Psalm 119:83
"word" as testifying of Jesus. Here alone is the ground of comfort; and the more confidently we expect, the more patiently we will look.
Nor shall we ever look in vain. Sin will be rebuked. But restoration and acceptance are assured. We shall obtain—not the spurious comfort of delusion—but those wholesome comforts, founded upon the word of promise, and connected with contrition, peace, love, joy, and triumph. The gospel shows hell deserved, and heaven purchased thus combining conviction and faith. Indeed, conviction without faith, would be legal sorrow; as assurance without conviction would be gospel presumption. Paul's experience happily united both. Never was man at the same moment more exercised with conflict, and yet more established in assurance. Thus may we maintain our assurance as really in wrestling trouble as in exulting joy; honoring the Lord by an humble, patient spirit—in Bernard's resolution—'I will never come away from You without You'—in the true spirit of the wrestling patriarch, "I will not let You go, except You bless me."
But we sometimes seem to go "mourning without the sun," "shut up, and we cannot come forth"—straitened in our desires and expectations—doing little for the Lord—with little enjoyment in our own souls, and little apparent usefulness to the Church. At such seasons it is our clear duty and privilege to "wait upon the Lord, that hides His face from the house of Jacob, and to look for Him." "He waits that He may be gracious. He is a God of Judgment; and blessed are all those who wait for Him." He waits—not because He is reluctant to give, but that we may be fitted to receive.
Psalm 119:83
83. For I am become like a bottle in the smoke, yet do I not forget Your statutes.
What an affecting picture of misery! Not only were his patience and hope—but his very body, "dried up" by long-continued affliction.
This is he, who in the prime of youth was "ruddy and of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to,"—now shriveled up like a bottle of skin, hung up in the smoke! Such is the mark that the rod of "chastening" leaves on the body of humiliation. The soul is strengthened—the body withers—under the stroke.
What might naturally have been expected to have been the result of this lengthened exercise? Saul, under protracted trial, resorted to the devil for relief. An infidel nation took occasion from thence to throw off the yoke. Even a good man, under a few hours' trial, murmurs against God—no, even defends his murmuring. How did this man of God behave? When his soul was fainting, his hope in the word kept him from sinking. Under the further continuance of the trial, the same recollection gives him support—yet do I not forget Your statutes.
Now—Christian—do not expect a new way to heaven to be made for you. Prepare for the cross. It may be—as with David—a heavy, longcontinued burden, and, should it come—look on it as your appointed trial of faith, and your training discipline for more enduring conflicts.
And remember that your determined resolution rather to pine away in affliction, than "make a way of escape" by sin—is the proof of the reality of His own grace in you, and of His faithful love towards you.
Think how honorably He manifests your relation to Christ, by causing "His sufferings to abound in you," and making you "bear in your body the marks of the Lord Jesus." And do you not thus realize, as you could not otherwise do, the sympathy of our High Priest, who was Himself "a root out of a dry ground, having no form nor loveliness, and no beauty that He should be desired—despised and rejected of men" to the end? Oh, what a supporting cordial to His afflicted people is the sympathy of this suffering, tempted Savior!
But to look at David, under his long-continued trials, preserving his recollection of the Lord's statutes—what a striking evidence of the presence of his God, and the sustaining power of his word! If we then
—blessed with much larger Scriptures than he—fail in deriving from
them the same support, it can only be, that we do not search them in a dependent, prayerful, and humble spirit—that we do not simply look for the revelation of Christ; to mark His glory, and to increase in the knowledge of Him. In this spirit we should have more to say of the comfort of remembering the Lord's statutes; and of their upholding influence, when all other stays were found as "the trust in the shadow of Egypt—shame and confusion."
Job's history strikingly illustrates both the trial and its sanctified results. When "scraping himself with a potsherd, and sitting down among the ashes,"—the temporary victim of Satanic power—he might well have taken up the complaint, I am become like a bottle in the smoke. But when in this hour of temptation he was enabled to resist the tempter in the person of his own wife, and commit himself with implicit resignation into the hands of his faithful God, "What! shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?"— was not this the confidence—Yet do I not forget Your statutes?
This confidence is indeed an encouraging seal of the Lord's love to our souls. For we never should have remembered His statutes, had
He not written His covenant promises upon our hearts. And how much more honorable to our God is it than the desponding complaint, "The Lord has forsaken me, and my God has forgotten me!" Let us watch then against a proud sullenness under every little trial—such as the coldness of friends, the unkindness of enemies, or our Father's providential dispensations. How sinful to allow hard thoughts of Him, whose name and character, "without variableness or shadow of turning," is "Love!" A steady trust in the long and wearisome seasons of tribulation, is indeed "to glorify God in the fires." Nothing honors Him so much as this enduring, overcoming faith, persevering in despite of opposition, in destitution of all outward prospects of relief. It is when "against hope we believe in hope, not staggering at the promise of God through unbelief," that we are "strong in faith, giving glory to God."