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The psalmist exhorts his soul to return unto its rest; not because it has heard of God, or has seen His power in nature; not because He recognizes Divine order in the universe, not because his poetical feeling is kindled by the thought of Divine majesty and glory, but because he has had personal dealings with God. "Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee." I supplicated Him, He "heard" my supplication, I was brought low, He "helped" me: He "delivered my soul from death." He wiped the tears from my eyes and gave His angels charge to keep my feet from falling. Therefore, on my side, I too, will deal with Him. I will "call" upon Him: I will "rest" in Him: I will "walk before" Him: I will "believe" in Him: I will "pay my vows" to Him. We really need get back to the old Hebrew conception of God's relation to man. But we never can do so through any conception of God which makes Him less than a personal Father in heaven. Now, let us look at three questions in the light of this thought of the soul's rest, all of them practical questions which every thoughtful man asks. "Whence do I come? How shall my life be ordered? Whither am I going?" No soul is at rest until it can answer these three questions; and no soul will ever find rest until it shall have found its answer in God.

1. As to the first of these questions — "Whence did I come?" Modern thought is seeking rest for itself, not in God, but in scientific theories of the origin of man. We have no fault to find with such researches. All I say now is that the scientist does not give you anything restful, even if he succeeds in proving that God had no hand in your creation. You go on craving a leather in heaven just the same. You are restless as ever, no less restless than the child who knows his mother is in her grave, but who, nevertheless, cries for her unceasingly. You want the truth, but may not your filial instinct be truthful? May not your sense of sonship be a sense of a stupendous truth?

2. How shall I live? How make the most and best of life? What guides shall I follow? Here again we find a point of rest only in a personal God, a God of providence, who interferes (I am not afraid of the term) in our affairs. You may prove, if you can, that your life moves on under the guidance of mere, settled, mechanical order. That conclusion will not give you rest. If this world of men which we see and of which we are a part, with all its clashing and contradiction, its triumph of evil and its struggle of good, is uncontrolled by a Supreme Will, if men like grains of sand, merely fly before the wind that drives them against the rocks and against each other, if change, and sickness, and ruin, and death come just as the water shoots the precipice, just as two and two make four, — it is but mockery to point our souls to such a conception of life and say, "Return unto thy rest, O my soul." We can obtain a calm, restful outlook upon life, a tranquil, cheerful participation in life only as we get back to God. We find these only when Christ leads us as He led the disciples of old to the market, and points to the little dead sparrow, and says "Your Father marked its fall; fear not, ye are of more value than many sparrows." We shall not be frightened at a mystery, provided we know God is behind it.

3. And, once more, the soul finds no rest as regards the question of destiny, until it finds it in God. Whatever restful thought of heaven we have, whatever knowledge of its conditions we have, comes entirely from the moral quality of heaven, and therefore from the thought of God; for, take out God from the universe, and no determinate moral quality is left anywhere, in heaven or in earth. Heaven is heaven to us because God is there; because God's law rules there absolutely; because its happiness is the happiness of perfect moral order.

(M. R. Vincent, D.D.)

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KJV: Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee.

WEB: Return to your rest, my soul, for Yahweh has dealt bountifully with you.