Psalm CXXIX

A Song of degrees.

1 Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth, may Israel now say:

2 Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth: yet they have not prevailed against me.

3 The plowei’s plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows.

4 The Lord is righteous! he hath cut asunder the cords of the wicked.

5 Let them all be confounded and turned back that hate Zion.

6 Let them be as the grass upon the house tops, which withereth afore it

groweth up:

7 Wherewith the mower filleth not his hand; nor he that bindeth sheaves

his bosom.

8 Neither do they which go by say, The blessing of the Lord be upon you: We bless you in the name of the Lord.

Perseverance to the end is the burden of this song, inasmuch as in it we hear the pilgrim at another stage of the way recording deliverances and drawing from his past experience good hope of final deliverance. It is like 2 Cor. i. 10,” He delivered us from so great a death, and doth deliver, in whom we trust that he will yet deliver.

“Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth,
Oh let Israel say!” (ij, I beseech you.)

Israel as a nation might refer to the time of their ‘’ youth;” see Hosea xi. 1, Jer. ii. 1, and every man of Israel might do the like. Every worshipper, and not least the Lord Jesus in the days of his flesh, could take up this song. Abel, Enoch, Noah, and all the elders, and not less the Church in its latter days, when feeling the terrible blast of the enemy, might describe their experience by its verses; all agreeing, too, in the expectation of final victory. The Lord cuts asunder “the cord” that fastens the oxen to the plough.

The ttieiiie
Perseveiance.

PSALM CXXX. — THE CRY FROM THE DEPTHS,

“Ashamed and turned bach shall be all the haters of Z ion. (Ver. 5.) They shall he like the grass on the house tops, That icithereth ere it is plucked ii]).”

Not as Job V. 26, the shock of corn in its season, but as 2 Kings xix. 26, Sennacherib’s doom, which is the doom of all God’s foes: “They are as the grass of the field, and as the green herb, as the grass on the house tops, and as corn blasted before it is grown up!” Antichrist, like all before him, shall thus perish. They are men working a vain work; no Boaz shall ever bless them with a prayer, nor shall even a casual traveller. The Lord’s foes perish unblest; they perish with the curse upon them, on that day when the Lord comes forth to reward his own with the “Gome, ye blessed.” With expectations like these The Lord’s servant reviews past sufferings in assured hope.