Bible Commentaries

LISTENING TO GOD

‘I will hear what God the Lord will speak.’

Psalms 85:8

It is not too much to say that whoever will resolve to listen as David listened will hear what David heard. Only determine, ‘I will hear what God the Lord will speak,’ and ‘He will speak peace.’ God never disappoints a really attentive hearer.

I. God has always something to say to us.—We only miss it either because we do not believe that He is going to speak, or because we are not quiet enough. This is frequently the reason of a sickness or a deep sorrow. God has something to say to us. He makes a calm, He settles the rush of life, that He may speak. The Shepherd draws the hurdles closer that His sheep, being nearer to Him, may the better hear the Shepherd’s voice.

II. There are few of us who do not know what these times are when God has come very near.—They are very critical times; great issues hang upon them: they will weigh heavily in the balances of ‘the great account of life.’ From these high-wrought feelings there will be a reaction. The moment you become earnest for good, Satan will become earnest to stop you. He who had read life better than almost any man who ever lived saw the need of the caution, ‘He will speak peace unto His people, and to His saints: but let them not turn again to folly.’

III. The expression, ‘turn again to folly,’ may mean one of three things.—Either all sin is folly, or you may understand by it the particular sin of those who return to the vanities of the world, or you may take it to imply that a relapse into what is wrong has such a distorting influence on the mind, and so perverts the judgment and darkens the intellect, that both by natural consequence and judicial retribution the condition of a person who goes on in sin after the strivings of the Holy Ghost and after the manifestations of God’s peace becomes emphatically ‘folly.’

IV. Peace, the peace of Christ, is a delicate plant.—Do not expose it. Do not trifle with it, but lay it up in your heart’s closest affections. Watch it. Deal tenderly with it. It is your life.

—Rev. James Vaughan.

Illustrations

(1) ‘This eighth verse suggests a duty which we are too prone to forget. Be quiet, O Christian heart! when thou hast prayed. Listen to what the Lord God shall speak to thee. Thou wilt hear a still, small voice in thine heart, for God will speak peace. How true this is! God speaks Peace of Jesus Christ to the careworn worried one, to the burdened and depressed one. Listen, Oh listen! The voice is very still and gentle; but it thrills thy deepest nature, and produces a calm like that which spread over the troubled waters, when Jesus arose in the tempest-driven bark and said, “Peace, be still.” Yes, dear soul, His salvation is nigh thee—nearer than thy enemies, nearer than thy anxieties. And His voice of peace is the precursor of His arm of saving power.’

(2) ‘Psalm eighty-five appears to have been a temple hymn of the young colony of the returned, the first seven verses being intended to be chanted by the worshippers, and the remainder by the priests as an answer from God to the prayers of His people. It opens by a tender acknowledgment of His goodness in permitting the return, which showed that He had forgiven their past and laid aside His anger with them. Yet they felt that they needed, even now—as their prophets, such as Haggai and Zechariah, told them—a great revival of their first love and zeal.’