Bible Commentaries

The Biography of a Soul

Psalm 106:12-14

I. They believed His words. I venture to say there is not a soul who cannot recall, at least once or twice, such hours of vivid deliverance, when God's power thrust itself into your life and made clear your path before you. It may require perhaps a certain effort on your part to remember just at once such times of Divine interposition, but they are there none the less. They come in different ways.

(a) Perhaps it was that day when some one dearer to you than life itself was lying on the borderland of death. You just prayed with all the passion of a soul that shrank from the anguish of bereavement, that God would hear you and give you back, even for a little while, the life that seemed to be slipping from your grasp. Then the miracle took place.

(b) Or it may be that this Divine interposition in life comes through deliverance from some great temptation.

(c) Or it may be that God reveals Himself in a human life in saving from some great personal peril.

II. Most of us who have experienced such deliverance have written the second chapter in that spiritual biography, the chapter of praise. I do not know anything more beautiful than he who has thus come out of such a deliverance writing in his deeds of love and charity his record of gratitude.

III. But then comes the other side of all this, the story of forgetfulness and indifference. They believed His words, then sang His praise, but they soon forgot Him. Literally, they made haste to forget Him. The vividness of their faith was obliterated by the suddenness of their indifference.

IV. Forgetfulness passed by a natural stage into apostasy. When the psalm of gratitude ceased, the discord of sin began. The soul must feed on something. It craved other food. Its passions demanded other sustenance. So inevitably sin creates an unnatural and unsatisfied appetite. It begins by making us forget God and it ends by making us crave for that which makes the very thought of God distasteful. So the tragic schism between the soul and its Maker is rendered complete.

—D. S. Mackay, The Religion of the Threshold, p310.

Reference.—CVI:15.—R. M. Benson, Redemption, p30.

Man's Rejection of God

Psalm 106:24

Whatever diversity of opinion upon the sacred significance of life may be represented in this congregation, there is at least one thing upon which all serious-minded souls will agree, and that Psalm 106:24-25

This Psalm was written when Israel had a long history stretching far back into the past. The particular episode brought before us in these verses is the refusal of the children of Israel to advance and take possession of the Promised Land. There is one parallel which is frequently drawn between ourselves and the ancient Israelites. Canaan was to the Israelites what heaven is to us.

I. There is a Pleasant Land nearer to us than that which is divided from us by death. A Pleasant Land which we might possess now if we had the courage and made the necessary effort. Much that is meant to be ours now we push from us, and locate somewhere in the afterlife. The Christians of the Dispersion really knew something of the "joy unspeakable and full of glory". We find Wesley testifying to what he had seen—men, women, and children saved from sin, and filled with warm, holy feelings. Christian experience has been shared by many who had no genius of any kind.

II. Let us be real then, and ask ourselves what efforts were necessary to enter this Pleasant Land.

(a) Inwardly we should have to overcome our sins, our sinful ways of thinking or speaking, our sloth, despondency from past failures, the deadening weight of routine, acquiescence in what we are.

(b) Outwardly, too, we have our difficulties. Some may fear social coolness, ridicule heard or suspected. We have often heard exhortations to greater earnest. ness, and have approved. Has not our habitual sloth interposed between the approving judgment and the will to do? As Israel murmured "in the tents" so we excuse our sloth by what we are and have been.

III. But besides our contempt of the Pleasant Land of Christian experience another reason for our failure is unbelief. Such unbelief is fashionable. When Christianity was young Christian joy and exultation were then real things. But in these later ages our religion is a sober thing, and it is well if we attain peace. All the spiritual experiences of the New Testament, then, are real, and are possible now. What is begun here is perfected there.

—P. J. Maclagan, The Gospel View of Things, p23.

Their Inventions

Psalm 106:29

How often does the word "inventions" occur in the holy record? It seems quite a modern word, but in reality what is there that is modern? The whole text reads: "Thus"—as a thing done over and over again—"Thus they provoked Him to anger with their inventions," their tricks, their small novelties, their empty and futile devices. We do not make any graven images now; still we may be credited with inventions, as we shall presently see. What are these inventions, under what name soever they may flourish amongst us? They are attempts to do without God, to put substitutes instead of the living Father, to displace the spiritual and ineffable by something that we can see and handle.

I. What are these inventions? They are attempts to supplement God. The Israelites did not wish to dethrone Jehovah. It would have struck them as a very curious suggestion if you had charged them with a desire to get rid of God; they would have replied that they had no such desire or intention, but they would endeavour to supplement the majesty of the Eternal; something that was nearer to their own hands they would like to be able to approach. It is so difficult to take in eternity, it was never fitted to the human nostril; and so difficult to take in infinity, it was never shaped and adapted to the human eye. So they would have something supplemental, something subsidiary, something of the nature of a deputized Jehovah. They, poor innocent creatures, did not want to unseat the King, they wanted to have some kinglings to whom they could talk in a way more or less familiar. These were part of the "inventions" of old Israel.

II. What has been the opinion of God about all these inventions? That opinion is given in the text—"They provoked Him to anger with their inventions: and the plague brake in upon them". God has cleansing days, great ventilating shafts which He opens now and then in the cumbrous process of all this human evolution; so He calls in the plague, and says: "They are past entreaty, pray for them no more, let the plague go". And then we wonder where the plague came from, and what we have done to provoke this uproar and upset of the ordinary commonplaces of life. There is always a moral reason even behind an earthquake.

III. Now "their inventions" sometimes take curious forms and expressions—as lots, coincidences, omens. Sometimes we have given way to these tricky and apparently innocent temptations. An omen! I heard a voice, I heard no words, but I heard a voice, and it seemed to be a calling, an inviting, seductive voice; something I am sure is going to happen, because the omen was so distinct and so delightful and impressive. "Man was made upright, but he sought out many inventions." We are led away from simplicity; we are led away from restful truths. We tempt God.

IV. What is God's view of all such invention? We have that view in the text, and in Psalm 99:8 we have "Thou tookest vengeance of their inventions". He wrung their necks, and dashed them to the dust; He has swept out all these god-houses and invention-museums and ground them to powder, and He will do so again, and all your lots and omens and coincidences and shadows and table-rappings and table-turnings and all your miserable inventions, which are lies from the beginning to the end, because they spring out of a lie. The Apostle in Romans 1:30 says, "They are inventors of evil things". Good things do not need in venting; evil things suggest themselves for incarnation and expression, and the evil things sometimes have falsehood enough in them to say, If you embody us, if you incarnate us, you will do a world of good by showing what evil really is if properly interpreted. You know the old fable in the writings of Erasmus in which the tempted man asks for a dark place, for a more hidden place, and when he gets to the place which he cannot get beyond he says to the woman-devil, Can God see us here? That one question was like a lightning flash that cut the darkness in pieces and made midnight brilliant as noonday. We cannot bury ourselves out of God's sight; He is as familiar with the bottomless pit as with the immeasurable heights of heaven.

Then whence is the cleansing? There is only one answer to that inquiry. Only one power can cleanse the heart and bring us back to holiness, simplicity, and real sonship in the household of God. All this has to come out of us by blood, by the precious blood, by the redeeming, atoning, priestly blood of the Son of God.

—Joseph Parker, City Temple Pulpit, vol. v. p136.

References.—CVI:45.—L. E. Shelford, The Church of the People, p128. CVI:48.—J. Percival, Some Helps for School Life, p177. CVI.—International Critical Commentary, vol. ii. p339. CVII:9.—W. G. Rutherford, The Key of Knowledge, p256. CVII:14.—F. D. Maurice, Sermons, vol. iii. p149. CVII:17-20.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxxi. No1824. CVII:19.—E. A. Askew, Sermons Preached in Greystoke Church, p42. CVII:21.—J. Baldwin Brown, Christian World Pulpit, vol. vi. pp312 , 375. CVII:23.—S. Gregory, How to Steer a Ship, p91.