Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 11, 2025
It was the supreme bond that bound together prophets, priests, sages, and psalmists, although the means by which they accomplished their common purpose differed widely.
A God who should be "my God," as the psalmists say so often, must, I felt, be found by me myself, through living, searching, suffering, and struggling onward a step or two at a time. "That's pretty near free-thinking, isn't it?" a clergyman, to whom I tried to explain myself, once said to me. "No," I replied; "but it is pretty near thinking free."
We have a mightier Captain of the Lord's host with us than stood before Joshua; have we any of his courage? We have a tenderer and fuller revelation of the Father than had psalmists of old; are our aspirations greater after God, whom we know so much better, than were theirs in the twilight of revelation?
If we turn to His teaching we find that, whilst no doubt to some extent it is influenced in its forms by the necessities of its adaptation to the first listeners, there is a certain element in it far beyond anything that came from Rabbis, or even from prophets and psalmists.
Just behind them Abel, arm-in-arm with Cain. Then crowded up the patriarchs, the judges, the kings, the prophets, and the psalmists, among them Abraham and Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, Solomon and David, Zachariah and Josiah, Eleazar and Jehoiakim, and quite at the back an old man, walking alone, supporting himself on a stick from which lilies sprouted Joseph, her husband.
And one of the sweetest Psalmists tells us that, as for him, his feet were almost gone; his steps had well-nigh slipped: and that, not because he was eager for sinful pleasures, but because he saw darkness and clouds around the Providence of God: he could not understand or "justify the ways of God to man."
It is the deepest and most universal desire of man, whose prayer in all ages has been, "Grant us Thy Peace, O Lord." It is the reward of the righteous, the blessing of the good, the crown of life's effort, and the glory of eternity. The prophets foretell the beauty of its coming and the psalmists sing of the joy which it brings.
In his Synagogue hymns he joins hands with the past, with the Psalmists; in his love poems he joins hands with the future, with Heine. His love poetry is at once dainty and sincere. He draws indiscriminately on Hebrew and Arabic models, but he is no mere imitator. I will not quote much from him, for his best verses are too familiar.
Yet there is not a prophet or psalmist of the Old Testament who does not speak of 'The Name of the Lord, as a kind of talisman against all the troubles which can befall the spirit of man. And we, as Christians, know, or ought to know, far more of God than did even prophets or psalmists. If they found comfort in the name of God, we ought to find far more. But some will say Yes.
Many stories are to be found in Indian literature which when found elsewhere are judged to be products of savage imagination, and the fact that the Rigveda ignores some of them and refines others, simply shows that the authors of that collection were on a higher level than their people in point of cultivation and of piety, as the psalmists and the prophets of Israel were in advance of theirs.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking