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Our text and this whole psalm show clearly enough that -

I. SUCH HELP WAS NEEDED.

1. Society, order, law, seemed all on the point of dissolution. A condition of affairs is contemplated in which everything seemed rushing ruinwards, and would rapidly have reached such sad ending, had they not been held back by One mightier than they. We cannot say for certain, though we may conjecture, what special age, persons, or events are alluded to. The psalm suits several such, and is capable of many applications. For our own use of its teachings it is well that we are left in ignorance of its actual allusions, and cannot point to the special events which were before the psalmist's mind.

2. And such conditions are all too common. We see them in nations, Churches, families, individual souls. Everything seems slipping away, all order and strength and well being dissolving. It is as if "the earth and all the inhabitants thereof were dissolved." It is so in things temporal, and so, too, in things spiritual.

3. The causes that produce such conditions are manifold. Sometimes, in nations, it is war, or political strife, or, and this more commonly, moral corruption. So it seems to have been in the condition contemplated by this psalm (see vers. 2, 4). And none can read the records of history, whether in the Bible or in other books, but may trace this cause, sin, ever at its deadly work. If a nation, a Church, a city has fallen, we have not far to seek for what has brought it about, The philosophy of history is the tracing out the contrasted effects of righteousness and wrong. And in the dissolution told of here, the solvent that brought it about was certainly sin. And so is it also in the like conditions that are found elsewhere.

4. But wherever found, they are very sad. The groaning and travail of the whole creation, which were so audible and distressing to St. Paul, are the result of such conditions, and the sorrow would have been greater than he could have borne had he not been "saved by hope" - the hope suggested by the latter half of our text, of help being laid on One that is mighty. For -

II. SUCH HELP IS FORTHCOMING. "I bear up the pillars of it." The earth is pictured as some vast temple supported on pillars, but which are on the point of giving way, and would were they not upheld by a mighty support. The meaning is plain - that there is One who holds back the ruin which is everywhere threatening, who will interpose and prevent it. Who is this Mighty One? It may be some monarch, statesman, prophet. God has raised up such - like Moses, David, our own Alfred the Great; like Nehemiah, like William the Silent, and many more. The saying, "I bear up," etc., is not arrogance, but the simple statement of the duty God has assigned him. The faith in God, and the courage which characterize such men, are evident in this psalm. But in the last resort it is God who is the real Up-bearer. It is he who inspires and qualifies his servants.

III. SUCH HELP, UNDER SUCH CIRCUMSTANCES, IS WAITING FOR US. Seek it. - S.C.

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KJV: The earth and all the inhabitants thereof are dissolved: I bear up the pillars of it. Selah.

WEB: The earth and all its inhabitants quake. I firmly hold its pillars. Selah.