United States or Svalbard and Jan Mayen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
If we have felt a difficulty, as I suppose we all have sometimes, and are ready to say with the half-despondent Psalmist, 'My feet were almost gone, and my steps had well-nigh slipped, when we see what we think the complicated mysteries of divine providence in this world, we have to come to the belief that the evil that is in the evil will never come near a man sheltered beneath God's wing.
But I have thought that it might not be inappropriate to this occasion if I were to ask you to consider with me, from these words, the attitude of mind and heart to God's word which becomes the Christian in times of opposition. The Psalmist was surrounded, as would appear, by widespread defection from God's law.
'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord, or who shall stand in His holy place? asked the Psalmist; and a prophet put the question in a still sharper form, and by the very form of the question suggested a negative answer 'Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire; who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings? Who can pass into that Presence, and stand near God, without being, like the maiden in the old legend, shrivelled into ashes by the contact of the celestial fire?
Then, when eye and heart are full of the horror, the Psalmist steps suddenly back, and lifts his gaze beyond and above his study of evil to God's own world that stretches everywhere. The effect is to put the problem into a new perspective.
Let us look on the world around us, as what it is, as what the old Psalmist saw it to be, a sacred place, full of God's presence, shaped, quickened, and guided by the Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of life. My dear friends, God grant that you may all learn to look upon this world as the Psalmist looked on it.
'Blessed be the Lord out of Zion, which dwelleth at Jerusalem, Psalm cxxxv. 21. So wrote the Psalmist, and he was right. God had chosen Jerusalem as His home on earth, His abiding-place, His dwelling; and so long as He remained there, Jerusalem and all its surroundings was holy.
"For joy I have both gaped & breathed." But it is useless to multiply these selections, which, viewed individually, are certainly absurd and inelegant. They often indicate, however, the exact thought of the Psalmist, and are as well expressed as the desire to be literal as well as poetic will permit them to be.
He is the 'Lord' of whom the Psalmist sang, and the prophet declared that whoever called on His name should be saved; and He is the Christ for whom Israel looked.
Like the king's daughter of the Psalmist, PTERIA PEASEI is "all glorious within," the nacreous surface, margined with lustrous black, shining like silver with a tinge of blue. Only a very small proportion of the species of shells to be found on the shore of this bay have been enumerated.
We may not, we shall not, be able to reconcile this goodness with the cruel facts about us; but at least we shall have reduced these to a new proportion and perspective; we shall have disengaged our wills from the horrid influence of evil, and received a new temper for that contest, in which it is temper far more than any knowledge which overcomes. This is what our Psalmist does.
Word Of The Day