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That truth, if revealed at all to the Psalmist's contemporaries, certainly did not occupy the same position of clearness or of prominence as it does in our religious beliefs.
God is more merciful than man. Drumtochty was accustomed to break every law of health, except wholesome food and fresh air, and yet had reduced the psalmist's furthest limit to an average life-rate.
But we note, too, this Psalmist's passionate personal devotion to the object of his patriotic love "They shall prosper that love thee" "For my brethren and companions' sakes I will wish thee prosperity." Who can read unmoved these noble and generous outpourings?
And the last words are 'Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart. That is what you will get if you commit your soul to God. There was no change in the Psalmist's circumstances. The same enemy was round about him. The same 'net was privily laid for him. All that had seemed to him half an hour before as wellnigh desperate, continued utterly unaltered. But what had altered?
'The sparrow hath found a house, and the swallow a nest for herself, while I! We do not know what the Psalmist's circumstances were, but if we accept the conjecture that he may have accompanied David in his flight during Absalom's rebellion, we may fancy him as wandering on the uplands across Jordan, and sharing the agitations, fears, and sorrows of those dark hours, and in the midst of all, as the little company hurried hither and thither for safety, thinking, with a touch of bitter envy, of the calm restfulness and serene services of the peaceful Temple.
But now he is comparatively cheerful, and so gentle too. Do you know, I have been thinking a good deal lately of the psalmist's saying, `it is good for me that I have been afflicted; and, in the midst of it all, our Heavenly Father remembered mercy, for it was He who sent our jewel-box, as if to prevent the burden from being too heavy for papa."
Either the substitution or the transformation may be supposed to be in the Psalmist's mind. Both are true. No human heart, however wounded, continues always to bleed. Some gracious vegetation creeps over the wildest ruin. The roughest edges are smoothed by time. Vitality asserts itself; other interests have a right to be entertained and are entertained.
But the other thought seems to me to be even more beautiful, and probably to be what was in the Psalmist's mind viz. the transformation of the evil, Sorrow itself, into the radiant form of Joy. A prince in rags comes to a poor man's hovel, is hospitably received in the darkness, and being received and welcomed, in the morning slips off his rags and appears as he is. Sorrow is Joy disguised.
Thou hast been our Dwelling-place in all generations, or as one of the other psalmists has it, 'God is our Refuge and our Strength. That thought was blessed, but it was not enough for the Psalmist's present need, and it is never enough for the deepest necessities of any soul.
Religious fear and anxiety are the prelude to religious peace and joy. These are the discords that prepare for the concords. He, who in the Psalmist's phrase has known the power of the Divine anger, is visited with the manifestation of the Divine love. The method in the thirty-second psalm is the method of salvation.
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