EXPLANATORY NOTES AND QUAINT SAYINGS (2)

Verse 5.—How often have we experienced the literal truth of that verse, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning!” How heavily does any trouble weigh on us at night! Our wearied nerve and brain seem unable to bear up under the pressure. Our pulse throbs, and the fevered restless body refuses to help in the work of endurance. Miserable and helpless we feel; and passionately weep under the force of the unresisted attack. At last sleep comes. Trouble, temptation, whatever it be that strives to overcome us, takes the one step too far which overleaps its mark, and by sheer force drives our poor humanity beyond the present reach of further trial. After such a night of struggle, and the heavy sleep of exhaustion, we awake with a vague sense of trouble. Our thoughts gather, and we wonder over our own violence, as the memory of it returns upon us. What was it that seemed so hopeless—so dark? Why were we so helpless and despairing? Things do not look so now—sad indeed still, but endurable—hard, but no longer impossible—bad enough perhaps, but we despair no more. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” And so, when life with its struggles and toils and sins, bringing us perpetual conflict, ends at last in the fierce struggle of death, then God “giveth his beloved sleep.” They sleep in Jesus, and awake to the joy of a morning which shall know no wane—the morning of joy. The Sun of Righteousness is beaming on them. Light is now on all their ways. And they can only wonder when they recall the despair and darkness, and toil, and violence of their earthly life, and say, as they have often said on earth, “Weeping has endured only for the night, and now it is morning, and joy has come!” And our sorrows, our doubts, our difficulties, our long looks forward, with despair of enduring strength for so long a night of trial—Where are they? Shall we not feel as is so beautifully described in the words of one of our hymns—

Verse 5.—“Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Their mourning shall last but till morning. God will turn their winter’s night into a summer’s day, their sighing into singing, their grief into gladness, their mourning into music, their bitter into sweet, their wilderness into a paradise. The life of a Christian is filled up with interchanges of sickness and health, weakness and strength, want and wealth, disgrace and honour, crosses, and comforts, miseries and mercies, joys and sorrows, mirth and mourning; all honey would harm us, all wormwood would undo us; a composition of both is the best way in the world to keep our souls in a healthy constitution. It is best and most for the health of the soul that the south wind of mercy, and the north wind of adversity, do both blow upon it; and though every wind that blows shall blow good to the saints, yet certainly their sins die most, and their graces thrive best, when they are under the drying, nipping north wind of calamity, as well as under the warm, cherishing south wind of mercy and prosperity.—Thomas Brooks.

Verse 5.—“Joy cometh in the morning.” The godly man’s joy “cometh in the morning,” when the wicked man’s goeth; for to him “the morning is even as the shadow of death.” Job xxiv. 17. He is not only afraid of reproof and punishment, but he grieves and suffers sufficiently, though nobody should know of his actions, for the impair and loss, and misspence of his strength and his time and his money.—Zachary Bogan.

Verse 5.—In the second half of the verse, “weeping” is personified, and represented by the figure of a wanderer, who leaves in the morning the lodging, into which he had entered the preceding evening. After him another guest arrives, namely, “joy.”—E. W. Hengstenberg.

Verse 5.—The princely prophet says plainly, “heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” As the two angels that came to Lot lodged with him for a night, and when they had despatched their errand, went away in the morning; so afflictions, which are the angels or the messengers of God. God sendeth afflictions to do an errand unto us; to tell us we forget God, we forget ourselves, we are too proud, too self-conceited, and such like; and when they have said as they were bid, then presently they are gone.—Thomas Playfere.

Verses 5-10.—When a man’s heart is set upon the creatures, there being thorns in them all, therefore if he will grasp too much of them, or too hard, he shall find it. God’s children are trained up so to it, that God will not let them go away with a sin; if they be too adulterously affected, they shall find a cross in such a thing. You may observe this in the thirtieth Psalm; there you may see the circle God goes in with his children. David has many afflictions, as appeareth by the fifth verse: I cried, and then God returned to me, and joy came. What did David then? “I said, I shall never be moved:” his heart grew wanton, but God would not let him go away so: “God turned away his face, and I was troubled.” At the seventh verse he is, you see, in trouble again: well, David cries again, at the eighth and tenth verses, and then God turned his mourning into joy again. And this to be his dealing you shall find in all the Scriptures; but because we find this his dealing set so close together in this Psalm, therefore I name it.—John Preston, D.D. (1587-1628), in “The Golden Scepter held forth to the Humble.”

Verse 6.—“In my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved.” Our entering upon a special service for God, or receiving a special favour from God, are two solemn seasons which Satan makes use of for temptation.... We are apt to get proud, careless, and confident, after or upon such employments and favours; even as men are apt to sleep or surfeit upon a full meal, or to forget themselves when they are advanced to honour. Job’s great peace and plenty made him, as he confesseth, so confident, that he concluded he should “die in his nest.” Chap. xxix. 18. David enjoying the favour of God in a more than ordinary measure, though he was more acquainted with vicissitudes and changes than most of men, grows secure in his apprehension that he “should never be moved;” but he acknowledgeth his mistake, and leaves it upon record as an experience necessary for others to take warning by, that when he became warm under the beams of God’s countenance, then he was apt to fall into security; and this it seems was usual with him in all such cases—when he was most secure he was nearest some trouble or disquiet. “Thou didst hide thy face”—and then to be sure the devil will show him his—“and I was troubled.” Enjoyments beget confidence; confidence brings forth carelessness; carelessness makes God withdraw, and gives opportunity to Satan to work unseen. And thus, as armies after victory growing secure, are oft surprised; so are we oft after our spiritual advancements thrown down.—Richard Gilpin.

Verse 6.—“In my prosperity.” בְּשַׁלְוִי The word denotes peace and tranquility, arising from an affluent, prosperous condition. When God had settled him quietly on the throne, he thought all his troubles were over, and that he should enjoy uninterrupted happiness; and that God “had made his mountain so strong, as that it should never be moved;” i.e., placed him as secure from all danger as though he had taken refuge upon an inaccessible mountain; or made his prosperity firm, and subject to no more alteration, than a mountain is liable to be removed out of its place; or, raised him to an eminent degree of honour and prosperity; a mountain, by its height, being a very natural representation of a very superior condition, remarkable for power, affluence, and dignity. He had taken the fortress of Mount Sion, which was properly his mountain, as he had fixed on it for his dwelling. It was strong by nature, and rendered almost impregnable by the fortifications he had added to it. This he regarded as the effect of God’s favour to him, and promised himself that his peace and happiness for the future should be as undisturbed and unshaken as Mount Sion itself.—Samuel Chandler.

Verse 6.—“In my prosperity.” Prosperity is more pleasant than profitable to us. Though in show it look like a fair summer, yet it is indeed a wasting winter, and spendeth all the fruit we have reaped in the harvest of sanctified affliction. We are never in greater danger than in the sunshine of prosperity. To be always indulged of God, and never to taste of trouble, is rather a token of God’s neglect than of his tender love.—William Struther.

Verse 7.—It is rare to receive much of this world, and not as the prodigal to go afar off; ’tis hard to keep close to God in prosperity, when we have much of this world to live upon and content ourselves with; to live upon God, and make him our content and stay, as if we had no other life nor livelihood but in him; we are very apt in such a case to contract a carnal frame, let go our hold of God, discustom ourselves to the exercise of faith, abate and estrange our affections from God. See how it was with David: “I said, I shall never be moved, thou hast made my mountain so strong.” I solaced myself on these outward accommodations, as if I needed no other support, strength, or content, and there were no fear of a change; no care now to make God my constant joy and stay, and reckon upon God only for my portion, and that I must follow him with a cross, and be conformed to my Saviour, in being crucified to the world. What comes of this? “Thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled;” namely, because he had too much indulged a life of sense. Children that are held up by their nurses’ hand, and mind not to feel their feet and ground when the nurses let them go, they fall, as if they had no feet or ground to stand upon. Or thus: we are like children, who, playing in the golden sunshine, and following their sport, stray so far from their father’s house, that night coming upon them ere they are aware, they are as it were lost, and full of fears, not knowing how to recover home. The world steals away our hearts from God, gives so few opportunities for the exercise of the life of faith, and such advantages to a life of sense, wears off the sense of our dependence on God, and need thereof, so that when we are put to it by affliction, we are ready to miscarry ere we can recover our weapon or hold. Faith is our cordial (Psalm xxvii. 13); now if it be not at hand (as in health, when we have no need of it, it use to be) we may faint ere we recover the use of it.—Elias Pledger’s Sermon in “The Morning Exercises,” 1677.

Verse 7.—“Thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.” What soul can be deserted and not be afflicted? Certainly his absence cannot but be lamented with greatest grief, whose presence the soul prizeth above all earthly joy; when the evidence of salvation is obscured, the light of God’s countenance darkened, the comforts of the Spirit detained, then the heavens appear not so clear, the promises taste not so sweet, the ordinances prove not so lively, yea, the clouds which hang over the soul gather blackness, doubts arise, fears overflow, terrors increase, troubles enlarge, and the soul becomes languishingly afflicted, even with all variety of disquietments.—Robert Mossom.

Verse 7.—“Thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.” A believer puts on the sackcloth of contrition, for having put off the garment of perfection. As the sugar-loaf is dissolved, and weeps itself way, when dipped in wine; so do our hearts melt under a sense of divine love.—William Secker.

Verse 7 (last clause).—No verse can more plainly teach us that glorious and comforting truth on which the mediæval writers especially love to dwell, that it is the looking, or not looking, of God upon his creature, that forms the happiness or the misery of that creature; that those secret springs of joy which sometimes seem to rise up of themselves, and with which a stranger intermeddleth not, are nothing but God’s direct and immediate looking on us; while the sorrow for which we cannot assign any especial cause—call it melancholy, or low spirits, or by whatever other name—is nothing but his turning away his face from us.—John Mason Neale.

Verse 7 (last clause).—Is spiritual desertion and the hiding of God’s face matter of affliction, and casting down to believers? Yes, yes; it quails their hearts, nothing can comfort them. “Thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled.” Outward afflictions do but break the skin, this touches the quick; they like rain fall only upon the tiles, this soaks into the house; but Christ brings to believers substantial matter of consolation against the troubles of desertion: he himself was deserted of God for a time, that they might not be deserted for ever.—John Flavel.