EXPLANATORY NOTES AND QUAINT SAYINGS (4)

Verse 14.—“He shot out his lightnings.” בְּרָקִים רָב. LXX ἀστραπὰς ἐπλήθυνε. Fulgura multiplicavit; Vulg. and so all the versions. He multiplied his thunderbolts; or, shot them out thick one after another; as the word properly signifies.

וַיְהֻמֵּם. And discomfited them, as we render the word; or rather, as I think it should be translated, and melted them; namely, the heavens.—Samuel Chandler.

Verse 14 (last clause).—It is written, “destroyed them,” because the Holy Ghost would not so much as name, by the mouth of his prophet, the evil spirits to whom he refers.—Euthymius Zigabenus (1125) quoted by J. M. Neale.

Verse 15.—“The foundations of the world were discovered;” i.e., such large and deep chasms, or apertures, were made by the violence of the earthquake, as one might almost see the very foundations, or as Jonah calls them, the bottoms, or rather, the extremities of the mountains, in the bottom of the sea. Jonah ii. 6.—Samuel Chandler.

Verse 15.—The Lord interposed with the same notoriety of his presence, as when the waters of the sea were driven back by a strong east wind, and the deep turned into dry ground (Ex. xiv. 21, 22), to give the Israelites a safe passage out of their thraldom, and to drown the Egyptians.—Henry Hammond.

Verse 16.—“He sent from above,” etc. He “sent” angels, or assistance otherwise.—Matthew Poole.

Verse 16.—“He took.” God’s grasp cannot be broken. None can pluck his chosen out of his hand.—William S. Plumer.

Verse 16.—“Drew me out of many waters.” This hath reference to Moses’ case, who was “drawn out of the water,” and thereupon called Mosheh (Ex. ii. 10); that word Mashah is used here by David, and nowhere else in Scripture. “Waters,” signify troubles, and sometimes multitudes of people.—H. Ainsworth.

Verse 18.—“They prevented me in the day of my calamity;” i.e., came on me suddenly unawares, when I was unprovided and helpless, and must have destroyed me had not God upheld and supported me when I was in danger of perishing. God was to the Psalmist לְמִשֵׁעָן, for a staff to support him. What the staff is to one that is ready to fall, the means of recovering and preserving him; that was God to David in the time of his extremity. For he several times preserved him from Saul, when he, David, thought his destruction by him almost unavoidable. See 1 Sam. xxiii. 26, 27.—Samuel Chandler.

Verse 18.—“They prevented me in the day of my calamity: but the Lord was my stay.” When Henry the Eighth had spoken and written bitterly against Luther; saith Luther, Tell the Henries, the bishops, the Turks, and the devil himself, do what they can, we are the children of the kingdom, worshipping of the true God, whom they, and such as they, spit upon and crucified. And of the same spirit were many martyrs. Basil affirms of the primitive saints, that they had so much courage and confidence in their sufferings, that many of the heathens seeing their heroic zeal and constancy, turned Christians.—Charles Bradbury.

Verse 20.—“The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me.” We must stand our ground, and be stiff for ourselves against all misjudgings. It is good to be zealously affected always in a good matter, whether it respects the glory of God immediately and alone, or whether it respects the credit of our brethren or our own. To desire to be famous in the world, and as those giants in the old world (Gen. vi. 4), men of renown, or, as the original text hath it, men of name, is a very great vanity; but to protect and preserve our good name is a great and necessary duty.—Joseph Caryl.

Verse 21.—“I have not wickedly departed from my God;” that is, with a purpose and resolution of heart to continue in a way of sinning; and that is the property of sincerity. A man indeed may be overtaken and surprised by a temptation, but it is not with a resolution to forsake God and to cleave unto the sin, or rest in it. He will not sleep in it, spare it, or favour it; that is, to do wickedly against God, to have a double heart and a double eye; to look upon two objects, partly at God and partly at sin; so to keep God, as to keep some sin also, as it is with all false-hearted men in the world. They look not upon God alone, let them pretend to religion never so much, yet they look not unto God alone, but upon something else together with God; as Herod regarded John, but regarded his Herodias more; and the young man in the gospel, comes to Christ, yet he looks after his estate; and Judas followed in Christ, yet looks after the bag; this is to depart wickedly from God.—William Strong, 1650.

Verse 21 (last clause).—Although a godly man may break a particular commandment again and again against knowledge, yet his knowledge never suffers him to go so far as to venture knowingly to break the covenant of grace with God, and to depart from him; when he hath gone on so far in a sin as he comes to apprehend he must break with God, and lose him if he goes on any further, this apprehension stays him, stops and brings him back again; he may presumptuously venture (though seldom; and always to his cost) to commit an act of sin against knowledge, because he may withal think, that by one act the covenant is not broken, nor all friendship and love hazarded between God and him, nor his interest in the state of grace, nor God, quite lost by it, though he may well think he would be displeased with him; but if he should begin to allow himself in it, and to continue to go on again and again in it, then he knows the covenant would be broken, it cannot stand with grace; and when this apprehension comes, and comes in strongly, he cannot sin against it, for this were to cast away the Lord, and to depart wickedly from him, now so he doth not. So David, though he sinned highly and presumptuously, yet says he, “I have not departed wickedly from my God;” that is, I have not so far departed from him as though I apprehended I should utterly lose my interest in him, yet I would go on. No; for he is my God, there lies the consideration that kept him from departing from him. So Psalm xliv. 17, “We have not dealt falsely in thy covenant,” says the church there. Many acts of displeasing him may pass and be ventured, but if the holy soul thinks that the covenant lay at stake, that he and God must utterly part and break off, thus far he will never go.—Thomas Goodwin.

Verses 22, 23.—An unsound soul will not take notice of such a precept as opposeth his special sin; such a precept must go for a blank, which the soul throws by, and will not think of, but as conscience now and then puts him in mind of it, whether he will or no. But it is not so with a man in whom sincerity is: that precept which doth most oppose that sin to which he is most inclined, he labours to obey as well as any other. An unsound soul sets so many of God’s statutes before him, as rulers to walk by, as suits with himself and the times, and no more. Such precepts as oppose his special corruptions, or displease the times, and so expose him to suffering, these he baulks and puts away, as David here saith, and calls them as the rotten Scribes and Pharisees were wont to do, “least commandments,” small things not to be regarded; which rottenness Christ took up roundly in those ironical words, “Whosoever shall break one of these least commandments, shall be called the least in the kingdom of God.” Godly sincerity makes no difference of greatest and least between the precepts of God, but sets all before a man as a rule to walk by, and makes the soul laborious to observe all. “Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect unto all thy commandments.” Psalm cxix. 6.—Nicholas Lockyer, 1649.

Verse 23.—“I was also upright before him, and I kept myself from mine iniquity.” He who says, “Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God; yea, thy law is within my heart;” and who by the apostle, in the tenth chapter of the epistle to the Hebrews, is identified with Jesus Christ, says also (verse 12), “innumerable evils have compassed me about; mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up: they are more than the hairs of mine head; therefore mine heart faileth me;” and in the forty-first Psalm, “He whose familiar friend, to whom he had committed a trust, who ate of his bread, lifted up his heel against him,” whom our Lord in the thirteenth chapter of the gospel of John identifies with himself, says (verse 4), “Lord, be merciful to me: heal my soul for I have sinned;” I am guilty “before thee.” The difficulty is removed by the undoubtedly true principle—the principle which, above all others, gives Christianity its peculiar character—“He who knew no sin, was made sin;” “On his righteous servant, Jehovah made to fall the iniquities of us all.” In this sense, “innumerable iniquities compassed him,” the iniquities made to fall on him made “his” as to their liabilities—by divine appointment laid hold of him. In the sense of culpa—blame-worthiness—he had no sin. In the sense of reatus—liability to the penal effects of sin—never had any one so much sin to bear as he—“He bore the sins of many.”—John Brown.

Verse 23.—“I was upright before him.” Hence observe:—first, that a godly man may have his heart upright and perfect even in the imperfection of his ways. Secondly, a man that is sincere is in God’s account a perfect man: sincerity is the truth of all grace, the highest pitch that is to be attained here. Thirdly, sincerity of heart gives a man boldness even in the presence of God, notwithstanding many failings. The Lord doth “charge his angels with folly,” how much more man that “dwells in a house of clay”? Job. iv. David, whose faith failed, and who had said, “I shall one day perish by the hand of Saul,” and whose tongue had faltered also to Abimelech, the priest; three or four several lies he had told; yet David can say to God, that he was perfect with him for all that. It is a strange boldness that the saints have in the presence of God by virtue of the new covenant. All their sins shall be laid open at the last day as a cancelled bond, that they wonder how they shall look upon them and not blush; but the same spirit of sonship that shall give them perfect boldness then, doth give them boldness in a great measure even now in this life; that they shall be able to say, “Neither height nor depth,” etc., nothing “shall separate us from the love of Christ.”—William Strong.

Verse 23.—“I was upright,” etc. An upright Christian will not allow himself in any known sin; he dares not touch the forbidden fruit. Gen. xxxix. 9. “How then can I do this great wickedness, and sin against God?” Though it be a complexion-sin, he disinherits it. There is no man but doth propend and incline more to one sin than another; as in the body there is one humour predominant, or as in the hive there is one master-bee; so in the heart there is one master-sin; there is one sin which is not only near to a man as the garment, but dear to him as the right eye. This is Satan’s fort-royal, all his strength lies here; and though we beat down his out-works, gross sin, yet if we let him hold this fort of complexion-sin, it is as much as he desires. The devil can hold a man as fast by this one link, as by a whole chain of vices. The fowler hath the bird fast enough by one wing. Now, an upright Christian will not indulge himself in this complexion-sin: “I was upright before him, and kept myself from mine iniquity.” An upright Christian takes the sacrificing knife of mortification, and runs it through his dearest sin. Herod did many things, but there was one sin so dear to him, that he would sooner behead the prophet, than behead that sin. Herod would have a gap for his incest. An upright heart is not only angry with sin (which may admit of reconciliation), but hates sin; and if he sees this serpent creeping into his bosom, the nearer it is the more he hates it.—Thomas Watson.

Verse 23.—“I kept myself.” Kept himself! Who made man his own keeper? It’s the Lord that is his keeper: he is the keeper of Israel, and the preserver of man. If a man cannot keep himself from sorrow, how is he able to keep himself from sin? God indeed in our first conversion works upon us as he did upon the earth, or Adam’s body in paradise, before he breathed a soul into it, and made it a living creature; such a power as Christ put forth on Lazarus in his grave, for we are “dead in trespasses and sins;” but yet being living he must walk and act of himself, the Lord will have us to co-operate together with him, for we are built upon Christ, not as dead, but as “living stones.” 1 Pet. ii. 5. The grace whereby we are made alive is his, and the power is his; he it is that works in us both to will and to do, when we perform anything; and yet by his grace we do it also; ille facit ut nos faciamus, quæ præcepit (Augustine).—William Strong.