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Updated: June 18, 2025
The Psalmist's desire was a prophecy. The New Testament vindicates and fulfils it when it says 'We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. Since He now dwells in 'the land of uprightness, who once dwelt among us in this weary world of confusion and of sin, then we one day shall be with Him.
So the chief captain then let the young man depart, and charged him, See thou tell no man that thou hast shewed these things to me. ACTS xxiii. 12-22. 'The wicked plotteth against the just.... The Lord will laugh at him. The Psalmist's experience and his faith were both repeated in Paul's case.
Why, the Psalmist's limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those days!
And when you do those little acts of selfish indulgence which you do twenty times a day, without a prick of conscience, each of them, trivial as it is, like some newly-hatched poisonous serpent, a finger-length long, has in it the serpent nature, it is rebellion and separation from God. Then another aspect of the same foul thing rises before the Psalmist's mind.
His temper seemed unruffled by the vexations of the day as he remarked, "Magnificent scenery. Makes me think of Lake Como, only lacks the lake. Regular amphitheater of mountains. Reminds one of the Psalmist's description of Jerusalem."
In the one case, the future is conceived as the Psalmist's awaking, and losing all the vain show of this dreamland of life, while he is at rest in beholding the appearance, and perhaps in receiving the likeness, of the one enduring Substance, God. In the other, it is thought of as God's awaking, and putting to shame the fleeting shadow of well-being with which godless men befool themselves.
I cannot venture to tell a heterogeneous audience the history of that night they spent at Shotts with God. It is so unlike what we have ever seen or heard of. There may be one or two of us here who have spent whole nights in prayer at some crisis in our life, going from one promise to another, when, in the Psalmist's words, the sorrows of death compassed us, and the pains of hell gat hold upon us.
So I started for my tree, which I reached some ten seconds sooner than the boar, swung myself up on its low branch, and there took my seat. The boar rushed furiously to and fro, raging like the heathen of the Psalmist, and also, like the Psalmist's people not a well-ordered democracy like ours, of course imagining a vain thing.
We have in this psalm the record of the Psalmist's struggle with the great standing difficulty of how to reconcile the unequal distribution of worldly prosperity with the wisdom and providence of God. That difficulty pressed more acutely upon men of the Old Dispensation than even upon us, because the very promise of that stage of revelation was that Godliness brought with it outward well-being.
Brethren! these are the possibilities of the Christian life; being its possibilities they are our obligations. The Psalmist's words may well be turned by us into self-examining interrogations and we may God grant that we do! all ask ourselves; 'Do I thus thirst after God? 'Have I learned that, notwithstanding all supplies, this world without Him is a waterless desert?
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