The Teaching God and His Scholars

Psalm xxv. 8, 9

Good and upright is the Lord: therefore will He teach sinners in the wa3 The meek will He guide in judgment: and the meek will He teach Plis way. — Psalm xxv. 8-9.

THIS is one of the so-called Acrostic Psalms, in which the successive verses begin with the successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. It can easily be understood that a poet moving in fetters of that sort is necessarily. obliged to make the connection of his thoughts sometimes rather loose, and in the Acrostic Psalms, as a whole, one very seldom finds that two consecutive verses have very close relation with one another. That makes the connection of thought in the words that I have read the more remarkable. You see that there is a very beautiful sequence. First of all, the psalmist lifts his eyes to heaven, and gets a great thought into his heart about God, and then he comes down to the world and he sees all its wickedness and evil, and he draws an inference from that thought about God, very unlike the one that might naturally suggest itself. “Good and upright is the Lord” — so what will He do with sinners? — “therefore will He teach sinners His way.”

But that is not all — that is not a wide, absolute, unconditioned promise, but the psalmist guards himself, and defines the conditions, as well as narrows the sweep, of the promise, in the next verse: “The meek will He guide in judgment: and the meek will He teach His way.” So there are three things here: a great thought about God, a confident trust built thereon, and the necessary conditions for the realisation of the trust.

I. A Geeat Thought about God.

“Good and upright “— the one word covering the sweet, gracious, gentle, tender, loving, communicating, sustaining aspects of His character; the other passing by all the mere pompous” Omnisciences,” “Omnipresences,” Omnipotences,” and the like, and going right to the heart of the Divine nature. All that goodness is kept from being facile weakness because it is inseparably linked with uprightness, as some flowering plant is held aloft by a strong pole round which it twines.

Now these are the two sides of the Divine nature which it has always been hard, and for many people impossible, to unite in one thought. They are like some of those obstinate gases which may be brought side by side, but will not blend unless yon put an electric spark throngli them. The psalmist flashed his spark through them, and brought the two together. He bracketed them. He began with the goodness. The goodness is the basis of the uprightness, and righteousness is a mode of love. “Good and upright is the Lord.” That is a grander thought than “He moves all things according to the purpose of His own will.” That is a mightier thought than all these attributes to which I have referred, which are only the fringes and circumference of the Divine glory, the flaming heart of which lies in what I may call the benevolence and the morality of the Divine nature: the love and the rectitude. The difficulty of keeping these two thoughts together, seeing both of them at one time, is just as great to-day as ever it was. And the insisting on one of them without regard to the other lies at the bottom of a great many of the misconceptions, both about God and of Christianity, from which this generation is sufl“ering. People say the Lord is good, and will talk by the yard about the Divine love; what they mean all the while is, “God is so good that He has no hatred of sin, and that there is no need for the cross, before His goodness can come to men and bless them.” I believe that you cannot more assuredly degrade the thing that you fancy you are exalting, than by harping continually on the love of God, and keeping your tlinmb on His righteous - ness. That is at the bottom of a great deal of the kicking against the New Testament teaching with which we are too familiar to-day. Hold by the righteousness, or you will debase the love; hold by the love, or you will never understand the righteousness. Keep the two things together. Parted, they give you a fragmentary God; joined, they give you all the glory of His name.

Let us come now to the next point that is here: II. The Wondehful Hope, the Confident Trust THAT IS Built upon that Thought of God.

^’ Good and upright is the Lord, therefore He will teach sinners in the way.” Ah! our own consciences do not draw that inference for us. We need something more than our own thoughts to rise to that height. If we say, “good and upright,” if we take the two aspects together, we cannot but feel that “sinner” suggests the impediment to the goodness which is uprightness, blessing and instructing us. But the psalmist had learnt — and the fact that he did learn it is the best proof of the “inspiration” of the Old Testament system — the psalmist had learnt that just because God was good, it was impossible that His attitude to us poor, sinful men down here should be anything else than that of trying to draw them back into His own paths and to teach them. Punish them? Yes. Hate the sin? Yes; but teach the sinner. The rightconsness of God, His love of righteoasness, makes Him infinitely desirons of making men what He Himself is, and the purpose of Creation, and Revelation, and Redemption, and of all the discipline of life, and the providences of our days, is summed up in this, to teach sinners not only the way, but His way. God’s love and God’s righteousness combine to make it certain that what He desires most for all His creatures is that they should be conformed to Himself.

These are threadbare old truths, but if we understood and felt, as we ought to do, and as is the simple fact, that the one thing that God seeks to do for us all is to bring us to know, and to love, and to do that which is like His own righteousness, the whole world would be different for us. The more we felt our own evil, the more we should be sure that His patient, tender, continuous love was working upon us, in all sorts of ways, for the one purpose, to guide us ^’ in judgment,” that is, to bring us into the paths of righteousness, and to woo us back into the way everlasting, which is His way. It is practical morality, active righteousness, which is here meant; and the assurance is given to us that just because we, being sinners, need a higher teacher than conscience or emotion, and just because God is upright and good, therefore He will impart to us a righteousness, an uprightness kindred with His own.

And perhaps I am not too fanciful if I venture to say that the various words which the psalmist employs here for the processes of Divine instruction are full of significant teaching: “Therefore will He teach sinners in the way” — the word employed there for ‘^ teaching “literally means “to point,” or to “throw” (the handj that is), and it suggests the attitude of a man who, to some stranger that has lost his path, points in a certain direction and says, “There, that is your road, take that!” And so perhaps that first word suggests to us the daily providences by which, if we keep our eyes open, we shall, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, see the path made plain before ns. And then the other word that follows, ^’ the meek will He guide ^’’ suggests more than that. A man may be like a finger-post, and point his arm to the road, and then leave the traveller to take it. But the guide comes beside him and says, “Follow; step in my steps, and be sure that you keep close to my heels, and you will be in the right path.” So we have, in addition to the providences which we are to interpret, the Christ whom we are not to interpret so much as to follow. “He that followeth Me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” Ah! there is the true guide, better than all providences. As John Stuart Mill said, you cannot have a better precept for practical life than just to do as Jesus Christ would have done in your i)lace. The wonder and beauty of that brief life are that we can apply it to lives so utterly diiFerent from His as ours are. He, a peasant in a Galilean village, knowing nothing of the complications of modern life, is yet for each of us our pattern, following whom we may be sure that we shall not walk in darkness. “He that saith he abideth in Him” — by virtue of that abiding — “ought himself so to walk even as He walked.” “The meek shall He guide in judgment.” Then the third word that is used here is a general expression for all sorts of teaching, and may imply the continuity and the repetition, lesson by lesson, here a little and there a little, the gradual unfolding which is a characteristic of a wise teacher’s dealing with his pupils; giving each little brain as much as it can carry to-day, and not minding about to-morrow’s lesson till to-morrow comes.

So we have the promise not only of direction at the initial point, which may show ns the general trend of our road, nor only the more blessed thought of a Companion and a Guide who leaves us an example that we should follow in His steps; but we have also the thought of a gradual, progressive unfolding of duty and of righteousness. And just as a child learns the alphabet first, and then longersyllabled words, and then is let out into great fields of knowledge, so a Christian man’s conscience ought to be ever growing, not only in the clearness of its perceptions, and in the firmness of its decisions, but in the sensitiveness that it has to the touch of good or of evil. Thus directed, thus guided, thus progressively taught, we should pass on from the lowest benches of the day-school up to the university. Our Teacher, because He is “good and upright,” will direct and guide and instruct us, if only we are docile scholars in His school. Have we experience of the progressive character of the Divine teaching? Do we see duty more clearly than we did ten years ago? Have our consciences been enlightened, so that things that seemed then to be perfectly legitimate, and were done without winking, we cannot do now? And have we become more swift and more cheerful in our obedience to the progressive teaching? These are sharp questions for us all, brethren. But the great promise of my text is not only a great promise, it is a solemn obligation. “Good and upright is the Lord “; therefore our schooling is not done until we have learnt the whole “truth as it is in Jesus.”

Every one that is perfect shall be as his Master.”

And so, lastly, notice —

III. The Conditions of This Teaching.

‘’ The meek will He guide in judgment: and the meek will He teach His way.” The quality expressed in that word may be put in a double fashion. It means humility and it means docility. The man that is sure of himself, self-confident, quite certain that he knows what is to be done, and who does not take God into his counsel, that man is not taught. And, on the other hand, the man that lives so near God that he can look into His face and see the commandment or the prohibition in His eye, and so is guided by His eye, that man is taught. There is nothing that so much comes in our way, in interpreting our providences, in imitating our Lord, in profiting by the progressive teaching of God’s Spirit, as self-will and indocility. The oak that stands unmoved by the storm is one day blown down by the storm. The reed that bends to the lightest touch of the lips of the south wind is safe. There was an old commandment given long ago, when the Israelites were coming out of the wilderness, and were to cross the Jordan. Joshua said to them, “The ark is to go first, and do you not be in a hurry to go after it. Leave a clear space between you and it, that you may know which way to go, for you have not passed this way heretofore.” Do not run too fast on the heels of God’s providences; do not be too quick to interpret them. Give Him time to get clear ahead, that you may be quite sure which way He is going, and if you are not quite sure, stand still where you are. When we do not know what we ought to do, that is a clear sign that we ought to do nothing.

One of the prophets, Jeremiah, frequently rebukes “men who go forwardly in the way of their own hearts.” And that is the sure temper to prevent and block out all the teaching of the good and upright Lord. Self-will, and the determination to have his own way, blind a man to providences, to Christ’s example, and deafen his ears to the illuminative whispers of the Divine Spirit who “guides us into all truth.”

So let us hold fast by that great thought of God. Let us be sure that we shall receive the guidance that we need, if only we will comply with the conditions, and in meekness abnegating our own will, and laying down our plans, and our wisdom, and our strength, and our everything at God’s feet, say “the Lord shall choose my inheritance for me “; “Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth.” “The meek will He guide in judgment” — and guide them by the right way to the City of Habitation.