And the fields yield no meat,
Cut off[450] be the flock from the fold,
And no cattle in the stalls,
Yet in the LORD will I exult,
I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.
Jehovah, the Lord, is my might;
He hath made my feet like the hinds’,
And on my heights He gives me to march.
This Psalm, whose musical signs prove it to have been employed in the liturgy of the Jewish Temple, has also largely entered into the use of the Christian Church. The vivid style, the sweep of vision, the exultation in the extreme of adversity with which it closes, have made it a frequent theme of preachers and of poets. St. Augustine’s exposition of the Septuagint version spiritualises almost every clause into a description of the first and second advents of Christ.[451] Calvin’s more sober and accurate learning interpreted it of God’s guidance of Israel from the time of the Egyptian plagues to the days of Joshua and Gideon, and made it enforce the lesson that He who so wonderfully delivered His people in their youth will not forsake them in the midway of their career.[452] The closing verses have been torn from the rest to form the essence of a large number of hymns in many languages.
For ourselves it is perhaps most useful to fasten upon the poet’s description of his own position in the midst of the years, and like him to take heart, amid our very similar circumstances, from the glorious story of God’s ancient revelation, in the faith that He is still the same in might and in purpose of grace to His people. We, too, live among the nameless years. We feel them about us, undistinguished by the manifest workings of God, slow and petty, or, at the most, full of inarticulate turmoil. At this very moment we suffer from the frustration of a great cause, on which believing men had set their hearts as God’s cause; Christendom has received from the infidel no greater reverse since the days of the Crusades. Or, lifting our eyes to a larger horizon, we are tempted to see about us a wide, flat waste of years. It is nearly nineteen centuries since the great revelation of God in Christ, the redemption of mankind, and all the wonders of the Early Church. We are far, far away from that, and unstirred by the expectation of any crisis in the near future. We stand in the midst of the years, equally distant from beginning and from end. It is the situation which Jesus Himself likened to the long double watch in the middle of the night—if he come in the second watch or in the third watch—against whose dulness He warned His disciples. How much need is there at such a time to recall, like this poet, what God has done—how often He has shaken the world and overturned the nations, for the sake of His people and the Divine causes they represent. His ways are everlasting. As He then worked, so He will work now for the same ends of redemption. Our prayer for a revival of His work will be answered before it is spoken.