Expositions of Holy Scripture | Page 6

of snow and rain--but it has stormed itself out, and at
eventide, a rent in the clouds reveals the sun, and it closes in peaceful clearness of light.
The note of gladness heard at the beginning, 'Oh! the blessedness of the man that delights

in the law of the Lord,' holds on persistently, like a subdued and almost bewildered
undercurrent of sweet sound amid all the movements of some colossal symphony,
through tears and sobs, confession and complaint, and it springs up at the close
triumphant, like the ruddy spires of a flame long smothered, and swells and broadens, and
draws all the intricate harmonies into its own rushing tide. Some of you remember the
great musical work which has these very words for its theme. It begins with the call, 'All
that hath life and breath, praise ye the Lord,' and although the gladness saddens into the
plaintive cry of a soul sick with hope deferred, 'Will the night soon pass?' yet, ere the
close, all discords are reconciled, and at last, with assurance firmer for the experience of
passing sorrows, loud as the voice of many waters and sweet as harpers harping with their
harps, the joyful invocation peals forth again, and all ends, as it does in a Christian man's
life, and as it does in this book, with 'Praise ye the Lord.'
III. We have here also a twofold prophecy of the perfection of Heaven.
Whilst it is true that both of these purposes are accomplished here and now, it is also true
that their accomplishment is but partial, and that therefore for their fulfilment we have to
lift our eyes beyond this world of imperfect faith, of incomplete blessedness, of
interrupted praise. Whether the Psalmist looked forward thus we do not know. But for us,
the very shortcomings of our joys and of our songs are prophetic of the perfect and
perpetual rapture of the one, and the perfect and perpetual music of the other. We know
that He who has given us so much will not stay His hand until He has perfected that
which concerns us. We know that He who has taught our dumb hearts to magnify His
name will not cease till 'out of the lips of babes and sucklings, He has perfected praise.'
We know that the pilgrims in whose hearts are the ways are blessed, and we are sure that
a fuller blessedness must belong to those who have reached the journey's end.
And so these words give us a twofold aspect of that future on which our longing hopes
may well fix.
It is the perfection of man's blessedness. Then the joyous exclamation of our first text,
which we have often had to strive hard not to disbelieve, will be no more a truth of faith
but a truth of experience. Here we have had to trust that it was so, even when we could
scarce cleave to the confidence. There, memory will look back on our wanderings
through this great wilderness, and, enlightened by the issue of them all, will speak only of
Mercy and Goodness as our angel guides all our lives. The end will crown the work. Pure
unmingled consciousness of bliss will fill all hearts, and break into the old exclamation,
which we had sometimes to stifle sobs ere we could speak on earth. When He says,
'Come in! ye blessed of My Father,' all our tears and fears, and pains and sins, will be
forgotten, and we shall but have to say, in wonder and joy, 'Blessed are they that dwell in
Thy house; they will be still praising Thee.'
It is the perfection of God's praise. We may possibly venture to see in these wonderful
words of our text a dim and far-off hint of a possibility that seems to be pointed at in
many parts of Scripture--that the blessings of Christ's mighty work shall, in some
measure and manner, pass through man to his dwelling-place and its creatures. Dark
shadows of evil--the mystery of pain and sorrow--lie over earth and all its tribes. 'We
look for new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.' And the
statements of Scripture which represent creation as suffering by man's sin, and participant
in its degree in man's redemption, seem too emphatic and precise, as well as too frequent,
and in too didactic connections, to be lightly brushed aside as poetic imagery. May it not

be that man's transgression
'Broke the fair music that all creatures made To their great Lord, whose love their motion
swayed,'
and that man's restoration may, indeed, bring back all that hath life and breath to a
harmonious blessedness--according to the deep and enigmatical words, which declare
that 'the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into