Amid the fitfulness of his own feelings, this was the Psalmist's consolation—"God my Rock!" What a source of comfort is there here in the immutability of Jehovah. All else around us is unstable. External nature bears on every page of its volume the traces of mutation. Earth has the folds already on its vesture—the wrinkles of age on its brow. The ocean murmurs of change, as its billows chafe on altered landmarks. Human friendships and human associations are all fluctuating. So are our habits, and tastes, and employments. The old man looking back from some hoary pinnacle on the past, almost questions his personal identity; and these emptied chairs!—these faces, once glowing at our firesides, now greeting our gaze only in mute and silent portraits on the wall! "Here we have no continuing city," is the oracle of all time.
"But Thou art the same, and Thy years shall have no end."[86] "Heaven and earth may pass away," but there is no change, and can be none, in an all-perfect God! "The wheel turns round, but the axle is immutable." The clouds which obscure the sun do not descend from heaven—they are exhaled from earth. It is the soul's own darkening vapours, generated by unbelief and sin, which at times taint and obscure the moral atmosphere. Behind every such murky haze He shines brightly as ever. "Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary?"[87] "Young sailors," says Rutherford, "imagine the shore and land moving, while it is they themselves all the while. So we often think that God is changing, when the change is all with ourselves!"
2. Faith regards this immutable God as a God in covenant.
"My Rock!" Believer! you have the same immovable ground of confidence! Look to YOUR God in Christ, who has made with you "an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things, and sure!" He, "willing more abundantly to shew unto the heirs of promise the immutability of His counsel, confirmed it by an oath: that by two immutable things, in which it was impossible for God to lie, we might have a strong consolation, who have fled for refuge to lay hold upon the hope set before us."[88] The torch may flicker in your hand, the flame may be the sport of every passing gust of temptation and trial, but He who lighted it will not suffer it to be quenched. "Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have thee, that he may sift thee as wheat: but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not."[89] The Great Adversary may attempt to rob you of your peace, but that peace is imperishably secured. He must first destroy the Rock, before he can touch one trembling soul that has fled there for refuge! He must first uncrown Christ, before he can touch one jewel in the purchased diadems of His people! Your life is "hid with Christ in God;" because He lives, "ye shall live also!" God himself must become mutable, and cease to be God, ere your eternal safety can be imperilled or impaired. "If we perish," says Luther, "Christ perisheth with us."
Let us turn now to the Psalmist's Prayer.
If Faith be called the eye, Prayer may be called the wings of the soul. No sooner does Faith descry God his "Rock," than forthwith Prayer spreads out her pinions for flight. In the close of the preceding verse, (when in the extremity of his agony,) David had announced his determination to betake himself to supplication—"In the night His song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life." He follows up his resolution now with material for petition. He puts on record a solemn and beautiful liturgy—"I will say unto God my Rock, Why hast Thou forgotten me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy? As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies reproach me; while they say daily unto me, Where is thy God?"
How wonderfully does God thus overrule His darkest dispensations for the exercise and discipline of His people's spiritual graces! In their overflowing prosperity they are apt to forget Him. He sends them afflictions. Trial elicits faith—faith drives to prayer—prayer obtains the spiritual blessing! It was the sense of want and wretchedness which drove the prodigal to cry, "Father, I have sinned!" It was the "buffeting" thorn which sent Paul thrice to his knees in the agony of supplication, and brought down on his soul a rich heritage of spiritual blessing. It was these surging waves—the "deep calling to deep"—which elicited the cry from this sinking castaway, "My heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the Rock that is higher than I!" "Behold he prayeth!" That announcement seems in a moment to turn the tide of battle, and change the storm into a calm. Well has a Christian poet written:—
"Frail art thou, O man, as a bubble on the breaker;
Weak, and govern'd by externals, like a poor bird caught in the storm: