Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 11, 2025
So one of the Psalmists, hundreds of years after the time that Israel was led through the wilderness, sang: 'There did we' of this present generation 'rejoice in Him. What has been, is, and will be, for Thou art 'the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. We have not a God that lurks in darkness, but one that has come into the light.
Is it not right to protest against ceremonial prescriptions, and to say, with the later prophets and psalmists of the Jews: "Thinkest thou that He will eat bull's flesh, and drink the blood of goats. Sacrifice and burnt-offering Thou wouldst not . . . I come to do thy will, O God!"
It is part of the heritage from the Jewish prophets and psalmists and the Babylonian interaction with Hebraism. Philo had large sympathies with the Essenic development of Judaism, and he speaks at times as though he had joined one of their communities, and therein had been initiated into the great mysteries and secret philosophies of the sages.
The immanence of GOD, as theologians and philosophers call it; the indwelling of GOD, as the psalmists and the apostles and the saints call it; the Divine Word lightening every man that comes into the world, as John has it, of the practical and personal bearings of all that Behmen's every book is full. Dost thou not see it and feel it? he continually calls to his readers.
Augustine, or to the Grace Abounding of John Bunyan, and make their words the language of our own broken and contrite hearts. For when Bunyan and Augustine and Paul and the psalmists spoke of sin, they spoke not the thoughts of others, but their knowledge of themselves; they looked into their own hearts and wrote. That is why their words "find" us to-day.
'Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered, prayed one of the later psalmists; 'let them that hate Him flee before Him. We, too, in circumstances so different, may take up the immortal though ancient words, on which no dimming rust of antiquity has encrusted itself, and may, at the beginnings and the endings of all our efforts and of each of our days, and at the beginning and ending of life itself, offer this old prayer the prayer which asked for a divine presence in the incipiency of our efforts, and the prayer which asked for a divine presence in the completion of our work and in the rest that remaineth.
Next to that favoured land that produced the Psalmists and the Prophets, I know no land that, for its numbers, possessed so many men and women of a profoundly spiritual experience, and of an adoring and heavenly mind, as Scotland possessed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Then he will not be afraid of the terror, but thankful for it, when he knows that it is what St. Paul calls, the terror of the Lord. This is why the old Psalmists were not afraid of the terror by night; because they knew that their anxiety had come from God, and therefore went to God for forgiveness, for help, for comfort. Therefore it is that one says, 'I am weary of groaning.
And Psalmists and Prophets are most careful to tell us that he is the God, not of the Jews only, but of the Gentiles; of all mankind as indeed, he must be, being Jehovah, the I Am, the one Self- existent and Eternal Being; that from his throne he is watching and judging all the nations upon earth, fashioning the hearts of all, appointing them their bounds, and the times of their habitation, if haply they may seek after him and find him, though he be not far from any one of them; for in him they live and move and have their being.
Of old the light shone only on the highest peaks, prophets, and kings, and psalmists; now the lowest depths of the valleys are flooded with it. Would that Christians generally believed more fully in, and set more store by, that great gift! As symbols preceded, tokens followed.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking