Bible Commentaries

SWEET THOUGHTS OF GOD

‘My meditation of Him shall be sweet: I will be glad in the Lord.’

Psalms 104:34

Meditation is the calm and quiet dwelling of the mind upon a great fact till that fact has time to get into the mind and pervade it with its influence. Meditation is the quiet thinking on single truths, the steady setting of attentive thought drawn away from other things and concentrated on this alone.

I. The words of the text imply a personal relationship: that is, the relation of the human person who thinks towards a Divine Person on whom he meditates. All through it is the personal, living God whom the Psalmist saw, the God who thought, and felt, and schemed, and ruled, and loved, and with whom the Psalmist himself was brought into relation. Not an abstract or distant Deity is He who calls out the adoration of His human creatures, but One in whom we live, and move, and have our being round about our path and about our bed, and searching out all our ways.

II. Consider whence comes the sweetness of this exercise of the head and heart.—(1) It is sweet to think of the love of Christ, and especially to realise that we, with all our conscious unworthiness, are the objects of it. (2) It is sweet to dwell on the love-tokens of our absent Saviour. (3) It is sweet to anticipate the time when we shall meet Him, ‘Whom, having not seen, we love; in Whom, though now we see Him not, yet believing, we rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory.’

—Rev. Canon Garbett.

Illustration

‘Of Him Whom I have forgotten, neglected, braved? Can it be sweet to meditate on Him? It is sweet to meditate on things we love, on things we delight in—on those from whom we expect benefit, and from whom we have deserved it. But how can it be sweet to a sinner to meditate on his God, the great obstacle to his safety and his happiness, without Whom he might indulge his propensities and be at rest as to the consequences? This is impossible—while there is a debt uncancelled between us and our God, it cannot be sweet to us to think of Him.’