Psalm 89:2 For I have said, Mercy shall be built up for ever: your faithfulness shall you establish in the very heavens. That is a Christmas psalm chosen for the day, and it is the psalm of dauntless courage, for it is a song that sings always the lovingkindness of the Lord; it goes up out of the darkness of desolation, it sees no cause for cheerfulness ringing it round as it sings. The singer stands, he tells us, in the heart of a great dismay. The cause of God is in ruin and contempt and impotence and misery. And yet, and yet he has but one song, and he must sing it out in defiance of his generation. No dishonour shall defeat it, no darkness shall choke it, no doubt or hesitation, no soreness or anger shall cloud his upward look or hold down the outpouring of his soul. The old words shall sing out from his lips which have never yet failed down all the long years. We would turn to this singer of long ago to ask him how it was that he retained his heroic confidence. What was his secret, in the thick of those old-world troubles, by force of which he still sang on this unswerving chant of victory? Can he pass the secret on to us who need it so sorely? 1. First, he relies absolutely on a word that God has once uttered, on a pledge that God has given to him (vers. 3, 4). God has said it, God has sworn it. That is what he relies on! This looks so simple, but to estimate it aright let us recall that we touch here on that elementary conception of God which differentiated the Jew's religion from all others. The Jew laid hold of God by this primary title, that He was a God who kept His word. A righteous God, so he called Him, and by righteousness he meant a God whose word can be trusted, and a God who never failed His pledge. This is the vital significance of the Jew that he was the first who took God seriously, the first to believe that God meant what He said, that what He spoke He spoke with a real and fixed purpose, and having spoken He held Himself bound by His own pronouncement. 2. Secondly, to justify his own confident assurance, he corroborates his belief in the verbal consistency of God by looking to that other handiwork of His, the vast fabric of ordered Nature. There it moves in its superb persistence, the immovable witness to the unchanging loyalty of God. Everywhere among the sequence of infinite changes God's original creative word holds on changeless and true (vers. 8-11). Surely if a Jew had been allowed to know what we know of all that science tells us of the uniformities of Nature, of the persistence and conservation of force, he would have seen in these disclosures, not as we so stupidly do, the terms of a godless mechanism, but exactly the phrase that would best report his assurance of an imminent God. Everything that told him of the immutable permanence of a natural law beneath and through all change spoke to him directly of God Himself. Uniformity, persistence, conservation, yes, that is what he desires to find with all his soul in the world that God has made. That is the evidence he clings to of a God who keepeth His promise, whose word never faileth, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. 3. Thirdly, he finds the like witness yielded by the solid securities of history. "Thou hast subdued Egypt" — God has done it, and if He has done it, surely not in vain, surely not without a fixed and final purpose! A historic act like that is a pledge put down by God: "Hath He begun and shall He not finish?" Here again it is the faithfulness of God to which the appeal is made. "He keepeth His promise for ever," the promise sealed by His deeds; He will prove Himself consistent; if He take one step He will follow it by another; if He gives a decision He will hold to it. That is the significance of the actual deeds done in history. They are stakes laid down which cannot be withdrawn. They lay the honour and the power under obligation, and He cannot afford to retract. And God is honourable; He has a reputation which lie will keep clear at all hazards. And God has made His choice; He has laid down His stakes, He has taken His side, He has ventured His honour, He did it when He brought up Israel out of Egypt. He has done it since throughout the long story of His people whom He had fathered and shepherded, on whom He set His name; He has consummated this by the further steps taken when He went to give Israel a king and chose David for the kingdom. "Thou spakest," our psalm goes on, "Thou spakest sometimes in visions and said, I have found David," etc. All this has been done — it is down in the pages recorded in history which cannot be blotted out. What is done cannot be undone, and what God has done binds God as it binds a man. His will has gone out of it, He will never gainsay. That is the Divine freedom, that He binds Himself by His own deeds and His own words. His truth once more is His troth, His righteousness is the assurance that He will never fail to justify Himself. No, even if the witness of Nature were to fail, yet the witness of God's own acts in history would abide. God is true, God keeps His word. We want nothing further wherewith to meet the year before us. There may be anxieties and the sense of social trouble and a cloudy outlook, but nothing shall rob us of our song. (Canon Scott Holland.) Parallel Verses KJV: For I have said, Mercy shall be built up for ever: thy faithfulness shalt thou establish in the very heavens. |
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