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Updated: May 4, 2025
And so, when the Psalmist says, 'I have hid Thy word within my heart, he means 'I have buried it deep in the very midst of my being, and put it down at the very roots of myself, and there incorporated it with the very substance of my soul. Now, I venture to take that expression, 'Thy word, in a somewhat wider sense than the Psalmist employed it.
At the same time he said that those who were burdened with Martha's busy anxieties would not fail to enjoy in the very midst of their hearts the deep peace of Mary's better part, provided they carried all their cares to God. We saw afterwards another inscription containing these words of the Psalmist: This is my rest for ever and ever: Here will I dwell for I have chosen it.
With one sweep the Psalmist tears the curtains down and lets in the sunshine. The leal love of God is every day. There, in that commonplace daily light: in that love which is as near you as the open air and as free as the sunshine, are the life and exultation which you seek so vainly within yourself.
The Psalmist has been describing, with the eloquence of misery, his own desperate condition, in all manner of metaphors which he heaps together 'sickness, 'captivity, 'like a broken vessel, 'as a dead man out of mind. But in the depth of desolation he grasps at God's hand, and that lifts him up out of the pit. 'I trusted in Thee, O Lord!
Yet in spite of the darkness that enfolds you, the Cloud of Unknowing into which you have plunged, you are sure that it is well to be here. A peculiar certitude which you cannot analyse, a strange satisfaction and peace, is distilled into you. You begin to understand what the Psalmist meant, when he said, "Be still, and know."
The Psalmist sang that angels' hands should bear up God's servant. That is little compared with this promise of being carried heavenwards on Jehovah's own pinions. A vile piece of Greek mythology tells how Jove once, in the guise of an eagle, bore away a boy between his great wings. It is foul where it stands, but it is blessedly true about Christian experience.
This, however, serves to show that the fly implied was one easily recognisable by its habit of swarming; and the further fact that it bites, or rather stings, is elicited from the expression of the Psalmist, Ps. lxxviii. 45, that the insects by which the Egyptians were tormented "devoured them," so that here are two peculiarities inapplicable to the domestic fly, but strongly characteristic of gnats and mosquitoes.
That the Psalmist had this custom in view, when composing the last two verses of the Psalm, is plain from the phrase with which these open: Thou spreadest before me a table in the very face of mine enemies; and perhaps also from the unusual metaphor in verse 6: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow, or hunt, me all the days of my life.
All this, be it observed, was because God had saved not my soul, but my life; for as yet I had not, like the Psalmist, felt any trouble about my soul. I knew nothing of what he describes as the "sorrows of death and the pains of hell."
The Psalmist uses that name with a lofty imaginative freedom, which itself confirms the view that I have taken, that there is something deeper in the psalm than the mere external circumstances of the pilgrimages to the Holy City.
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