Four Psalms XXIII. XXXVI. LII. CXXI. / Interpreted for practical use

by George Adam Smith

PSALM CXXI

THE MINISTRY OF THE HILLS AND ALL GREAT THINGS

We catch the key-note of this Psalm if we read the words whence cometh my help not as a statement but as a question. Our older version takes them as a statement; it makes the Psalmist look to the hills, as if his help broke and shouted from them all like waterfalls. But with the Revised Version we ought to read: I will lift mine eyes unto the mountains—from whence cometh my help? The Psalmist looks up, not because his help is stored there, but because the sight of the hills stirs within him an intense hope. His heart is immediately full of the prayer, Whence cometh my help? and of the answer, My help is from the Lord, that made heaven and earth.

We need not wish to fix a locality or a date to this Psalm. It is enough that the singer had a mountain skyline in view, and that below in the shadows, so dark that we cannot make out their features, lay God's church and people. They were threatened, and there was neither help nor hope of help among themselves.

Perhaps it was one of those frequent periods in the life of Israel, in which the religious institutions of the people were so abased that the Psalmist could see in them no pledge nor provocation of hope. Indeed, these institutions may have been altogether overthrown. There was no leader on whom God had set His seal, and the national life had nothing to raise the heart, but was full of base thoughts and paltry issues that dissipate faith, and render the interference of God an improbable thing. So the Psalmist lifted his thoughts to the sacraments which God has fixed in the framework of His world. He did not identify his help with the hills—no true Israelite could have done that,—but the sight of them started his hope and filled his heart with the desire to pray. This may have happened at sunrise, when, even more than at other hours, mountains fulfil the ministry of hope. Below them all was in darkness; it was still night, but the peaks saw the morning, and the signal of its coming fell swiftly down their flanks. In this case the Psalm is a matin-song, a character which the rest of the verses carry out. Or at any other hour of the day, it may simply have been the high, clear outline of the hills which inspired the Psalm—that firm step between heaven and earth, that margin of a world of possibility beyond. A prophet has said, How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of them that bring good tidings! But to our Psalmist the mountains spread a threshold for a Divine arrival. Up there God Himself may be felt to be afoot.

Now to a pure heart and a hungry heart this is always what a mountain view effects. 'A hill-top,' says a recent writer, 'is a moral as well as a physical elevation.' He is right, or men would not have worshipped on hill-tops, nor high places have become synonymous with sacred ones. Whether we climb them or gaze at them, the mountains produce in us that mingling of moral and physical emotion in which the temper of true worship consists. They seclude us from trifles, and give the mind the fellowship of greatness. They inspire patience and peace; they speak of faithfulness and guardianship. But chiefly the mountains are sacraments of hope. That high, steadfast line—how it raises the spirits, and lifts the heart from care; how early it signals the day, how near it brings heaven! To men of old its margin excited thoughts of an enchanted world beyond; its clear step between heaven and earth made easy the imagination of God descending among men.

So it is here. At the sight of the hills our Psalmist's hope—instead of lying asleep in confidence of a help too far away to be vivid, or dying of starvation because that help is so long of coming—leaps to her feet, all watch and welcome for an instant arrival. Whence cometh my help? My help cometh from the Lord, that made heaven and earth. This is not fancy; it is an attitude of real life. This is not a poet with a happy phrase for his idea: it is a sentry at his difficult post, challenging the signal, and welcoming the arrival, of that help which makes all the difference to life.

But we may widen the application of the Psalmist's words far beyond the hills. This is a big thing to which he lifts his eyes to feed his hope. God is unseen; so he betakes himself to the biggest thing he can see. And therein is a lesson which we need all across our life. For it is just because, instead of lifting our eyes to the big things around us, we busy and engross ourselves with trifles, that the practical enthusiasm which beats through this Psalm is failing among us, and that we have so little faith in God's readiness to act, and to act speedily, within the circle of our own experience. Trifles, however innocent or dutiful they may be, do not move within us the fundamental pieties. They reveal no stage worthy for God to act upon. They give no help to the imagination to realise Him as near. A church which never lifts her eyes above her own denominational details, petty differences in doctrine or government, petty matters of ritual and posture, cannot continue to believe in the nearness of the living God. The strain on faith is too great to last. The reason recoils from admitting that God can help on such battle-fields as those on which the churches are often so busy, that He can come to help such causes as the sects, neglectful of the real interests of the world, too often stoop to champion. And so the churches insensibly get settled in far-off, abstract views of God, and are sapped of the primal and practical energies of religion. Whereas it is evident that in the religious communities which lift their eyes above their low hedges to the high hills of God—to the great simple outlines of His kingdom, to the ideals and destiny which God has set before mankind—in such churches faith in His nearness to the world and in His readiness to help must always abound. To men who have an eye for the big things of earth, God will always seem to be afoot upon it. They are conscious of an arena worthy for Him to descend upon, and of causes worthy for Him to interfere in. It is no shock to their reason, no undue strain upon their imagination, to feel the Almighty and the All-loving come down to earth, when earth has such horizons and such issues.

Turning to ourselves as individuals, we may ask why we have such distant notions of God, so shy a faith of His coming within the circle of our own life and work? Why are our prayers so formal, so empty of the expectation of an immediate and divine answer? Why is our attitude at our work so destitute of practical enthusiasm? Because we, too, are not lifting our eyes to the hills. We are looking for nothing but little things, and therefore we see nowhere any threshold or field worthy of God. How can the sense that the living God is near to our life, that He is interested in it and willing to help it, survive in us, if our life be full of petty things? Absorption in trifles, attention only to the meaner aspects of life, is killing more faith than is killed by aggressive unbelief. For if all a man sees of life be his own interests, if all he sees of home be its comforts, if all he sees of religion be the outlines of his own denomination, the complexion of his preacher's doctrine, the agreeableness and taste of his fellow-worshippers—to such a man God must always seem far away, for in those things there is no call upon either mind or heart to feel God near. But if, instead of limiting ourselves to trifles, we resolutely and 'with pious obstinacy' lift our eyes to the hills—whether to those great mountain-tops of history which the dawn of the new heavens has already touched, periods of faith and action that signal to our more forward but lower ages the promise of His coming; or to the great essentials of human experience that at sunrise, noon and evening remain the same through all ages; or to the ideals of truth and justice; to the possibilities of human nature about us; to the stature of the highest characters within our sight; to the bulk and sweep of the people's life; to the destinies of our own nation that still rise high above all party dust and strife—then we shall see thresholds prepared for a divine arrival, conditions upon which we can realise God acting. Our hope will spring, an eager sentinel, as if she already heard upon them all the footfalls of His coming.

These lines may meet the eyes of some who have lost their faith, and are sorry and weary to have lost it. Whether the blame be outside yourselves, in the littleness of many of the prevailing aspects of religious life, and the crowding of our religious arenas with the pettiest of interests, or within yourselves, in your own mean and slovenly views of life, your indolence to extricate details and discriminate the large eternal issues among them—there is for you but one way back to faith. Lift your eyes to the hills. Let your attention haunt the spots where life rises most near to heaven, and your hearts will again become full of hopes and reasons for God being at work upon earth.

Let those who, still in their youth, have preserved their faith and fullness of hope, keep looking up. Amid all the cynicism and the belittling of life, strenuously take the highest views of life. Amid all the selfishness and impatience, which in our day consider life upon its lowest levels, and there break it up into short and selfish interests, strenuously lift your eyes and sweep with them the main outlines, summits and issues. May no man lose sight of the hills for want of looking up, till at the last he is laid upon his back,—and then must look up whether he has done so before or not—and in the evening clearness and evening quiet those great outlines stand forth before his eyes—stand forth but for a few moments and are lost for ever in the falling night.

Many men have bravely lifted their eyes to the hills, who have felt nothing come back upon them save a vague wonder and influence of purity. They have been struck with an awe to which they could give no name, with a health and energy which they could only ascribe to physical infection. But to this Psalmist the hope and worship which the hills excited were satisfied by the revelation of a Person. Above earth and her hills he saw a Character.

There have been revelations of God more rich and brilliant than this one. But its simplicity suits the Psalmist's point of view. He is looking to the hills. It is on that high line he sees his Helper appearing. Now we all know how a figure looks upon a skyline. We see just the outline of it—a silhouette, as it were: no details, expression, voice nor colour, but only an attitude. This is all the Psalmist sees of God on that high threshold against the light—His attitude. The attitude is that of a sentinel. The Lord is thy Keeper—thy watchman. The figure is familiar in Palestine, especially where the tents of the nomads lie. The camp or flock lies low among the tumbled hills, unable to see far, and subject, in the intricate land, to sudden surprise. But sentinels are posted on eminences round about, erect and watchful. This is the figure which the Psalmist sees his help assume upon the skyline to which he has lifted his eyes.

Compared with other experiences of God, this outline of Him may seem bare. Yet if we feel the fact of it with freshness of heart and imagination, what may it not do for us? Life may be hallowed by no thought more powerfully than by this, that it is watched: nor peace secured by any stronger trust than that the Almighty assumes responsibility for it; nor has work ever been inspired by keener sense of honour than when we feel that God gives us freedom and safety for it. These are the fundamental pieties of the soul; and no elaborateness of doctrine can compensate for the loss of fresh convictions of their truth.

The Lord is thy Keeper. If men had only not left this article out of their creeds when they added all the rest, how changed the religious life of to-day would have been!—how simple, how strenuous, how possibly heroic!

The Lord is thy Keeper. What sense of proportion and what tact does the thought of those sleepless thoughts bring upon our life! How quickly it restores the instinct to discriminate between what is essential and what is not essential in faith and morals; that instinct, from the loss of which the religious world of to-day suffers so much. How hard does it make us with ourselves that His eyes are on us, yet how hopeful that He counts us worth protecting! When we realise, that not only many of the primal forces of character, but its true balance and proportion, are thus due to so simple a faith in God, we understand the insistence laid upon this by the prophets and by Christ. There is no truth which the prophets press more steadily upon Israel than that all their national life lies in the sight and on the care of God. The burden of many prophetic orations is no more than this—you are defended, you are understood, you are watched, by God. And in the Sermon on the Mount, and in that address to the disciples now given in the tenth of Matthew, there is no message more clear or frequent than that God cares for us, has to be reckoned with by all our enemies, is aware of everything that befalls us, and while He relieves us from responsibility in the things that are too great for us, makes us the more to feel our responsibility for things within our power—in short, that the Lord is our Keeper.

Of course we shall be able to realise this, according as we realise life. If we have a heart for the magnitudes of life, it will not seem vain to believe that God Himself should guard it.

If we keep looking to the hills, God shall be very clear upon them as our
Keeper.

But this distant view of God upon the skyline, full as it is of discipline and of peace, does not satisfy the Psalmist. To him the Lord is not only Israel's Keeper or Sentinel, but the Lord is also thy shade on thy right hand: the sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The origin of these expressions is vague, but their application here is vivid enough. A sentinel is too far away, and is, physically, too narrow a figure to fulfil man's imagination of God. The Psalmist requires something near enough to express both intimacy and shelter. So he calls God the Comrade as well as the Sentinel of His people; their Champion as well as their Watchman. The shade upon thy right hand is of course the shade upon the fighting or working arm, to preserve it from exposure, and in the full freedom of its power.

Now it is never ideas about God, nor even aspirations after Him, which in the real battle of life keep us fresh and unexhausted. Ideas, and even aspirations, strain as much as they lift. They give the mind its direction, but by themselves they cannot carry it all the way. Nor is the influence of a Personality sufficient if that Personality remain far off. Reverence alone never saved any human soul in the storm of life. It is One by our side Whom we need. It is by the sense of trust, of sympathy, of comradeship, of fighting together in the ranks, that our strength is thrilled and our right hand preserved in freshness. Without all this between us and bare heaven, we must in the end weary and wither.

Twofold is the experience in which we especially need such compassion and fellowship—in the time of responsibility and in the time of temptation. These are the two great Lonelinesses of life—the Loneliness of the Height and the Loneliness of the Deep—in which the heart needs to be sure of more than being remembered and watched. The Loneliness of the Height, when God has led us to the duty of a great decision, or given us the charge of other lives, or sent us on the quest of some truth, or lifted us to a vision and ideal. The king, the father, the thinker, the artist, all know this loneliness of the height, which no human fellow can share, no human heart fully sympathise with. Then it is that, with another Psalmist, the heart, exposed to the bare heaven, cries out for something higher than itself to come between the heaven and it: What time my heart is overwhelmed do Thou lead me unto the rock that is higher than I; and God answers us by being Himself a shade upon the right hand, and the sun shall not smite by day, nor the moon by night. And there is the Loneliness of the Deep, when we are plunged into the pit of our hearts to fight with terrible temptations—a conflict no other man knows about or can help us in. Shall God, Who sees us fighting there, and falling under the sense of our helplessness, leave us to fight alone? The Lord is thy shade on thy right hand; thy Comrade, fighting with thee, His presence shall keep thy heart brave and thine arm fresh. It is a truth enforced through the whole of the Old Testament. God is not a God far away. He descends, He comes to our side: He battles for and suffers with His own.

These then are the main thoughts of this Psalm. What new authority and vividness have Jesus Christ and His Cross put into them? There are few of the Psalms which the early Christians more frequently employed of Christ. On the lintel of an ancient house in Hauran I once read the inscription: 'O Jesus Christ, be the shelter and defence of the home and of the whole family, and bless their incoming and outgoing.' How may we also sing this Psalm of Christ? By remembering the new pledges He has given us, that God's thoughts and God's heart are with us. By remembering the infinite degree, which the Cross has revealed, not only of the interest God takes in our life, but of the responsibility He Himself assumes for its eternal issues. The Cross was no new thing. The Cross was the putting of the Love of God, of the Blood of Christ, into the old fundamental pieties of the human heart, the realising by Jesus in Himself of the dearest truths about God. Look up, then, and sing this Psalm of Him. Can we lift our eyes to any of the hills without seeing His figure upon them? Is there a human ideal, duty or hope, with which Jesus is not inseparably and for ever identified? Is there a human experience—the struggle of the individual heart in temptation, the pity of the multitude, the warfare against the strongholds of wickedness—from which we can imagine Him absent? No; it is impossible for any high outline of morality or religion to break upon the eyes of our race, it is impossible for any field of righteous battle, any floor of suffering to unroll, without the vision of Christ upon it. He dominates our highest aspirations, and is felt by our side in our deepest sorrows. There is no loneliness, whether of height or of depth, which He does not enter by the side of His own.

Who has warned us like Christ? To this day He stands the great Sentinel of civilisation. If all within the camp do not acknowledge Him, no new thing starts up in its midst, no new thing comes upon it from outside, which He does not challenge. His judgment is still the highest, clearest, safest the world has ever known; and each new effort of service, each new movement of knowledge, is determined by its worth to His Kingdom.

Who has assumed responsibility for our life as Christ has? Who has taken upon himself the safety and the honour, not of the little tribe for whom this Psalm was first sung, but of the whole of the children of men! He called about Himself our weariness, He lifted our sorrow, He disposed of our sin—as only God can call or lift or dispose. Nothing exhausted His pity, or His confidence to deal with us; nothing ever betrayed a fault in His character, or belied the trust His people put in Him. He suffers not thy foot to be moved; He neither slumbers nor sleeps.

For all this we sing the Psalm of Christ. We know that so long as we have our conversation among the lofty things of life, His dominating Presence grows only the more clear; and so long as we are beset by things adverse and tempting, His sympathy and His prevailing grace become the more sure.

The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil. He shall preserve thy soul.

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and for evermore.

* * * * *

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By the same Author

THE HISTORICAL

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HOLY LAND

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