Psalms 147
RileyPsalms 147:1-20
THE OF Psalms 147 Sermon preached on Thanksgiving Day. is one of the most ancient of customs. In fact, it is altogether probable that Adam and Eve were not unmindful of the favor of God, nor silent in the autumn season when the fruits of the earth so eloquently proclaimed His grace. Americans may imagine that the custom of Thanksgiving Day originated with the Plymouth Pilgrims in 1621; that it was made official when George Washington proclaimed Thursday, November 26th, 1789, as a day of national thanksgiving, and perennial when Abraham Lincoln, in 1863, established the last Thursday in November as the date on which the people should assemble in their churches and acknowledge the “grace of God” as manifested in the abundant fruits of field and forest. But all this is modern enough! We know that an oriental custom of Thanksgiving existed even back of Israel’s day and throughout the Old Testament. This custom is referred to again and again and the feast of tabernacles became its official and annual recognition. It is not improbable that some of these later psalms were written by David as the songs of praise expressing the thankfulness of the people in these annual occasions. If so, they were certainly well adapted, and combined in one production all that now belongs to both sermon and anthem, characterizing the same occasion. The almost infinite variety revealed in the grace of God is shown in the various objects treated in these anthem of praise.There is a similarity between all the Psalms 145-150 inclusive, but there is also extensive variety, due to the fact that no one of them was sufficient in length to voice the multiplied favors from above.
In this 147th, David does what the energetic director of music often voices. He calls, as if to a choir, once, twice, thrice, “Sing! sing! sing!” He sings of God’s great power! He sings of God’s abundant provision! He sings of God’s universal providence!GOD’S GREAT POWER “Praise ye the Lord: for it is good to sing praises unto our God”. It certainly is! He is worthy! Few things give greater joy than praise when it comes from a heart happy in the Lord, and deserved praise is comely. The first portion of the hymn is based on what follows in Psalms 147:3-6.His power is revealed in His exceeding grace.“The Lord doth build up Jerusalem: He gathereth together the outcasts of Israel. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds”.The first favor from the Lord is not material prosperity.
Men often so imagine. Due to men’s shortsightedness and selfishness, they often so imagine, but experience proves the contrary. “Grace’’ is better than gifts. “Mercy” exceeds favor. “Healing” is above riches, and the binding of “the broken heart” is more to be desired than big harvests.In fact, it is doubtful if any man or woman has ever come into the truest favor from the Lord, who falls short of experiencing a sense of His care, the deep consciousness of His grace. The poet put first things first when he wrote: What can it mean? Is it ought to Him That the nights are long and the days are dim? Can He be touched by the griefs I bear, Which sadden the heart and whiten the hair? Around His throne are eternal calms, And strong, glad music of happy psalms, And bliss unruffled by any strife, How can He care for my life?
Oh, wonderful story of deathless love! Each child is dear to that heart above; He fights for me when I cannot fight, He comforts me in the gloom of night. He lifts the burden, for He is strong, He stills the sigh and awakens the song; The sorrow that bowed me down He bears, And loves and pardons because He cares.
Let all who are sad take heart again, We are not alone in our hour of pain; Our Father stoops from His throne above To soothe and quiet us with His love: He leaves us not when the storm is high, And we have safety, for He is nigh. Can it be trouble which He doth share? Oh, rest in peace, for the Lord does care.” His power is also shown in His matchless wisdom. The study of astronomy is adding to the significance of the sentence, “He telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power; His understanding is infinite” (Psalms 147:4-5). Once we imagined that they amounted to a few hundred. Now we know that the sidereal systems exceed the million, and that when the separate stars are counted, they amount to millions on millions, and we have little reason to doubt that beyond the possible reach of the mightiest instrument yet conceived by man, infinite additional sidereal systems swing through endless space. Truly did the Psalmist speak, “The heavens declare the glory of God”.He calleth them by their names.
How interesting it would be to know what God’s names for these stars are; how surely they would exceed in suggestiveness the appellations of men! We marvel at the wisdom of Adam when it is written that “The Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field”.Some years since, I inquired who gave names to all the pullman cars that moved by the thousands across our mighty country, and was told that an individual was paid a very high salary to do nothing else. The number and variety of them, and the necessity of no repetition, requires real ingenuity; but Adam’s task and that of the pullman car employee is trivial beside the wisdom that called the stars by name. No wonder it is followed by the phrase, “Great is our Lord, and of great power: His understanding is infinite”.Before passing from these verses, it is well to remark the juxtaposition of the “grace of God” and the “power of God”,—grace revealed in gathering “together the outcasts of Israel”, healing “the broken-hearted”, and binding “up their wounds”, and the power exhibited in telling “the number of the stars”, calling “them all by their names”, which is truly interpreted as “commanding their courses”. In God, gentleness and greatness perfectly combined! How marvelous that He who framed the worlds by His Word, “so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear” (Hebrews 11:3), is the very same “who sittcth beside every sparrow”, that falls to the street and flutters in dying, resting the same in the hollow of His hand till breath goes from the tiny and seemingly worthless body. That is God, and therein is His greatness!It is further revealed in His judgments. “The Lord lifteth up the meek; He casteth the wicked down to the ground”.
There are those who would object to this because there are those who hate judgment. There are those who want no discernment between righteousness and wickedness; who would have no favor shown, to the first, and who would certainly have no adjudication exercised against the second.
But if God did not do both, He would not be God, and the very world in which we live would shortly become a moral chaos.Illinois once had a governor who set free hundreds and thousands of her criminals. Texas had a woman governor who did the same. At first, this unmerited favor is popular. It commonly results in a reelection of such governors, but they seldom get beyond two short terms when the reeking state of society demands reform. On the contrary, God who lifts “up the meek”; and casts “the wicked down to the ground” justifies himself in that righteous judgment, and gives men everywhere to know that the right will triumph and the wrong will go to defeat.George Lorimer once said, “As we look backward and comprehensively grasp all that has fallen out, both of good and bad, and observe their bearing and results, we are constrained to recognize a guiding intelligence that is not of earth, and a benevolence that has never failed to bring light out of darkness. Why then should we, who have been thus taught, falter in our faith or yield to the dismay of doubt?
Though we see Him not, we have sufficient reason for trust; and though error may for the time being seem to prevail against truth, and the hearts of His children fail them for fear, unless the centuries have lied to us, He will yet remember the kingdom of His dear Son, will enlarge its borders, establish its authority, and bring forth its righteousness as the noonday. Careless seems the Great Avenger: History’s pages but record One death-struggle in the darkness ‘twixt false systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne; But that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.”But we come to our second appeal for a further burst of praise, and the occasion isAN “Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving; sing praise upon the harp unto our God: “Who covereth the heaven with clouds, who prepareth rain for the earth, who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains. “He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry. “He delighteth not in the strength of the horse; He taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man. “The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear Him, in those that hope in His mercy” (Psalms 147:7-11) Let us return to the study of these verses and see what they suggest.God regards and provides Nature’s real necessities. There are those who imagine that clouds are independent of God, and that rains are subject only to natural laws, and that grass on the mountains to give to the beast his food, and by his carcass in turn to silence the cry of young ravens, is all by fixed and eternal laws of unconscious nature. But, our Bible does not so teach, and true believers do not so hold. They entertain rather the conviction that, as the stars in their courses execute the Divine command, so the clouds come at the Divine will, and the rain pours on earth to express the Divine pleasure, and that no grass ever grew apart from the active will of God. Robertson Nicoll has well said, “The yearly miracle which brings from some invisible storehouse the clouds to fill the sky and drop down fatness, the answer of the brown earth which mysteriously shoots forth the tender green spikelets away up on the mountain flanks, where no man has sown and no man will reap, the loving care which thereby provides food for the wild creatures, owned by no one, and answers the hoarse croak of the callow fledglings in the ravens’ nests—these are manifestations of God’s power and revelations of His character worthy to be woven into a hymn which celebrates His restoring grace, and to be set beside the apocalypse of His greatness in the nightly heavens.”California, in America, with a climate close akin to that of Palestine, profoundly impresses these truths, and in its long, hot summer season, vegetation perishes from wide fields. The forests themselves grow brown, and the grass on the mountainsides dries up and dies, and the inhabitants of the mountainsides grow lean and long for the rainy season, and lo, when it comes, what instant change.
I have seen brown fields and even mountainsides change to green over-night and one could readily imagine the famished hart feeling a sense of gratitude to the God who thus gives the tender, luscious grass to fatten the very food on which young ravens, in a later season, shall feed.The verses that follow sound like an abrupt and illogical change, but not so. They only teach a converse truth.God delights in human affection vs. animal strength.“He delighteth not in the strength of the horse; He taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man. The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear Him, in those that hope in His mercy” (Psalms 147:10-11). The time was when the strength of the horse was consummate, when the legs of a man were a synonym for swiftness. But, alas, for miracle inventions! They have both lost their meaning. That may be why God never took delight in them. He knew how puny and poor they were, as compared with the multiplied forces at His command yet to be discovered by men. God never rests in the ephemeral thing, but rather in the eternal. That is why He taketh pleasure in “them that fear Him”, in “those that hope in His mercy”. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. “Hope in God is the prophecy of its consummation.”Lot and Abraham were perfect illustrations of these converse truths. Lot believed in temporal power expressed by the strength in the horse.
Lot trusted in his business sagacity, voiced by the swiftness of man’s feet. Consequently, he lifted up his eyes and made choice of the rich plains of Esdraelon, and counted himself a far-seeing man, as all conscienceless business men so suppose themselves.Abraham waited for the Word of the Lord, and when it was spoken, it was this, “Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward: for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it”. The truth is, then, that what Lot had chosen was finally to fall out as belonging also to Abraham, and to his seed after him. Even so, and it is commonly so, the man who chooses God’s will, “fearing Him” and “hoping in His mercy,” that man will know God’s pleasure and enjoy a prosperity of Divine appointment.God is not like Nature, indifferent to moral values. Henry Van Dyke writes, “If we regarded Nature as impersonal, and the universe as a material mechanism, we should find no difficulty in it. For then this shining of the sun and falling of the rain upon the evil and the good, this procession of the seasons, this interflow of forces and influences which work together in productiveness, this germinating of the seed and unfolding of the blade and forming of the ear and ripening of the full corn in the ear,—the same for every child of man who toils and waits,—all this would be to us only the proof and illustration of what we should call the large indifference of Nature. * * * * But the moment we see God behind the face of Nature,—the moment we believe that this vast and marvellous procession of seasons and causes and changes, this array of interworking forces, is directed and controlled by a Supreme, Omniscient, Holy Spirit, whose will is manifest in the springing of the seed, the ripening of the fruit, the fading of the leaf, the shining of the sun, and the falling of the rain,— this indifference becomes incomprehensible and impossible. * * * *You tell me that Nature is indifferent.
I say, Not if God is behind Nature.You tell me that “it matters not whether the hand that guides the plow be pure and clean, or wicked and defiled. Nature feels alike and will do alike for both.” I say, Not if God is behind Nature; not if Nature is the expression of His will.
He may do alike, but He does not feel alike. As well say that He who made light and darkness cannot distinguish between them, as that He whose will is the moral law ever forgets it, ignores it, casts it aside, in any sphere or mode of his action. Evermore He loves the good, the true, the noble. Evermore He hates the base, the false, the evil. Evermore iniquity is an abomination unto Him, and righteousness is His delight.”But we come to the third appeal of this choir director. Once more, he calls upon the singers to unite their voices in loudest paeans.“Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise thy God, O Zion. “For He hath strengthened the bars of thy gates; He hath blessed thy children within thee. “He maketh peace in thy borders, and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat. “He sendeth forth His commandment upon earth: His Word runneth very swiftly. “He giveth snow like wool: He scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes. “He casteth forth His ice like morsels: who can stand before His cold? “He sendeth out His word, and melteth them: He causeth His wind to blow, and the waters flow. “He sheweth His word unto Jacob, His statutes and His judgments unto Israel. “He hath not dealt so with any nation: and as for His judgments, they have not known them. Praise ye the Lord” (Psalms 147:12-20). What does it mean? Several things! First, God’s providence is peculiar over His own people.“Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise thy God, O Zion. For He hath strengthened the bars of thy gates; He hath blessed thy children within thee”. There are comely leaders among singers. A great soprano, noble alto, a high tenor, a mighty bass. They sound the note loudest and clearest. Other voices unite to swell the praise.Why should not Jerusalem lead? Why should not Zion be first in song? These are God’s own! They know Him! They love Him!
They can sing from grateful hearts. Their voices express conscious favor. Such are the first singers always! To review the Divine favors is to find the lips filled with song. God is ever revealing a special grace toward His own. This single fact gave birth to more of the psalms than all other influences combined. Take the 106th psalm, with its forty-eight verses, and the 107th psalm, with its forty-three verses, and they are a review of God’s favor to Israel, and voice the Psalmist’s earnest plea for upraise” unto “the Lord for His godness, and for His wonderful works to the children of men”.But the descendants of Jacob are not the lone children of God. Through all the centuries, His favor has been upon them that feared Him, His blessing upon believers.
Read the Book of the Acts. Regard the Divine inference and rejoice that God “careth for His own”. Look into so-called secular history! See it made doubly sacred by the defeat of the Duke of Alva’s intention against the Christians in Holland through a tide that refused to turn in twelve long hours. Look into the history of England, and recall how the fierce wind scattered the Armada of Spain over the north and spared the people of God. Or do what David is constantly doing,—reduce it to individual preservation.Remember how John Knox felt strangely moved to give up his seat in front of a window and take another.
You see that impulse proven to have been of God when, a little later, a musket-ball crashed past the very place where he sat and buried itself in an opposite wall. No wonder the psalmist concludes a great psalm, written in review of such incidents, by saying,“Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, even they shall understand the lovingkindness of the Lord” (Psalms 107:43). In the providence of God is both peace and prosperity. “He maketh peace in thy borders, and filleth thee with the finest of the wheat”. These two commonly walk hand in hand, just as war and want were almost always co-workers. People seldom appreciate the prosperity that belongs to a time of peace until lands are war-swept and impoverished. Germany, Russia, Austria, Romania, Poland, Italy, Belgium, France, England,—these all now appreciate the days back of 1914 when “peace was in their borders,” and when their “garners were filled with the finest wheat “When will the nations learn that war and want walk together, and turning with believing hearts to the Prince of Peace, implore His presence and His administration of life,—personal, national, international!Poverty of nations and poverty of individuals will end only when God is taken into partnership, or rather is accepted in leadership. Campbell Morgan, in one of his books, tells the story of the Scotch lord, who called his faithful servant into his presence and said, “Donald, I have decided to give you that farm that you may work it for yourself, own it, and spend the rest of your days on your own property. But Donald, with all the canniness that characterized his nationality, looked up into the face of his lord and said, “It is nae gude to gie me the farm; I have nae capital to stock it.” His lordship was touched, and so he answered, “Oh, Donald, I think I can manage to stock it also.” Whereupon, Donald replied, “Oh, well, if it is you and me for it, I think we will manage.” And then Morgan applied his story, “Jesus, Master, if it be Thee and me for it, we can manage.” God with us, who can be against us!”His providence is over all the earth. “He giveth snow like wool: He scattereth the hoarfrost tike ashes.
He casteth forth His ice like morsels: who can stand before His cold”?A strange expression of providence, you say! These are curses! Pardon me; not at all! Snow, frost, ice,—these are as absolutely essential to the season’s success as is spring or summer themselves.Is it not written, “As the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater”? Certainly! The winter season is not a time of fruitfulness in itself, but it is an essential preparation of the earth for the same. God is not cursing man with cold! God is blessing him! By the cold, he is resting nature, refreshing her to make her more fruitful; and by the cold, He is toning up the blood, enlarging the veins, quickening the arteries, adding zest to life. These are the inheritance of all men!Nature’s pageant in the recurring seasons is only an expression of God’s care for all His creatures.
In fact, winter is perhaps God’s own appointment for bringing men to appreciate the spring and summer and autumn. But for the very contrast, spiritual carelessness and spiritual ingratitude of a deeper and baser sort, might characterize men. It was some such thought that Robert Louis Stevenson voiced in verse:“If I have faltered more or less In my great track of happiness; If I have moved among my race, And shown no glorious morning face; If beams from happy human eyes Have moved me not; if morning skies, Books, and my food, and summer rain, Knocked on my sullen heart in vain, Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take, And stab my spirit broad awake.” And it was this same thought that David himself evidently had, for he concludes his anthem of praise with this expression, “He sendeth out His Word, and melteth them; He caused His wind to blow, and the waters flow. He sheweth His Word unto Jacob, His Statutes and His Judgments unto Israel. He hath not dealt so with any nation: and as for His Judgments, they have not known them. Praise ye the Lord”!