A Prayer of Moses, the Man of God
Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children. And let the beauty of the LoED our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.” — Ps. xc. 16, 17.
Although some difficulties have been started, there seems no reason to doubt that this Psalm is the composition of Moses. From the remotest period his name has been attached to it, and almost every Biblical scholar, from Jerome down to Hengstenberg, has agreed to accept it as a prayer of that “man of God” whose name it has always carried.
If so, it is one of the oldest poems in the world. Compared with it Homer and Pindar are (so to speak) modern, and even King David is of recent date. That is to say, compared with this ancient hymn the other psalms are as much more modern as Tennyson and Longfellow are more modern than Chaucer. In either case there are nearly five centuries between.
The occasion on which it was written can only be z conjectured; but from internal evidence we should say that it must have been either towards the end of the wilderness sojourn, or after that calamitous outburst which was punished by a lengthened detention in the desert, and from which it resulted that of those who were forty years old on leaving Egypt only two made out the fourscore and arrived in the land of promise (7-11).
This is enough to account for the tone of the Psalm, so pensive and plaintive. Moses himself was an exception. He had nearly made out the sixscore years, but this made him only the more lonely — the greater contrast to the youthful race which had started up around him. It gave him the feeling described by a poet of our own (Dr. Young), —
“One world deceased, another born,
Like Noah they behold,
O’er whose white hair and furrow’d brows
Too many suns have roU’d.
Happy the patriarch! he rejoiced
His second world to see;
My second world, though gay the scene,
Can boast no charms for me.
To me this brilliant age appears
With desolation spread;
Near all with whom I lived and smiled,
Whilst life was life, are dead.”
And although there is every reason to believe that the new generation was an immense improvement on its predecessor, it had the drawback of being dreadfully new. It contained no one with whom in the days of his youth the Psalmist had been acquainted. As if a flood had swept over the scene, that race had been carried completely away; and now he was left at once a spectator and a spectacle, — in the midst of a race none of whom had known him when young, — like the primeval oak or elm looking down on a whole upstart forest, and himself the venerable monument of a generation which had utterly vanished.
Nothing can be more pathetic than the middle portion — verses 3-10; nor can anything be more expressive than the imagery under which the shortness of our earthly existence is described. Compared with the years of the Eternal it is nothing. Even although the original millennium were continued — even although the thousand years of Adam and Methusaleh were still vouchsafed, — they would pass, and after they were past, — “before God’s sight,” compared with the years of the Eternal, they would look no more than a rapid and returnless “yesterday.” Life, he says, is like “a watch in the night.” The weary warrior lays him down, and he fancies that he has hardly closed his eyes — it does not look like forty winks — when he is roused to take his turn in the trenches or relieve the sentinel on the battlements, or join the forlorn-hope — the storming party in the escalade. And like such a short “sleep” is our mortal history. We have had some pleasant dreams, and others rather frightful: when we wake up and see a ghastly apparition bending over us. “What, O Death! is that you already? It cannot possibly be time.” And he answers, “Yes, indeed. The tale is told; the night is spent; and now you must turn out into the morning. Nor is it so short as you imagine. Look at the clock, and you will see that it has come to threescore and ten. Look into the mirror, and you will see that there are snows upon your head, that there are furrows on your brow, that there are crows’-feet in the corners of your eyes.”
From man’s mortality the Psalmist seeks refuge in God’s eternity. As the first and foremost thought it begins the Psalm; and there evidently underlies it the assumption that man’s immortality is involved in the immortality of God. “Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations,” and as at the bush Jehovah proclaimed, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” — showing that these godly patriarchs still were extant, and still had a life in the great I AM, so from the wreck and desolation all around him, the Psalmist lifts his eyes to that true and only Potentate, who alone hath immortality. Of all the godly generations God is the eternal home. Nothing which He once blesses with His friendship is ever blotted out of being, or is disappointed of that exceeding great reward to which He Himself has taught it to aspire. The tent is gone, but the pilgrim lives. The tent is torn and scattered amongst the elements; but the pilgrim has exchanged its frail and flimsy shelter for a house eternal. He has got better than any building made with hands, for He has passed in beneath the covert of the Almighty, and will henceforth have that home which God had for Himself before the mountains were brought forth, or ever He had formed the earth and the world.
If man he ephemeral, God is eternal. Such is the first consideration. But a second thought strikes the Psalmist. After he has depicted life’s shortness he seems startled by his own description. Is it so? Is it really a dream — a sleep — a yesterday? Then how astounding is the universal delusion! what a mad mistake is this general hope that to-morrow will be as this day and much more abundant! “Lord, teach us so to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” On which Calvin remarks,” Children learn numbers as soon as they begin to prattle, and we do not need an arithmetical tutor to enable us to count a hundred on our fingers. So much the more shameful is our stupidity in never comprehending the short term of our life. Even the most accomplished accountant
358 “A PRAYEE OF MOSES,
is unable to calculate the fourscore years of his own existence. Surely it is monstrous that men can measure all distances outside of themselves. They can tell how far asunder are the several planets, and how many miles it is from the centre of the moon to the centre of the earth, but they cannot measure the threescore years and ten which divide their cradle from their grave. To do this no one is wise enough till God shines into His understanding by the Holy Spirit, and for this rare wisdom Moses now sets himself to prayer.”
That prayer passes on to other points. He entreats that the period of rebuke and chastisement may now be succeeded by a season of revival and renovation. “Return, O Lord, how long [wilt Thou be angry?] and let it repent thee concerning thy servants. Oh satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.” And more especially he prays that the present juncture may be signalized by more of God’s power and presence, so that before the departing generation entirely left the stage, it might have the comfort of seeing that its work was done, and that a better race was coming on. “Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy glory unto their children. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us; and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it;” — a prayer in which is involved the principle that the shorter the individual existence is, it becomes all the more urgent to exert a beneficial influence on others, so as to transmit to posterity a portion of ourselves which shall thus become imperishable; and a prayer which in the instance before us was abundantly answered; for now that the murmurers were dead, now that a new generation had learned the dangers of disobedience, and been somewhat weaned from idols, it is probable that the Hebrew nation exhibited as much of the beauty of holiness as at any period of their history. Referring to this time, the Lord says, “I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown. Israel was holiness unto the Lord” (Jer. ii. 2, 3). And as this “beauty of Jehovah” was on the rising race, Moses had reason to believe that the Lord’s work was appearing, and that his own work would be established; and — now that it has assumed the form of prayer, and so from man’s sin and frailty has risen up into the region of Jehovah’s faithfulness and love — the meditation loses all its mournfulness, and ends in a gleam of hope and gladness.
This Psalm has already furnished us with two
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discourses (vers. 12 and 14), and so we shall now confine ourselves to the lesson of its closing verses.
1. You will observe a beautiful parallelism between two things which are sometimes confounded and sometimes too jealously sundered: I mean God’s agency and marCs instmmentality, between man’s personal activity and that power of God which actuates and animates, and gives it a vital efficacy. For forty years it had been the business of Moses to bring Israel into a right state politically, morally, religiously: that had been his work. And yet, in so far as it was to have any success or enduringness, it must be God’s work. “The work of our hands” do Thou establish; and this God does when, in answer to prayer. He adopts the work of His servants, and makes it His own “work,” His own “glory,” His own “beauty.”
And so if any of you are concerned for the good of others, the secret of success and the best security for permanence is prayer. To all your efforts bring your best; throw into them all the tact and all the energy of which you are capable; bring to them the utmost of your affection, skill, and earnestness; and when you have done your best you will feel most deeply that God Himself must do it all. Here you stand seeking into the mind of this loved one admission for the gospel and for the Son of God; but you stand before a door which cannot be forced, and it is only He that hath the key of David who can open it, and who, introducing your message, can withal enter Himself. Here is a history over whose early and critical outset you are anxious. At present it is like a rill rising on the watershed of a far inland range, and although you make every exertion to direct it into that quarter where it will flow long and illustriously and usefully, it shows a sad propensity towards those sour and swampy levels where it must be engulfed and wasted, and where it will ignobly disappear; but the heart of the youth, the heart of the child, is in the hand of the Lord, and, as a river of water, He can turn it whichever way He will; and if He will kindly interpose, from this time forward its course will be shaped aright, not perhaps so steady and so uniform as you wish, not so straight as a conduit, not so placid as the surface of a canal; a little wriggling at the first, a little noisy, a little redundant now and then; but by-and-bye gladdening the banks on either hand, and to the right course too far committed to make you fearful of its deflecting towards the desert or turning backward to the sea of death.
2. A man of piety is a man of public spirit. It is not only in the great congregation, but in secret and domestic devotion, that the man of God has at heart the cause of God, and prays, “Let thy work appear.” Hitherto God has been working in the
3G2 “A PRAYER OF MOSES,
world. His great work is that which He carries on in the souls of men, and there has never been a time wien some did not experience His worh of saving and transforming grace. But the time when God works most apparently is the time when His people pray most earnestly. This year opened with much prayer, and every successive week has brought instalments of the answer. In some of the mission fields — amongst the Karens of Burmah and the Hindus of Tinnevelly — the awaking has been wonderful; and here at home — in Wales, to some extent in London, still more in Dublin, in Glasgow, Perth, and Aberdeen, and in the fishing villages along the eastern coast, from Eyemouth to Peterhead, great numbers have been added to the Church. And with the patriotism of Moses, with the philanthropy of Christians, it behoves us to urge the prayer and with every corresponding effort emphasize the Amen, till God’s work “appear” throughout these isles, till His way is known through all the earth, till the name of His holy child Jesus is adored by all the nations.
3. God is glorified and His work advances when His church is beautiful. “The beauty of the Lord “is the beauty of holiness, — that beauty which in the Lord Jesus himself shone with lustre so resplendent, and which ought to be repeated or reflected by every disciple. And it is towards this that all amongst us who love the Saviour, and who long for the extension of His kingdom, should very mainly direct their endeavours. Nothing can be sadder than when preaching or personal effort is contradicted and neutralized by the low or unlovely lives of those who pass for Christians; and nothing can go further to insure success than when prayer is carried out and preaching is seconded by the pure, holy, and benevolent lives of those who seek to follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth. Dear brethren, be this your effort. In loving meditation and affectionate communion draw near to the Lord Jesus. Draw so near that His glory will lighten upon you, and that His lineaments of grace and truth will be reflected by you. Draw so near that the beauty which for a great way round encircles Him will enclose and encompass you. And then the living evidence, the palpable demonstration will go further than a thousand arguments. The book may be shut and flung into a corner; the sermon may be forgotten, or the lay figure which was left in the pew whilst the inner man went back to the opera or took a run through his ledger, — that lay figure may never have listened to a single sentence: but when at last the day-dream dissolves, when the man is come to himself, he will say,” Yes, but it is real. There is in religion something more than forms or phrases. I have seen it. In the old disciple I have seen its
364 “A PEAYER OF MOSES, THE MAN OF GOD.”
mellow grandeur, — its meek, patient, unmurmuring majesty; in the deathbed of the young believer I have seen the love of life, the fear of death, absorbed in the hope full of immortality. In that sincere and solid comrade, so pestered and so persecuted, I have seen the might of sterling principle; in that helpmeet so rallied for her scruples, and often so obstructed in her well-meant efforts, I have seen the inexhaustible long-suffering and gentleness which God bestows on those who pray for it. These are saints; for I have seen them, and they were very beautiful. 0 God, be merciful to me a sinner.”