knowledge of, they bless, every stratum of life in our Christian land; they are the biggest realities in the world to-day. Let us then meet the so-called realism of our times with this Greater Realism. Let us tell men who exhibit sin and wickedness apart from God and from man's power of penitence, apart from love and from the realised holiness of our human race, that they are working in a vacuum, and their experiment is therefore the most un-real that can be imagined. We may not be able to eliminate the cruel facts of sin from our universe, but do not let us therefore eliminate the rest of the Universe from our study of sin. Let us be true to the Greater Realism.

PSALM LII

RELIGION THE OPEN AIR OF THE SOUL

With the thirty-sixth Psalm we may take the fifty-second, which attacks the same problem of evil in pretty much the same temper. It is peculiar in not being addressed, like others, to God or to the Psalmist's own soul, but to the wicked man himself. It is, at first at least, neither a prayer nor a meditation, but a challenge and an arraignment of character.

Some may be disposed to cavil at its bitterness, and to say that for Christians it is too full of threats and vengeance. Perhaps it is; nay, certainly it is. But there are two noble feelings in it, and two vivid pictures of character. The Psalm is inspired by a brave contempt for wickedness in high places, and by a most devout trust in the love of God. And in expressing these two noble tempers, the poet analyses two characters. He analyses the character which is ruled from within by the love of Self, and he gives his own experience of a character inspired from without by faith--by faith in the mercy of the Living God.

We Christians too hastily dismiss from our own uses the so-called Cursing Psalms. It is unfortunate that the translators have so often tempted us to this by exaggerating the violence of the Hebrew at the expense of its insight, its discrimination, and its sometimes delicate satire. If only we had a version that produced the exact colours of the original, and if we ourselves had the quick conscience and the honest wit to carry over the ideas into terms suitable to our own day--in which the selfishness of the human heart is the same old thing it ever was, though it uses milder and more subtle means,--then we should feel the touch of a power not merely of dramatic interest but of moral conviction, where we have been too much accustomed to think that we were hearing only ancient rant. So treated, Psalms like the fifth, the tenth, the fourteenth, and the fifty-second, which we so often pass over, offended by their violence, become quick and powerful, the very word of God to our own times and hearts.

Let us take a more literal version of the Psalm before us:

The character who is challenged is easily made out, and we may recognize how natural he is and how near to ourselves.

The Psalm makes no attempt to turn this tyrant whom it challenges; it invokes the mercy of God, not to change him, but to show how vain his boasts are, and to give heart to those whom he oppresses. God's mercy endureth for ever; but he must pass away. The righteous shall see his end, and fear and laugh: their satire will have religion in it. But though the Psalm does not design this sinner's conversion, its very challenge contains an indication of the means by which he and all selfish people who are like him may be changed to nobler lives. In this respect it has a gospel for us all, which may be thus stated.

It was in the sunshine that the Psalmist felt himself growing:

Let us turn back for a moment to the man, to whose close character this open air is offered as a contrast. Is it really difficult for us to imagine him? There is not one of us who has not tried this kind of thing again and again,--and has succeeded in it with far less substance than the great man had to come and go upon. He trusted in the abundance of his riches: he lost God for the multitude of his temptations. But for us there is no such excuse. There has been no pleasure too sordid, no comfort too selfish, no profit too mean, no honour too cheap and vulgar, but we have sometimes preferred it, in seeking for happiness, to the infinite and everlasting mercy of our God. We may not be big men, and deserve to have psalms written about us; but in our own little ways we exult in our selfishness and the tempers it breeds in us just as guiltily as he did, and just as foolishly, for God's great love is as near to us, and could as easily chase these vapours from our souls, if we would but open the windows to its air.

Take one or two commonplace cases that do not require the great capital which this fellow put into his business of sinning, but are quite within reach of your and my very ordinary means of selfishness.

Let the other case be for young men and young women. For you the fresh air and sunshine are not yet shut out by the high walls of success or the thick ones of material prosperity. The dust of strife for you has not yet hidden heaven. But we all know that passion can build as solidly as wealth, and that a young heart may be as closely prisoned in a sudden temptation as an old one among the substantial accumulations of a lifetime. What is Temptation?

I turned to her: she built a house And Thought was her swift architect, And Falsehood let the curtains fall, And Fancy all the tables deck'd.

And so we shut the world out, Soul and Temptation face to face, And perfumed air and music sweet, And soft desire fill'd all the place.

THE MINISTRY OF THE HILLS AND ALL GREAT THINGS

We need not wish to fix a locality or a date to this Psalm. It is enough that the singer had a mountain skyline in view, and that below in the shadows, so dark that we cannot make out their features, lay God's church and people. They were threatened, and there was neither help nor hope of help among themselves.

Now to a pure heart and a hungry heart this is always what a mountain view effects. 'A hill-top,' says a recent writer, 'is a moral as well as a physical elevation.' He is right, or men would not have worshipped on hill-tops, nor high places have become synonymous with sacred ones. Whether we climb them or gaze at them, the mountains produce in us that mingling of moral and physical emotion in which the temper of true worship consists. They seclude us from trifles, and give the mind the fellowship of greatness. They inspire patience and peace; they speak of faithfulness and guardianship. But chiefly the mountains are sacraments of hope. That high, steadfast line--how it raises the spirits, and lifts the heart from care; how early it signals the day, how near it brings heaven! To men of old its margin excited thoughts of an enchanted world beyond; its clear step between heaven and earth made easy the imagination of God descending among men.

But we may widen the application of the Psalmist's words far beyond the hills. This is a big thing to which he lifts his eyes to feed his hope. God is unseen; so he betakes himself to the biggest thing he can see. And therein is a lesson which we need all across our life. For it is just because, instead of lifting our eyes to the big things around us, we busy and engross ourselves with trifles, that the practical enthusiasm which beats through this Psalm is failing among us, and that we have so little faith in God's readiness to act, and to act speedily, within the circle of our own experience. Trifles, however innocent or dutiful they may be, do not move within us the fundamental pieties. They reveal no stage worthy for God to act upon. They give no help to the imagination to realise Him as near. A church which never lifts her eyes above her own denominational details, petty differences in doctrine or government, petty matters of ritual and posture, cannot continue to believe in the nearness of the living God. The strain on faith is too great to last. The reason recoils from admitting that God can help on such battle-fields as those on which the churches are often so busy, that He can come to help such causes as the sects, neglectful of the real interests of the world, too often stoop to champion. And so the churches insensibly get settled in far-off, abstract views of God, and are sapped of the primal and practical energies of religion. Whereas it is evident that in the religious communities which lift their eyes above their low hedges to the high hills of God--to the great simple outlines of His kingdom, to the ideals and destiny which God has set before mankind--in such churches faith in His nearness to the world and in His readiness to help must always abound. To men who have an eye for the big things of earth, God will always seem to be afoot upon it. They are conscious of an arena worthy for Him to descend upon, and of causes worthy for Him to interfere in. It is no shock to their reason, no undue strain upon their imagination, to feel the Almighty and the All-loving come down to earth, when earth has such horizons and such issues.

Turning to ourselves as individuals, we may ask why we have such distant notions of God, so shy a faith of His coming within the circle of our own life and work? Why are our prayers so formal, so empty of the expectation of an immediate and divine answer? Why is our attitude at our work so destitute of practical enthusiasm? Because we, too, are not lifting our eyes to the hills. We are looking for nothing but little things, and therefore we see nowhere any threshold or field worthy of God. How can the sense that the living God is near to our life, that He is interested in it and willing to help it, survive in us, if our life be full of petty things? Absorption in trifles, attention only to the meaner aspects of life, is killing more faith than is killed by aggressive unbelief. For if all a man sees of life be his own interests, if all he sees of home be its comforts, if all he sees of religion be the outlines of his own denomination, the complexion of his preacher's doctrine, the agreeableness and taste of his fellow-worshippers--to such a man God must always seem far away, for in those things there is no call upon either mind or heart to feel God near. But if, instead of limiting ourselves to trifles, we resolutely and 'with pious obstinacy' lift our eyes to the hills--whether to those great mountain-tops of history which the dawn of the new heavens has already touched, periods of faith and action that signal to our more forward but lower ages the promise of His coming; or to the great essentials of human experience that at sunrise, noon and evening remain the same through all ages; or to the ideals of truth and justice; to the possibilities of human nature about us; to the stature of the highest characters within our sight; to the bulk and sweep of the people's life; to the destinies of our own nation that still rise high above all party dust and strife--then we shall see thresholds prepared for a divine arrival, conditions upon which we can realise God acting. Our hope will spring, an eager sentinel, as if she already heard upon them all the footfalls of His coming.

These lines may meet the eyes of some who have lost their faith, and are sorry and weary to have lost it. Whether the blame be outside yourselves, in the littleness of many of the prevailing aspects of religious life, and the crowding of our religious arenas with the pettiest of interests, or within yourselves, in your own mean and slovenly views of life, your indolence to extricate details and discriminate the large eternal issues among them--there is for you but one way back to faith. Lift your eyes to the hills. Let your attention haunt the spots where life rises most near to heaven, and your hearts will again become full of hopes and reasons for God being at work upon earth.

Let those who, still in their youth, have preserved their faith and fullness of hope, keep looking up. Amid all the cynicism and the belittling of life, strenuously take the highest views of life. Amid all the selfishness and impatience, which in our day consider life upon its lowest levels, and there break it up into short and selfish interests, strenuously lift your eyes and sweep with them the main outlines, summits and issues. May no man lose sight of the hills for want of looking up, till at the last he is laid upon his back,--and then must look up whether he has done so before or not--and in the evening clearness and evening quiet those great outlines stand forth before his eyes--stand forth but for a few moments and are lost for ever in the falling night.

Many men have bravely lifted their eyes to the hills, who have felt nothing come back upon them save a vague wonder and influence of purity. They have been struck with an awe to which they could give no name, with a health and energy which they could only ascribe to physical infection. But to this Psalmist the hope and worship which the hills excited were satisfied by the revelation of a Person. Above earth and her hills he saw a Character.

There have been revelations of God more rich and brilliant than this one. But its simplicity suits the Psalmist's point of view. He is looking to the hills. It is on that high line he sees his Helper appearing. Now we all know how a figure looks upon a skyline. We see just the outline of it--a silhouette, as it were: no details, expression, voice nor colour, but only an attitude. This is all the Psalmist sees of God on that high threshold against the light--His attitude. The attitude is that of a sentinel. The Lord is thy Keeper--thy watchman. The figure is familiar in Palestine, especially where the tents of the nomads lie. The camp or flock lies low among the tumbled hills, unable to see far, and subject, in the intricate land, to sudden surprise. But sentinels are posted on eminences round about, erect and watchful. This is the figure which the Psalmist sees his help assume upon the skyline to which he has lifted his eyes.

Compared with other experiences of God, this outline of Him may seem bare. Yet if we feel the fact of it with freshness of heart and imagination, what may it not do for us? Life may be hallowed by no thought more powerfully than by this, that it is watched: nor peace secured by any stronger trust than that the Almighty assumes responsibility for it; nor has work ever been inspired by keener sense of honour than when we feel that God gives us freedom and safety for it. These are the fundamental pieties of the soul; and no elaborateness of doctrine can compensate for the loss of fresh convictions of their truth.

Of course we shall be able to realise this, according as we realise life. If we have a heart for the magnitudes of life, it will not seem vain to believe that God Himself should guard it.

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