Lectionary Calendar
Wednesday, January 15th, 2025
the First Week after Epiphany
the First Week after Epiphany
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Bible Commentaries
Hastings' Great Text of the Bible Hastings' Commentary
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Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com. Used by Permission.
These files are public domain.
Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com. Used by Permission.
Bibliographical Information
Hastings, James. "Commentary on Psalms 32". Hastings' Great Text of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/eng/gtb/psalms-32.html. 1915.
Hastings, James. "Commentary on Psalms 32". Hastings' Great Text of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/
Whole Bible (48)Old Testament (1)Individual Books (6)
Verses 1-2
The Beatitude of Forgiveness
Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity,
And in whose spirit there is no guile.— Psalms 32:1-2.
These words form the preface to a psalm generally understood to have been written in connexion with the great sin of David’s life. It sings of that happy time when he had repented of his iniquity, when he had sought mercy and had found it, and then poured out the joy of his heart. It is no marvel that his pent-up feelings burst forth in such words as these, for the experience through which he had passed had been peculiarly dark and bitter. He tells here of the misery which he had undergone. He had kept silence, he says, with the result that his very bones had waxed old, and his moisture had been turned into the drought of summer. He would not confess, he would not repent. To a man with the open nature of David that would mean unspeakable wretchedness, but he persevered in it month after month till the mission of Nathan the prophet broke through his sulky reserve, and let loose the springs of his being. And then how measureless his peace and joy! Probably no man has ever felt more deeply than he the blessing of forgiveness. He entered into a new world, and being a poet he could not refrain from giving expression to his bliss in this beautiful poem, which begins with the outburst, “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.”
This psalm has been selected by the Church for one of the “seven penitential psalms.” It forms a part of the service of the synagogue on the great Day of Atonement. Yet it is almost as much jubilant as penitent. The writer, while very sensible of his sin, is still more sensible of the fact that his sin is pardoned. While his first words breathe content and gratitude, his last are a shout of rejoicing ( Psalms 32:10). 1 [Note: G. Rawlinson.]
Ewald says: “The song is manifestly ancient, original throughout, evidencing a strong spirit. Hardly could the inner misery of a lacerated heart, together with the higher happiness of one again reconciled and healed, be described with more inwardness, impressiveness, and power than here. The harder the struggle in his heart, so much more glorious is the victory, so much more limpid and joyous is the stream of the earnest word. The colour also of the language is Davidic, and there is no reason to doubt that it was sung after the transaction recorded in 2 Samuel 12.”
I
The Reality of Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a reality on God’s part, because sin is a reality on our part. Forgiveness, or justification, is sometimes spoken of as “treating the sinner as though he had not sinned.” This, however, is but loose, figurative language. Forgiveness implies sin, disobedience to God’s law. Therefore God is bound, as the Righteous One, to take account of sin. He must condemn or pardon it. And our Lord Himself speaks of forgiveness as a definite act. “Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee.”
1. The Psalmist views sin under three aspects.
(1) First, he calls it transgression. In its literal sense this means separation, or rending apart, or departure, and so comes to express the notion of apostasy and rebellion. All sin is a departure from God. It is treacherous rebellion. That is to say, it has relation not only to a law, but to a Lawgiver. It is not merely a departure from what is right, it is treason against God. It not only breaks some impersonal ideal of duty, but it is an act of rebellion against a loving Will which is in definite relations to me. And so it assumes a far graver and more solemn aspect than when we think of it as being merely a breach of law, a traversing of duty, a crime against conscience, or society, or public opinion, or expediency, or some abstract idea of morality. It is all these, but it is something much worse than these. The inmost recesses of the ugliness and wickedness of the wicked and ugly thing is this, that it throws into disorder our relations to a living person, that it is rebellion against the Living God.
There is in man an instinct of revolt, an enemy of all law, a rebel which will stoop to no yoke, not even that of reason, duty, and wisdom. This element in us is the root of all sin— das radicale Böse of Kant. The independence which is the condition of individuality is at the same time the eternal temptation of the individual. That which makes us beings makes us also sinners. Sin is, then, in our very marrow, it circulates in us like the blood in our veins, it is mingled with all our substance. Or rather I am wrong: temptation is our natural state, but sin is not necessary. Sin consists in the voluntary confusion of the independence which is good with the independence which is bad; it is caused by the half-indulgence granted to a first sophism. We shut our eyes to the beginnings of evil because they are small, and in this weakness is contained the germ of our defeat. Principiis obsta—this maxim dutifully followed would preserve us from almost all our catastrophes. We will have no other master but our caprice—that is to say, our evil self will have no God, and the foundation of our nature is seditious, impious, insolent, refractory, opposed to and contemptuous of all that tries to rule it, and therefore contrary to order, ungovernable and negative. It is this foundation which Christianity calls the natural man. But the savage which is within us, and constitutes the primitive stuff of us, must be disciplined and civilized in order to produce a man. And the man must be patiently cultivated to produce a wise man, and the wise man must be tested and tried if he is to become righteous. And the righteous man must have substituted the will of God for his individual will, if he is to become a saint. 1 [Note: Amiel’s Journal (trans, by Mrs. Humphry Ward), 164.]
(2) Then another aspect of sin rises before the Psalmist’s mind. This evil which he has done, which probably was the sin in the matter of Bathsheba, was not only rebellion against God, but it was, according to this text, in the second clause, “a sin,” by which is meant literally missing an aim. So this word, in its pregnant meaning, corresponds with the signification of the ordinary New Testament word for sin, which also implies error, or missing that which ought to be the goal of our lives. That is to say, whilst the former word regarded the evil deed mainly in its relation to God, this word regards it mainly in its relation to ourselves, and that which before Him is rebellion—the assertion of our own individuality and our own will, and therefore in separation from His will—is, considered in reference to ourselves, fatally missing the mark to which our whole energy and effort ought to be directed. All sin, big or little, is a blunder. It is a blunder even if it hits what it aims at, for it aims at the wrong thing. So doubly, all transgression is folly, and the true name for the doer is “Thou fool!” For every evil misses the mark which, regard being had to the man’s obvious destiny, he ought to aim at. “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever”; and whosoever in all his successes fails to realize that end is a failure through and through, in whatever smaller matters he may seem to himself and to others to succeed.
Full of far deeper love for what I remember of Turner himself, as I become better capable of understanding it, I find myself more and more helpless to explain his errors and his sins. His errors, I might say, simply. Perhaps, some day, people will again begin to remember the force of the old Greek word for sin; and to learn that all sin is in essence—“Missing the mark”; losing sight or consciousness of heaven; and that this loss may be various in its guilt; it cannot be judged by us. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters, v. pt. ix. chap. xii. (Works, vii. 441).]
(3) But the Psalmist sees in his own past behaviour not only rebellion and failure, but iniquity—that is, something twisted or distorted. His conduct is thus brought into contrast with the right line of the plain, straight path in which we ought to walk. We have the same metaphor in our own language. We talk about things being right and wrong, by which we mean, in the one case, parallel with the rigid law of duty, and in the other case, “wrung,” or wavering, crooked and divergent from it. There is a standard as well as a Judge, and we have to think of evil not only as being rebellion against God and separation from Him, and as, for ourselves, issuing in fatal missing of the mark, but also as being divergent from the one manifest law to which we ought to be conformed. The path to God is a right line; the shortest road from earth to Heaven is absolutely straight.
Every person of a mature age, and in his right mind, remembers turns or crises in his life, where he met the question of wrong face to face, and by a hard inward struggle broke through the sacred convictions of duty that rose up to fence him back. It was some new sin to which he had not become familiar, so much worse perhaps in degree as to be the entrance to him consciously of a new stage of guilt. He remembers how it shook his soul and even his body; how he shrunk in guilty anticipation from the new step of wrong; the sublime misgiving that seized him, the awkward and but half-possessed manner in which it was taken, and then afterward, perhaps even after years have passed away, how, in some quiet hour of the day or the wakeful hour of night, as the recollection of that deed—not a public crime, but a wrong, or an act of vice—returned upon him, the blood rushed back for the moment on his fluttering heart, the pores of his skin opened, and a kind of agony of shame and self-condemnation, in one word of remorse, seized his whole person. This is the consciousness, the guilty pang, of sin; every man knows what it is. 1 [Note: T. T. Munger, Horace Bushnell, 218.]
2. Corresponding to the three terms for sin, there are three expressions to signify its removal. The first word means taken away or lifted off, as a burden from aching shoulders. It implies more than holding back penal consequences; it is the removal of sin itself, and that not merely in the multitudinousness of its manifestations in act, but in the depth of its inward source. This is the metaphor which Bunyan has made so familiar by his picture of the pilgrim losing his load at the cross. The second (“covered”) paints pardon as God’s shrouding the foul thing from His pure eyes, so that His action is no longer determined by its existence. The third describes forgiveness as God’s not reckoning a man’s sin to him, in which expression hovers some allusion to cancelling a debt.
(1) Sin is here pictured as a burden, lying on the soul. Every sin we commit is making that burden larger and heavier. We do not say it is felt to be heavier; that would be the sense of sin. The burden is there, whether it be felt or not, and it always grows. If the burden of his sin remains on any sinner it will sink him into ruin. Surely, then, he is a happy man whose burden of sin is lifted off. “Oh, the blessedness of the man whose burden of sin is lifted off!” Why is he a blessed man? Because when the burden of sin goes, other things must go with it. When this burden is lifted off, the sentence of death against the sinner is cancelled for ever, the gates of hell are closed against him and will never open to admit him, and heaven’s gates are open in a new sense, in that they never can be closed till he is inside.
The most persistent symbol of Conscience in this first stage is the “burden”—a simple but picturesque emblem of a sense of guilt. It is on him, though behind him; it is oppressive, though it leaves his limbs all free for action or advance; it is rather felt than seen. Somewhat characteristic it is of Bunyan’s Christian that this burden of his is “great.” 1 [Note: J. A. Kerr Bain, The People of the Pilgrimage, i. 51.]
In 1881, when he was nearing his end, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, though an agnostic, became very anxious for confession and absolution. It was suggested to him that absolution was contrary to his pronounced views. But he said, “I don’t care about that. I can make nothing of Christianity, but I only want a confessor to give me absolution of my sins,” adding, “I believe in a future life—what I want now is absolution for my sins, that’s all,” 2 [Note: A. C. Benson, Life of D. G. Rossetti, 71.]
(2) Again, sin is pictured as inward pollution and filthiness, which must be covered before there can be true blessedness. But not every kind of “covering” will suffice. Many ways of covering sins bring no blessing, but a curse. Some people spend much time and trouble, and exercise great ingenuity, in covering up their sins. They dig deep graves in which they seek to bury them, but every sin they bury is going to have a resurrection. Such coverings never bring any blessedness. “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper.” The Psalmist tried for a year to bury his sin. Did he succeed? Was it a happy year? Note what he says about that time: “When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me: my moisture is turned into the drought of summer.” When he is brought to a right frame of mind he no longer tries to cover up his sin, but says, “My sin is ever before me.” “I acknowledge my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid.”
Bees in their hives, when there is anything corrupt and too large for them to remove, fling a covering of wax over it, and hermetically seal it, and no foul odour comes from it. And so a man’s sin is covered over and ceases to be in evidence, as it were, before the Divine Eye that sees all things. He Himself casts a merciful veil over it and hides it from Himself. 3 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
(3) The third picture of sin is perhaps the most striking of all. It means: “I am a debtor, over head and ears in debt, but the debt is not charged or reckoned against me at all.” Still more, it means: “I am guilty, yet the righteous Judge justly pronounces me not guilty.” How can that be possible? Let the Apostle Paul explain. He says that “David describes the blessedness of the man to whom the Lord imputeth righteousness without works,” and he quotes the text to prove this. David did not say one word about “righteousness without works.” What does St. Paul mean by saying he did? The simple fact is that St. Paul supplements David; he gives the positive side, in addition to David’s negative side of the double transaction. St. Paul has his eye on Christ. If sin is not reckoned or charged against, or put to the account of, the believing sinner, it is because it has been imputed, reckoned, charged against, or put to the account of Christ. And if “righteousness without works” is imputed, reckoned to, or put to the account of, the believing sinner, it is because of what Christ had done. “Him who knew no sin he made to be sin on our behalf; that we [who knew no righteousness] might become the righteousness of God in him.”
A very common idea of the object of the gospel is, that it is to show how men may obtain pardon; whereas, in truth, its object is to show how pardon for men has been obtained, or rather to show how God has taken occasion, by the entrance of sin into the world, to manifest the unsearchable riches of holy compassion. I have observed that even the phrase free offer of pardon is so interpreted that the very existence of the pardon is made to depend on the acceptance of the offer. The benefit of the pardon does most assuredly depend on its being accepted, but the pardon itself is laid up in Christ Jesus, and depends on nothing but the unchangeable character of God. 1 [Note: Letters of Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, i. 379.]
3. The condition of forgiveness.—The last clause of the text, “In whose spirit there is no guile,” seems to refer to the frank sincerity of a confession. He is not like the self-righteous sinner who tries to tell lies to God, and, attempting to deceive Him, really deceives only himself. Whoever opens his heart to God, makes a clean breast of it, and without equivocation or self-deception or the palliations which self-love teaches, says, “I have played the fool and erred exceedingly”—to that man, the Psalmist thinks, pardon is sure to come.
The great question before the mind of the Psalmist is how the burden of sin may be removed not from the Divine side, but from the human, and so he states one necessary condition to that removal—confession: “I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the Lord; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin” ( Psalms 32:5). Sin must be confessed before it is removed. Till a man confesses his sins he hugs them to himself, and refuses to part with them. When he truly confesses them he puts them away by an act of will. Not till then are they removed. God cannot forgive the man who is impenitent, for that man will presently sin again. He cannot forgive, much as He longs so to do, because there is an obstacle in the way. Repentance removes that obstacle; it opens the door to the exercise of God’s forgiving grace. The moment we repent we are pardoned.
Excellent as repentance may be in itself, and quite independent of all results, yet the one ultimate test of it is amendment—amendment, and nothing else. We have done wrong and are sorry for it. What is the test of the value of our sorrow? Our doing the same thing no more. We desire to be forgiven. We pray to God for that forgiveness. What is to us the certain seal that He has heard our prayer, and by the power of His Son’s Cross has finally forgiven us? The seal is that we have been enabled to sin so no more. Put it how you will, you must always come back to that. I do not say that no repentance is worth anything which is followed by further falls. God forbid. I do not say that God never forgives until He also makes the sin impossible. God forbid. But I do say that to us—to us there is no other proof either of the genuineness of our repentance, or of the certainty of God’s forgiveness. 1 [Note: Archbishop Temple.]
II
The Blessedness of Forgiveness
In all the benedictions of the Bible the thing brought prominently into notice is not the outward circumstances but the inner state or life of the man who is blessed. Blessedness does not depend on outward possessions, such as worldly goods, or lands, or high birth, or erudite culture. Indeed, there are words of Christ which suggest that they who stand possessed of these things will find it harder to enter that Paradise which has not yet faded from our world, and to pass through the gates of that city which are before our eyes, if only they were opened to discern them. When He repeated the Sermon of the Mountain-Heights and of the Dawn to the multitudes that stood breathless beneath its spell, He said, “Woe unto you that are rich. Woe unto you that are full. Woe unto you, ye that laugh.” He did not mean that such would be necessarily excluded, but that entrance into blessedness would be hard for them.
1. The forgiven soul enjoys the blessedness of deliverance. The very essence of the benediction is the exquisite sense of transgression forgiven, sin covered. This royal sinner knew the felicity in its full range. Through all those weary months of sullen silence which followed David’s murder and adultery, he was a most miserable man. He knew that his Divine Judge had not pardoned him. He was conscious all the time of lying under the withering condemnation of God. He felt that his iniquity lay naked and open to the eye of Him with whom he had to do. He might to some extent conceal his fault from his fellows, but in all its hideous enormity it was exposed to the gaze of the Searcher of hearts. Could the king have any peace or comfort under that continual sense of the silent sentence of Heaven on his conduct? O what a joyful man he was when the grace of God enabled him to confess, “I have sinned,” and the sweet response came, “The Lord also hath put away thy sin”! When he contrasted the sordid wretchedness of the preceding months with his condition, now that the springs of his better nature had found vent, would he not feel that he was in the seventh heaven? It was not enough for him to say that his transgression was forgiven: he had to supplement that with this other word, that his sin was covered, in order to utter fully his felicity. His Judge had pardoned him, how much was that! But was it not even more that his Heavenly Father had blotted out his foul guilt, so that it should be never seen or remembered more?
Whatever I have studied of the Epistles of St. Paul, and this has been for many years, and with as much yearning eagerness and breathless awe as I have felt in nothing except the words of the Lord Jesus, has tended to the confirmation of the old evangelic interpretation of them, in which perhaps I should not have seen my way so clearly but for their accordance with my own “experience.” All that unutterable sense of sin, that terrible deadly fight with evil, those strivings of the Spirit I went through, and more; all that deliverance, that liberty of the Gospel, that being justified by faith in Christ, that peace with God, that shedding abroad by the Holy Ghost of the love of God in the heart, that coming in of the “new creation”; all the shades and lights of experience since then. Twenty-three years of such experience, which inwardly is as great and as simple a fact as the facts of seeing and hearing, make me unable to receive, even to perceive, any other interpretation. And I have met with such scores and hundreds who strike hands with me in life and death on these great matters that it is settled “without controversy” to me. 1 [Note: Letters of James Smetham, 234.]
When Saul Kane, the ill-living prodigal whose “rake’s progress” John Masefield has so vividly set forth in his poem The Everlasting Mercy, suffered his instant conversion, an immediate and wonderful glory filled his soul.
I did not think, I did not strive,
The deep peace burnt my me alive;
The bolted door had broken in,
I knew that I had done with sin.
I knew that Christ had given me birth
To brother all the souls on earth,
And every bird and every beast
Should share the crumbs broke at the feast.
O glory of the lighted mind,
How dead I’d been, how dumb, how blind.
The station-brook to my new eyes,
Was babbling out of Paradise,
The waters rushing from the rain
Were singing, “Christ has risen again.”
I thought all earthly creatures knelt
From rapture of the joy I felt.
The narrow station-wall’s brick ledge,
The wild hop withering in the hedge,
The lights in huntsman’s upper storey
Were parts of an eternal glory,
Were God’s eternal garden flowers.
I stood in bliss at this for hours.
O clover tops, half-white, half-red,
O beauty from beyond the dead,
O blossom, key to earth and heaven,
O souls that Christ has new forgiven.
2. The forgiven soul is blessed, because the whole character and life are lifted to a higher plane. No man can pass from darkness to light, from alienation to reconciliation, without being marvellously transformed by the experience. His whole nature is changed. That is what we mean when we contrast the effect on the human soul of the gospel of grace with that produced by the preaching of mere morality and legality. Sinai thunders at us in vain, and the most eloquent exposition of the beauty of virtue is apt to leave a soul very much where it found it; but let a sinner come to believe that Christ died for him, that God so loved Him that He spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for the transgressor, and that in the fountain thus opened for sin and for uncleanness his sins have been washed away for ever, then that forgiven soul will become a living mass of gratitude, of love, of devotion to Him whose grace has saved him. Through all his subsequent life he will be a changed man. He will hate iniquity and love holiness. We cannot say that he will never sin again, but never again can he feel toward sin as he did in the days before he had drunk this wine of heaven. His character will be radically altered, and the life will answer, more or less truly, to the character.
You stand in some valley, and however brightly the sun may shine, there are shadows; you climb to the summit of some lofty hill, and it is all sunshine, and no shadows there. Even so, if you rest satisfied with forgiveness of sins merely, brightly as that exhibits God’s love, and wonderful as is the grace of it, your peace, and joy, and rest will be all imperfect. Come up into the heavenly places in Christ Jesus; get upon the high tableland of a really Christ-life; go on to the realization of all the “happinesses” which are linked on to forgiveness; be a little child, and take God at His word about them, without cavil or question; and then your whole life will be sunlit indeed. Difficulties and sorrows and temptations you may have, and they may multiply as you go on; but you will look down upon them, instead of being overshadowed by them: and you will see, what in the valley of a low life you cannot see, how God’s love lights them all up, and how in very truth they all work together for your good. 1 [Note: A. C. Price.]
3. Happy is he whose sin is forgiven, because new relations are established between God and the soul. To have passed through this experience not only changes a man’s character, it puts him permanently on a new footing with God. The pardon comes to him as but one part of what we call the Divine scheme of salvation. Henceforth he does not think of the Almighty as his Judge, but rather as his Heavenly Father. He has been adopted into the family of the Most High, and he knows that all the privileges of adoption, in time and eternity, are secured to him. Christ has become to him as an elder Brother, who is preparing a place for him in that region of the blessed which is to be hereafter their common home.
This is a side of Christian truth which has not always received the attention it deserves—a neglect the more to be regretted that the doctrine furnishes the reply to the objection sometimes made, that “justification” presents our relations with God in salvation in too exclusively “legal” a light. It would do so if it stood alone; but it does not stand alone. Adoption, by certain writers, has been treated as part of justification—as the positive side of it, in acceptance. But this is not warranted. If it is wrong to merge, as many do, God’s character as Judge in that of Father, it is as wrong to merge His character as Father in that of Judge, and to overlook the fact that God’s relation to us is personal as well as judicial. God does not merely pardon the sinner by way of legal acquittal. There is the outflow of paternal tenderness, paternal forgiveness, paternal grace (cf. the Prodigal, Luke 15:20-24); and the soul that comes to Him is received by Him into a relation of sonship—not merely that forfeited sonship which was its destination by creation, but a relation of honour, nearness, and privilege, analogous to Christ’s own. “If children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” ( Romans 8:17).
Here are we dark and weak, yet are we not
Excluded from Thy glorious family;
Pain to Thy children is a transient lot;
We suffer, that from sin we may be free.
Angels and men, the prophet and the child,
These all are what they are by gift of Thine;
No break or gulf is there; the undefiled
Are tenderly made one by birth divine.
If but a letter of the all-perfect name,
If but a mark of the celestial pen,
Distinguish us, we will, despising shame,
Abjuring self, live boldly among men.
Named after God! a little like to Him,
In whom the entireness of the name divine
Brightly involved was once by woes made dim,
But now unfolded shines, yet more to shine. 1 [Note: T. T. Lynch, The Rivulet, 202.]
Literature
Adams (J.), Sermons in Syntax, 45.
Dunbar (J. W.), The Beatitudes of the Old Testament, 129.
Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year: Lent to Passiontide, 260.
Mackay (J. J.), Recent Letters of Christ, 124.
Meyer (F. B.), The Directory of the Devout Life, 15.
Price (A. C), Fifty Sermons, i. 345.
Ritchie (A.), Sermons from St. Ignatius’ Pulpit, 42.
Smellie (A.), In the Hour of Silence, 303.
Wilmot-Buxton (H. J.), In Many Keys, 102.
Children’s Pulpit: Second Sunday after Christmas, ii. 204.
Church of England Pulpit, xxviii. 301.
Church Year Book, 1912, p. 49.
Verse 8
The Guiding Eye
I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go:
I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee.— Psalms 32:8.
It was at the end of a long and bitter trial that this promise was given to the Psalmist. It was by passing through doubt, perplexity, and despair that he was taught at last to find his way by the light of God. He had tried long and desperately to be his own guide, to trace out a path for himself through life, and it was after many wanderings, and many shameful falls, and much misery, that he was forced to confess that it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps, and that his only way of safety is to give himself up to One who will guide him better than he can guide himself. Feeling his ignorance, and perplexed at times by uncertainty as to his duty, he besought the Lord to teach and to guide him; and the Lord heard him and answered him, bringing strength to his weakness, light into his darkness, and showing him the way in which he should walk.
The beautiful suggestiveness of the Authorized Version, “I will guide thee with mine eye,” need not be wholly lost, though the Revised Version shows that the Hebrew does not mean that “a look is enough.” It means that with a Divine word of counsel in the ear, and the eye of Providence watching from above, the traveller in the pathway of life will be safe. 1 [Note: W. T. Davison.]
I
Our Need of Guidance
1. We need guidance because we may deliberately reject God. There are those who may be called the unbridled: the men who care for no restraint; whose whole life is a challenge, “Who is the Lord, that we should serve him?” The Psalms are full of the description of them. They escape the eye and the hand of God to all appearance. But do they indeed escape? The mere men of the world are the worst of slaves; and of all men they are the most limited, checked, compelled, by the hand of God. A hard bar meets them at every turn, a check at every breath. God rules them though it be with a rod of iron. Blind to the glance of His eye, they must writhe under the pressure of His hand.
The pupil spoke: “You said once that the tramcar comes to a standstill if it loses connexion with the aerial wire. I know that very well. Would that my friends who are atheists and pagans knew what a relief it is to find the connexion again. It is like diving in crystal-clear sea-water after perspiring in the heat of the dog-days on a dusty high-road. The heart grows light; the systematic ill-luck ceases; one has some success, one’s undertakings prosper, one can sleep at night, and neurasthenia ceases. I remember how, after a night of debauchery, the most beautiful landscape at sunrise looked ghastly; while after a night of quiet sleep the same scene looked paradisal. When we gain the certainty, and the belief founded on certainty, that life is continued on the other side, then we find it easier on this one, and do not hunt after trifles till we are weary. Then we discover the divine lightheartedness of which Goethe speaks, which finds expression in a certain contempt of honours and distinction, promotion and money. We become more insensible to blows and abuse. Everything goes more softly and smoothly. However dark the surroundings may be, we become self-luminous, so to speak, and carry the little pocket-lamp hope with us.” 1 [Note: A. Strindberg, Zones of the Spirit, 111.]
2. There are those whose hearts are divided between God and the world, and who need constraint to keep them in the right way. Some things are already settled in their minds on the subject of the duties and the issues of life. They know already that there is no blessing that is really worth anything but God’s. They would weep bitterly, and feel that life was utterly impoverished, if God’s presence were gone from it, and they were just left to make the best of a world that they love too well. But they will not risk too much in seeking the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. One eye is always on the world, if the other is on God. They have their comforts, their luxuries, their pleasures, their possessions, which fill as large a space as the higher things in the horizon round which they sweep their sight. They are not ungodly, they are not indifferent to the benediction of Heaven. But there is a great dead weight to be lifted, a great back-longing to be overcome. They have to be driven in the way which they say they love, and to the end which they profess to desire more than worlds. How many Christians have to be driven in the way of life, at a cost of pain to them, and patience to Him, which God alone knows!
It looks to me now like a kind of humble russet-coated epic, that seven years’ settlement at Craigenputtock; very poor in this world’s goods, but not without an intrinsic dignity greater and more important than then appeared. It is certain that for living in and thinking in, I have never since found in the world a place so favourable. And we were driven and pushed into it, as if by Necessity, and its beneficent though ugly little shocks and pushes, shock after shock gradually compelling us thither! “For a Divinity doth shape our ends, rough-hew them how we will”: often in my life have I been brought to think of this, as probably every considering person is; and, looking before and after, have felt, though reluctant enough to believe in the importance or significance of so infinitesimally small an atom as oneself, that the Doctrine of a Special Providence is in some sort natural to man. All piety points that way, all logic points the other;—one has, in one’s darkness and limitation, a trembling faith, and can at least say with the Voices, “ Wir heissen euch hoffen,”—if it be the will of the Highest. 1 [Note: Carlyle, Reminiscences, ii. 244.]
Do you at all recollect that interesting passage of Carlyle in which he compares, in this country and at this day, the understood and commercial value of man and horse; and in which he wonders that the horse, with its inferior brains and its awkward hoofiness, instead of handiness, should be always worth so many tens or scores of pounds in the market, while the man, so far from always commanding his price in the market, would often be thought to confer a service on the community by simply killing himself out of their way? Well, Carlyle does not answer his own question, because he supposes we shall at once see the answer. The value of the horse consists simply in the fact of your being able to put a bridle on him. The value of the man consists precisely in the same thing. If you can bridle him, or, which is better, if he can bridle himself, he will be a valuable creature directly. Otherwise, in a commercial point of view, his value is either nothing, or accidental only. Only, of course, the proper bridle of man is not a leathern one; what kind of texture it is rightly made of, we find from that command, “Be ye not as the horse or as the mule which have no understanding, whose mouths must be held in with bit and bridle.” You are not to be without the reins, indeed; but they are to be of another kind: “I will guide thee with mine eye.” So the bridle of man is to be the Eye of God; and if he rejects that guidance, then the next best, for him is the horse’s and the mule’s, which have no understanding; and if he rejects that, and takes the bit fairly in his teeth, then there is nothing left for him than the blood that comes out of the city, up to the horse-bridles. 1 [Note: Ruskin, A Joy far Ever, §18 (Works, xvi. 28).]
3. There are those who desire and who willingly accept God’s guidance. To such God says, “I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee.” He will take a personal interest in them. For the guide of men is no Epicurean God, loftily serene and impassive, but one whose interest in the world, whose care for the world, brought Him to live in it that He might share its burden and pain. The gospel is the revelation of how much He cares; of how much the happiness of His creation, the order of His government, and the satisfaction of His heart depend on the way man takes. He has created a being of wonderful and complex powers, capable, if guided aright, of doing godlike work in the universe, or capable of making it an Aceldama, a Gehenna of wailing and death. And the great work of Heaven is to guide him; to make him know, trust, and love his guide. Truly “thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.” When Christ has won this trust from a human spirit, His redemptive work is done.
To obey the will of the Lord is the secret first of all, of safety—security. “All things work together for good to them that love God.” From the moment a planet wheels into its path round the sun, there is nothing that can harm that planet, but just as soon as a star wanders from its orbit, and goes plunging headlong into the depths of space, it is liable to come into clash and crash with the universe of God. I have seen a great piece of machinery that would fill an immense building. Now, suppose that in that great piece of machinery, one little wheel, as small, it may be, as a shilling, should drop out of its place and fall into the midst of the machinery, that colossal mechanism moving round and round and round would grind this little wheel among its larger wheels into fragments, if not into powder. The Universe is one great Machine, and God is the Motive Power of it, and when a soul drops out of its place in this great machinery, and falls among the great wheels of God’s purpose, it is ground into powder, unless the grace of God puts that wheel back into its place in the vast system. The moment that you find out what the will of God is, and drop into your place, all the universe moves with you, and all the universe moves for you, the whole Godhead is back of you, the wisdom of God, and the power of God, and the love of God, and the grace of God; and you are as absolutely sure and safe as God is. And so Peter says: “Who is he that shall harm you if you be followers of that which is good?” 1 [Note: A. T. Pierson.]
II
God’s Method of Guiding us
1. God guides His people by imparting to them understanding. There is a threefold assurance in the text: I will make thee wise; I will point out to thee the way; I will fix Mine eye upon thee. God will do something in the man. He shall yet be instructed more deeply than ever, and shall find himself never too old to learn. God will do something round about the man. He shall have the guidance of circumstances, of closed and opened doors, which only the wise can understand. Finally, this man being a backslider of proven weakness, God will watch him with fixed attention to correct the least slip. Providential care is shown to be a very complex thing, operating along many lines which converge to the great result. But more particularly for our purpose, it is largely an inward thing, dealing first and foremost with the mind rather than with the circumstances, according to this initial promise, “I will make thee wise.” Probably circumstances are much more nearly right than people admit, and where failure arises the man himself is generally at fault. Also, men can never be saved from the outside or by the most favourable circumstances. Deliverance must be wrought supremely by an inward grace illuminating the mind and making men circumspect and self-adaptive to win the mastery over life’s conditions. It is written that God did not stay the flood, but Noah, being warned by Him, prepared an ark for the saving of his house. The grand resource and secret of the Most High in the protecting of His children is this gift of wisdom.
The name “Wisdom” pervades the Old Testament, bringing the glimmer of jewels and visions of a good woman’s face as tokens of its power to adorn and enrich life. In the text a, smaller word is used, indicating circumspection or intelligence; yet that is but wisdom applied practically. The assertion is that we may be made wise to think God’s thoughts after Him, intelligent to recognize the meaning of His way with us, and when understanding fails—as fail sometimes it will—patient to endure with a great trust. Mere acquiescence cannot be the end of our faith. He has called us friends—not puppets. Trials and griefs have no inevitable efficacy. In every different destiny of joy and sorrow, health and sickness, help and injury, there lie hidden both a use and a misuse, both a blessing and a curse, and only active wisdom can choose the better part.
Many still think of God in the way Omar Khayyám thought of Him—as an infinite Chess-player, with the world for His board. There stand bishops and knights and pawns, each on its own square and perhaps untouched for long intervals. But every piece is moved from time to time by the inexorable Hand, and sooner or later every piece is sacrificed for ends that it cannot know. Our duty is simply to trust that God is winning the game in His own way. Thus do the uninstructed ones most pitifully talk, taking the name of the Lord their God in vain—finding faith a poor futility. They cast their burden upon the Lord in quite the wrong sense, for they lay only the blame of it on Him. They think themselves not so much led through the world as dragged through it, like a child’s toy across the parlour floor, meeting with a bump here and a bump there; and having caught a gleam of religious truth from the nursery or the pulpit, they feel it right to say without conviction, “I suppose the bumps are all for my good.” They are puppets in the hand of the Inscrutable One: they are not made wise. 1 [Note: W. S. Hackett, The Land of Your Sojournings, 79.]
A lady put the universal difficulty to me in a simple but complete statement. “My troubles,” she said, “come from the unkindness of other people, and they are very hard to bear because I know they are not God’s will. Unkindness cannot be His will.” Her complaint well-nigh covers all the dreary catalogue of human suffering. Nearly always it is “somebody’s fault.” The cotton corner which spreads want over an English county, the opened lamp in the coal-mine which darkens a hundred homes, the careless workmanship at the drain which slays the darling of the household, the heartbreak of a fruitless search for employment—these surely are not the will of your Heavenly Father. Now it is quite true that Atlantic storms may be beyond control. But nothing hinders men from building ships strong enough to weather them. There may be limits which we know not to the miraculous betterment of circumstances outside, but there is no limit to God’s power to build up His saints inwardly in strength. He may be barred out of a thousand hearts, but He need not be barred out of mine. And this gospel is ennobling because it is educative. It may be doubted if “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” but it is not at all doubtful that He expects men to invent warmer clothing. The blessings of Providence are not for idlers, but for those who are willing to learn Wisdom 1 [Note: W. S. Hackett.]
2. God guides His own not by force, but by love. The eye is the indicator of the desire; the lips command; the hand compels. The lips can plead, but there is an inner plea which the eye alone urges. Those who know the language of the eye have mastered the language of the soul. It implies that a sympathy is already established. When the glance is understood and obeyed, there is perfect concert of mind and heart. A heart tuned to sympathy with the Divine purposes and hopes, leaps forth in glad obedience. It sees no meanings anywhere so joyfully as those which it reads in the eye of God.
What is it that makes thy life an intenser note than the music of the stars? Is it not just the fact that thou art free, just the circumstance that there is no iron belt around thee? What is this marvellous thing thou callest thy will? Wherein does its glory differ from the glory which the heavens declare? Is it not just in this, that thou art not compelled to come in? There is a guidance for thee, but it is not a star’s guidance; it is a guidance of the eye. It is the only guiding which a will can get without dying. Wouldst thou be driven like a star? then must thou cease to be free. The heavens declare God’s glory; but it is the glory of His hands. Who shall declare the glory of His Spirit? Not a star however bright, not a pulseless thing however fair; only something that can throb and strive and choose. He will not guide thee by aught but His eye. He will not compel thee to bear His cross. He will not sacrifice the joy of; being loved to the pride of being obeyed. He will draw thee, but He will never drive thee; He shall guide thee only with His eye. 1 [Note: G. Matheson, Words by the Wayside, 17.]
Is God your leader?—or does He only rein you in? Are you personally conscious of the vast difference between these two experiences? It is well to be held back from sin, no doubt, but the joy of the God-directed, sanctified man is certainly beyond that of the horse and mule which have no understanding, and whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle. There is no holiness of a radical sort without Divine, positive, everyday guidance. This differs not only in degree but in kind from negative restraint. The latter may be no more than the rebuke or cry of our own alarmed conscience. Conscience is born with us, born with every man. We possess it without choice of our own. It is liable to error like other human faculties, even though of inestimable value. But God intends us to know Him of our own free choice, and much more intimately than by laws written involuntarily upon our heart. Those latter we have in common with the heathen. They operate upon our fears. Guidance appeals to our faith. “I will guide thee with mine eye,” is a promise to God’s people which goes far ahead of conscience, and so universally is it intended to be enjoyed that it was given even long before the coming of our Lord. But there is no guidance of this highest kind without the eager and abiding desire for it—a desire strong enough in its faith and intensity to survive during the severest trial and suffering. 2 [Note: J. Rendel Harris, Life of F. W. Crossley, 165.]
3. God guides us, not by showing us at the outset the whole road that lies before us, and instructing us beforehand which turn to take, and what to do in each difficult place; but, step by step, as we go along, He reveals the path to us, and shows us how to walk. We should be appalled were we to see at a glance all that He sees. He does not guide us so. He Himself sees all; but He shows it to us, bit by bit, as we can bear the sight, and as it is needful for us to know. When we accept God’s guidance, we experience more and more the warm, cherishing, quickening sunlight, the light of God’s countenance, shining on, gladdening, and glorifying the life. We escape, too, all that is bitter in the school of discipline, all harm, all loss, all death. Nothing malign, nothing sorrowful, can lurk for a spirit in the path in which it is guided by the eye of God; while the life-path brightens as it travels, opening into a sphere of boundless activity, of glorious beauty, of perfect blessedness, as it nears the bounds of the eternal world.
My parents founded every action, every attitude, upon their interpretation of the Scriptures, and upon the guidance of the Divine Will as revealed to them by direct answer to prayer. Their ejaculation in the face of any dilemma was, “Let us cast it before the Lord!” So confident were they of the reality of their intercourse with God, that they asked for no other guide. They recognized no spiritual authority among men, they subjected themselves to no priest or minister, they troubled their consciences about no current manifestation of “religious opinion.” They lived in an intellectual cell, bounded at its sides by the walls of their own house, but open above to the very heart of the uttermost heavens. 1 [Note: Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, 14.]
4. God’s guidance meets all possible circumstances and conditions. The eye has infinite capability of expression, and speaks all languages. It thus meets and fits any character, in all its feelings, and in all its circumstances, every moment. And yet it is actually personal. Other “guidings,” such as laws, or books, or commands, are general, and the same to everybody. The look of “the eye” is essentially individual; it brings the Guider and the guided into the closest association: “I will guide thee with mine eye.”
Of all bodily organs the most expressive is the eye. I can read in the eye of a friend far more than he utters with the tongue. It is the most accurate of all the heart’s dial-plates. It can express joy or grief, entreaty or reproof, approval or dislike. Parents and children, or brothers and sisters, living in the same home, can hold conversations with each other, even in the presence of strangers, by the language of the eye. Small signs pass between them thus which a stranger neither sees nor understands. And just so, those who live in close intercourse with God learn to read what may be called the glances of His eye, small indications of His will which strangers to heart-fellowship with Him cannot read at all. 1 [Note: G. H. Knight, Abiding Help for Changing Days, 30.]
5. God’s guidance is unerring; it never fails. We read in the Old Testament that God guided His people in various ways—by angels, by dreams, by visions, by prophets, by priests, by Urim and Thummim, by signs and wonders. Although God no longer guides man by these special or extraordinary agencies, yet we may be as certain of God’s guidance now as though we saw Him in the heavens with His eye upon us and His finger pointing to the course He desires us to take. By an instinct, by an impression, by a sense of duty, by an exercise of judgment, by the advice of others, by a book, by a sermon, by a passage of Scripture, by helping us in one direction, by hindering us in another—these are the ordinary methods or agencies by which God is ever guiding those who obey His guidance. We are as a vessel being steered to port. There is One with us whose eye is always on the compass, and whose hand, so to speak, is always on the wheel of life. By His eye and by His hand every movement of a man’s life is guided. That hand and that eye are hidden, are unnoticed; but night and day they are in action, ever performing their guiding work till we reach the haven of God’s everlasting rest. We may make false moves at times, at times appear to get out of our providential track; but somehow, so long as the Divine eye is upon us and the Divine hand directs us, we go not far astray, and in the end reach our God-appointed port.
Keble recalled to men the teaching of Bishop Butler on the moral nature of the evidence by which spiritual convictions were reached. To the mere reason, this evidence could not get beyond suggestive probabilities; but these probabilities were used, by the living spirit of man, as an indication of the personal Will of God, which could be read by the soul that was in tune with that Will. So probabilities became certitudes. “I will guide thee with mine Eye,” was Keble’s favourite example of the mode in which Divine truth touched the soul. By deep glimpses, by rare flashes, by a momentary glance, the Eye of God could make us aware of Truths far beyond the understanding of reason. Such Truths possessed authority, which we could not dissect or critically examine. They were revelations of the mind of Him with whom we had to deal. 1 [Note: H. S. Holland, Personal Studies, 78.]
There is a tender awe in knowing that there is some One at your side guiding at every step, restraining here, leading on there. He knows the way better than the oldest Swiss guide knows the mountain trail. He has love’s concern that all shall go well with you. There is a great peace for us in that, and with it a tender awe to think who He is, and that He is close up by your side. When you come to the splitting of the road into two, with a third path forking off from the others, there is peace in just holding steady and very quiet while you put out your hand and say, “Jesus, Master, guide here.” And then to hear a Voice so soft that only in great quiet is it heard, softer than faintest breath on your cheek, or slightest touch on your arm, telling the way in fewest words or syllables—that makes the peace unspeakable. 2 [Note: S. D. Gordon, Quiet Talks on Personal Problems, 154.]
Not like the angel with drawn sword,
Neither with rod threat’ningly;
Leadst Thou, Lord, but fulfill’st Thy word,
“I will guide thee with Mine eye.”
We see Thee not, but Thou seest us,
Be where we may, Thou art nigh;
Whisp’ring, timid or valorous,
I will guide thee with Mine eye.”
Dark days come and our path is dark,
We know not to go or fly;
From the sky falls, like trill of lark,
“I will guide thee with Mine eye.”
Ah, Lord, we’re wayward and we’re weak,
Our gladness changing to sad sigh:
O keep Thou us as Thou dost speak,
And guide us ever with Thine eye. 3 [Note: A. B. Grosart, Songs of the Day and Night, 33.]
Literature
Bourdillon (F.), Handfuls, 24.
Brown (J. Baldwin), The Sunday Afternoon, 278.
Hackett (W. S.), The Land of Your Sojournings, 37.
Knight (G. H.), Abiding Help for Changing Days, 27.
Matheson (G.), Words by the Wayside, 16.
Meyer (F. B.), Christian Living, 78.
Stone (C. E.), Children’s Sunday Afternoons, 186.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xiii. (1876), No. 989.
Voysey (C.), Sermons, ii. (1879), No. 1.
Clergyman’s Magazine, 3rd Ser., xii. 96 (H. G. Youard).
Literary Churchman, xx. (1874) 95.
Sunday Magazine, 1880, p. 140 (R. H. Smith).