Psalm 27:1-14 The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?… The keynote of David's character is not the assertion of his own strength, but the confession of his own weakness. Nevertheless, he had strength, and that of no common order: he was an eminently powerful, able, and successful man. But he says it was from God. Even his physical prowess he ascribes to God. It is by God's help he slays the lion and the bear, and has nerve to kill Goliath. It is God who makes his feet like harts' feet, and enables him to leap over the walls of the mountain fortresses. And no doubt this was so: it is not mere metaphor. David was not likely to have been a man of gigantic strength. So delicate a-brain was probably coupled to a delicate body. But it is as the fount of light and goodness in his own soul that he chiefly thinks of God. In a word, David is a man of faith and prayer. And it is this which sustains him in every trouble, and gives enthusiasm and fire, life and reality, to his triumphant psalms. He had the firm conviction that God was the deliverer of all who trust in Him. And the same faith it is which gives to his penitence its manly tone, free from all cowardly cries of terror. He sees no angry, but a forgiving God, though he knows he is to be punished for the rest of his life. But he utterly trusts God, and is sure that God will restore him to goodness that He may thereby restore him to usefulness. Hence it is God demands not torturing penance or sacrifice, but the heart, the broken and contrite heart. It is such utterances as these which have given their priceless value to the little book of the psalms of David. Every form of human sorrow, doubt, struggle, error, sin; the nun agonizing in the cloister; the settler struggling for life in Transatlantic forests; the pauper shivering over the embers in his hovel, and waiting for kind death; the man of business striving to keep his honour pure amid the temptations of commerce; the prodigal son starving in the far country, and recollecting the words which he learnt long ago at his mother's knee; the peasant boy trudging a-field in the chill dawn, and remembering that the Lord is his Shepherd, therefore he will not want — all shapes of humanity have found, and will find to the end of time, a word said to their inmost hearts, and for them, to the living God of heaven by the vast humanity of David, the man after God's own heart; the most thoroughly human figure which had appeared upon the earth before the coming of that perfect Son of man, who is over all, God blessed for ever. (C. Kingsley, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: {A Psalm of David.} The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? |
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