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.