Psalms 117–118

Psalm cxvii. The consciousness of grace and favour enlarges the heart. Israel never thought of calling the nations to praise when under the law. But now that mercy has brought blessing, they do. It is the sentiment of what God is to us, the thankful enjoyment of it as of God, which opens the mouth and heart by the knowledge of Him. It calls others to enjoy His goodness, too. It is an assimilation to the divine nature and privilege in the knowledge of love; only, as it should be, we learn love by knowing its exercise towards ourselves.

In Psalm cxviii. we are still on the ground of final blessing, so that the government of God in the midst of trial is only referred to in the past. It is Israel’s recognition of the divine ways and of Christ Himself when blessing is come, owning that Jehovah’s mercy has lasted out all their ways and endured for ever. I notice only the aspect of circumstances as applicable to us at all times. God is for His people; but men, all men, may be against them. One has only to trust the Lord, and victory remains with faith. But in this, where evil has to be governmentally corrected, Satan seeks, Satan has his part. How truly it was so in leading all men against Christ; how fully so in the last days of Antichrist’s power, I need not say; but as the book of Job shows, it is so in the various chastenings God. Evil on the conscience, or even unconsciously in the heart, gives him a handle, sometimes a terrible one, against the soul even where it is upright. Rest is found only in self-judgment and confession of what gives him a handle. Satan would seek to make us fall thus; but behind all this the band of God is to be seen, as in Job’s case. “Thou hast chastened me sore, but thou hast not given me over unto death.” It is for blessing. One only could declare, “The prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in me; “but with us, all is love and blessing, to make us know ourselves, and then enjoy His blessing (compare Deut. viii.), and fully own what Christ is according to His victory and glory, in the counsels of God. We must be thus exercised, the ground ploughed and ‘harrowed, but the result is —” this is the day which the Lord hath made.” No doubt this is the final blessing of the earth when Christ comes, but in every exercise of a soul brought to the point of uprightness with Cod, the principle is made good; the gates of righteousness into the joy of communion, so to speak, are opened. And the mercy to which “we had no title we own to be the Lord’s doing, and all is light. The direct application to the remnant is evidently the just application of the psalm, but we connect this great display of God’s government with the details in which it applies to us.