Expositions of Holy Scripture | Page 2

Law
and the Prophets. The first of them is taken up with the celebration of the blessedness and
fruitful, stable being of the man who loves the Law of the Lord, as contrasted with the
rootless and barren life of the ungodly, who is like the chaff. The second is occupied with
the contemplation of the divine 'decree' by which the coming King is set in God's 'holy
hill of Zion,' and of the blessedness of 'all they who put their trust in Him,' as contrasted
with the swift destruction that shall fall on the vain imaginations of the rebellious heathen
and banded kings of earth.
The words of our first text, then, may well stand at the beginning of the Psalter. They
express the great purpose for which God has given His Law. They are the witness of
human experience to the substantial, though partial, accomplishment of that purpose.
They rise in buoyant triumph over that which is painful and apparently opposed to it; and
in spite of sorrow and sin, proclaim the blessedness of the life which is rooted in the Law
of the Lord.
The last words of the book are as significant as its first. The closing psalms are one long
call to praise--they probably date from the time of the restoration under Ezra and
Nehemiah, when, as we know, 'the service of song' was carefully re-established, and the
harps which had hung silent upon the willows by the rivers of Babylon woke again their
ancient melodies. These psalms climb higher and higher in their rapturous call to all
creatures, animate and inanimate, on earth and in heaven, to praise Him. The golden
waves of music and song pour out ever faster and fuller. At last we hear this invocation to
every instrument of music to praise Him, responded to, as we may suppose, by each, in
turn as summoned, adding its tributary notes to the broadening river of harmony--until all,
with gathered might of glad sound blended with the crash of many voices, unite in the
final words, 'Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.'
I. We have here a twofold declaration of God's great purpose in all His self-revelation,
and especially in the Gospel of His Son.
Our first text may be translated as a joyful exclamation, 'Oh! the blessedness of the
man--whose delight is in the law of the Lord.' Our second is an invocation or a command.
The one then expresses the purpose which God secures by His gift of the Law; the other
the purpose which He summons us to fulfil by the tribute of our hearts and songs--man's

happiness and God's glory.
His purpose is Man's blessedness.
That is but another way of saying, God is love. For love, as we know it, is eminently the
desire for the happiness of the person on whom it is fixed. And unless the love of God be
like ours, however it may transcend it, there is no revelation of Him to our hearts at all. If
He be love, then He 'delights in the prosperity' of His children.
And that purpose runs through all His acts. For perfect love is all-pervasive, and even
with us men, it rules the whole being; nor does he love at all who seeks the welfare of the
heart he clings to by fits and starts, by some of his acts and not by others. When God
comes forth from the unvisioned light, which is thick darkness, of His own eternal,
self-adequate Being, and flashes into energy in Creation, Providence, or Grace, the Law
of His Working and His Purpose are one, in all regions. The unity of the divine acts
depends on this--that all flow from one deep source, and all move to one mighty end.
Standing on the height to which His own declarations of His own nature lift our
feebleness, we can see how the 'river of God that waters the garden' and 'parts' into many
'heads,' gushes from one fountain. One of the psalms puts what people call the
'philosophy' of creation and of providence very clearly, in accordance with this
thought--that the love of God is the source, and the blessedness of man the end, of all His
work: 'To Him that made great lights; for His mercy endureth for ever. To Him that slew
mighty kings; for His mercy endureth for ever.'
Creation, then, is the effluence of the loving heart of God. Though the sacred characters
be but partially legible to us now, what He wrote, on stars and flowers, on the infinitely
great and the infinitely small, on the infinitely near and the infinitely far off, with His
creating hand, was the one inscription--God is love. And as in nature, so in providence.
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