by Charles Spurgeon
17. Deal bountifully with thy servant,
that I may live, and keep thy
word.
18. Open thou mine eyes, that I
may behold wondrous things out
of thy law.
19. I am a stranger in the earth:
hide not thy commandments from
me.
20. My soul breaketh for the longing
that it hath unto thy
judgments at all times.
21. Thou hast rebuked the proud
that are cursed, which do err
from thy commandments.
22. Remove from me reproach and
contempt; for I have kept thy
testimonies.
23. Princes also did sit and speak
against me: but thy servant did
meditate in thy statutes.
24. Thy testimonies also are my delight and my counselors.
In this section the trials of the
way appear to be manifest to the Psalmist’s
mind, and he prays accordingly
for the help which will meet his case, As in
the last eight verses he prayed
as a youth newly come into the world, so
here he pleads as a servant, and
a pilgrim, who growingly finds himself to
be a stranger in an enemy’s country.
His appeal is to God alone, and his
prayer is specially direct and
personal. He speaks with the Lord as a man
speaketh with his friend.
17. “Deal bountifully with thy servant,
that I may live, and keep thy
word.”
“Deal bountifully with thy servant.”
He takes pleasure in owning his
duty to God, and counts it the
joy of his heart to be in the service of his
God. Out of his condition he makes
a plea, for a servant has some hold
upon a master; but in this case
the wording of the plea shuts out the idea of
legal claim, since he seeks bounty
rather than reward. Let my wage be
according to thy goodness, and
not according to my merit. Reward me
according to the largeness of thy
liberality, and not according to the
scantiness of my service. The hired
servants of our Father have all of them
bread enough and to spare, and
he will not leave one of his household to
perish with hunger. If the Lord
will only treat us as he treats the least of his
servants we may be well content;
for all his true servants are sons, princes
of the blood, heirs of life eternal.
David felt that his great needs required a
bountiful provision, and that his
little desert would never earn such a
supply; hence he must throw himself
upon God’s grace, and look for the
great things he needed from the
great goodness of the Lord. He begs for a
liberality of grace, after the
fashion of one who prayed, “O Lord, thou
must give me great mercy or no
mercy, for little mercy will not serve my
turn.”
“That I may live.” Without abundant
mercy he could not live. It takes
great grace to keep a saint alive.
Even life is a gift of divine bounty to such
undeserving ones as we are. Only
the Lord can keep us in being, and it is
mighty grace which preserves to
us the life which we have forfeited by our
sin. It is right to desire to live,
it is meet to pray to live, it is just to ascribe
prolonged life to the favor of
God. Spiritual life, without which this natural
life is mere existence, is also
to be sought of the Lord’s bounty; for it is the
noblest work of divine grace, and
in it the bounty of God is gloriously
displayed. The Lord’s servants
cannot serve him in their own strength, for
they cannot even live unless his
grace abounds towards them.
“And keep thy word.” This should
be the rule, the object, and the joy of
our life. We may not wish to live
and sin; but we may pray to live and
keep God’s word. Being is a poor
thing if it be not well-being. Life is only
worth keeping while we can keep
God’s word; indeed, there is no life in
the highest sense apart from holiness:
life while we break the law is but a
name to live.
The prayer of this verse shows that
it is only through divine, bounty or
grace that we can live as faithful
servants of God, and manifest obedience
to his commands. If we give God
service it must be because he gives us
grace. We work for him because
he works in us. Thus we may make a
chain out of the opening verses
of the three first octaves of this psalm:
verse 1 blesses the holy man, verse
9 asks how we can attain to such
holiness, and verse 17 traces such
holiness to its secret source, and shows
us how to seek the blessing. The
more a man prizes holiness, and the more
earnestly he strives after it,
the more will he be driven towards God for
help therein; for he will plainly
perceive that his own strength is
insufficient, and that he cannot
even so much as live without the bounteous
assistance of the Lord his God.
18. “Open thou mine eyes, that I
may behold wondrous things out of thy
law.”
“Open thou mine eyes.” This is a
part of the bountiful dealing which he
has asked for; no bounty is greater
than that which benefits our person, our
soul, our mind, and benefits it
in so important an organ as the eye. It is far
better to have the eyes opened
than to be placed in the midst of the noblest
prospects and remain blind to their
beauty. “That I may behold wondrous
things out of thy law.” Some men
can perceive no wonders in the gospel,
but David felt sure that there
were glorious things in the law: he had not
half the Bible, but he prized it
more than some men prize the whole. He
felt that God had laid up great
beauties and bounties in his word, and he
begs for power to perceive, appreciate,
and enjoy the same. We need not
so much that God should give us
more benefits, as the ability to see what
he has given.
The prayer implies a conscious darkness,
a dimness of spiritual vision, a
powerlessness to remove that defect,
and a full assurance that God can
remove it. It shows also that the
writer knew that there were vast treasures
in the word which he had not yet
fully seen, marvels which he had not yet
beheld, mysteries which he had
scarcely believed. The Scriptures teem with
marvels; the Bible is wonder-land;
it not only relates miracles, but it is itself
a world of wonders. Yet what are
these to closed eyes? And what man can
open his own eyes, since he is
born blind? God himself must reveal
revelation to each heart. Scripture
needs opening, but not one half so much
as our eyes do; the veil is not
on the book, but on our hearts. What perfect
precepts, what precious promises,
what priceless privileges are neglected
by us, because we wander among
them like blind men among the beauties
of nature, and they are to us as
a landscape shrouded in darkness!
The Psalmist had a measure of spiritual
perception, or he would never have
known that there were wondrous
things to be seen, nor would he have
prayed, “Open thou mine eyes”;
but what he had seen made him long for
a clearer and wider sight. This
longing proved the genuineness of what he
possessed, for it is a test mark
of the true knowledge of God that it causes
its possessor to thirst for deeper
knowledge.
David’s prayer in this verse is
a good sequel to verse 10, which
corresponds to it in position in
its octave: there he said, “O let me not
wander”; and who so apt to wander
as a blind man? and there, too, he
declared, “With my whole heart
have I sought thee”; and hence the desire
to see the object of his search.
Very singular are the interlacings of the
toughs of the huge tree of this
psalm, which has many wonders even within
itself if we have opened eyes to
mark them.
19. “I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.”
“I am a stranger in the earth.”
This is meant for a plea. By divine
command men are bound to be kind
to strangers, and what God commands
in others he will exemplify in
himself. The Psalmist was a stranger for
God’s sake, else had he been as
much at home as worldlings are: he was
not a stranger to God, but a stranger
to the world, a banished man so long
as he was out of heaven. Therefore
he pleads, “Hide not thy
commandments from me.” If these
are gone, what have I else? Since
nothing around me is mine, what
can I do if I lose thy word? Since none
around me know or care to know
the way to thyself, what shall I do if I fail
to see thy commands, by which alone
I can guide my steps to the land
where thou dwellest? David implies
that God’s commands were his solace
in his exile: they reminded him
of home, and they showed him the way
thither, and therefore he begged
that they might never be hidden from him,
by his being unable either to understand
them or to obey them. If spiritual
light be withdrawn, the command
is hidden, and this a gracious heart
greatly deprecates. What would
be the use of opened eyes if the best object
of sight were hidden from their
view? While we wander here we can
endure all the ills of this foreign
land with patience, if the word of God is
applied to our hearts by the Spirit
of God; but if the heavenly things which
make for our peace were hid from
our eyes, we should be in an evil case —
in fact, we should be at sea without
a compass, in a desert without a guide,
in an enemy’s country without a
friend.
This prayer is a supplement to “Open
thou mine eyes,” and as the one
prays to see, the other deprecates
the negative of seeing, namely the
command being hidden, and so out
of sight. We do well to look at both
sides of the blessing we are seeking,
and to plead for it from every point of
view. The prayers are appropriate
to the characters mentioned: as he is a
servant, he asks for opened eyes
that his eyes may ever be towards his
Lord, as the eyes of a servant
should be; as a stranger, he begs that he may
not be strange to the way in which
he is to walk towards his home. In each
case his entire dependence is upon
God alone.
Note how the third of the second
octave (11) has the same keyword as this
third of the third octave: “Thy
word have I hid,” “Hide not thy
commandments from me.” This invites
a meditation upon the different
senses of hiding in and hiding
from.
20. “My soul breaketh for the longing
that it hath unto thy judgments at
all times.” True godliness lies
very much in desires. As we are not what
we shall be, so also we are not
what we would be. The desires of gracious
men after holiness are intense;
or they cause a wear of heart, a straining of
the mind, till it feels ready to
snap with the heavenly pull. A high value of
the Lord’s commandment leads to
a pressing desire to know and to do it,
and this so weighs upon the soul
that it is ready to break in pieces under
the crush of its own longings.
What a blessing it is when all our desires are
after the things of God! We may
well long for such longings.
God’s judgments are his decisions
upon points which else had been in
dispute. Every precept is a judgment
of the highest court upon a point of
action, an infallible and immutable
decision upon a moral or spiritual
question. The word of God is a
code of justice from which there is no
appeal.
“This is the Judge which ends the
strife
Where wit and reason fail;
Our guide through devious paths
of life,
Our shield when doubts assail.”
David had such reverence for the
Word, and such a desire to know it, and
to be conformed to it, that his
longings caused him a sort of heartbreak,
which he here pleads before God.
Longing is the soul of praying, and when
the soul longs till it breaks,
it cannot be long before the blessing will be
granted. The most intimate communion
between the soul and its God is
carried on by the process described
in the text. God reveals his will, and
our heart longs to be conformed
thereto. God judges, and our heart
rejoices in the verdict. This is
fellowship of heart most real and thorough.
Note well that our desire after
the mind of God should be constant; we
should feel holy longings “at all
times.” Desires which cart be put off
and on like our garments are at
best but mere wishes, and possibly they are
hardly true enough to be called
by that name, — they are temporary
emotions born of excitement, and
doomed to die when the heat which
created them has cooled down. He
who always longs to know and do the
right is the truly right man. His
judgment is sound, for he loves all God’s
judgments, and follows them with
constancy. His times shall be good, since
he longs to be good and to do good
at all times.
Remark how this fourth of the third
eight chimes with the fourth of the
fourth eight. “My soul breaketh;”
“My soul melteth.” There is surely
some recondite poetic art about
all this, and it is well for us to be careful in
studying what the Psalmist was
so careful in composing.
21. “Thou hast rebuked the proud
that are cursed, which do err from thy
commandments.”
“Thou hast rebuked the proud that
are cursed.” This is one of God’s
judgments: he is sure to deal out
a terrible portion to men of lofty looks.
God rebuked Pharaoh with sore plagues,
and at the Red Sea “the
foundations of the world were discovered
at thy rebuke, O Lord.” In the
person of the haughty Egyptian
he taught all the proud that he will
certainly abase them. Proud men
are cursed men: nobody blesses them, and
they soon become a burden to themselves.
In itself, pride is a plague and
torment. Even if no curse came
from the law of God, there seems to be a
law of nature that proud men should
be unhappy men. This led David to
abhor pride; he dreaded the rebuke
of God and the curse of the law. The
proud sinners of his day were his
enemies, and he felt happy that God was
in the quarrel as well as he.
“Which do err from thy commandments.”
Only humble hearts are
obedient, for they alone will yield
to rule and government. Proud men’s
looks are high, too high to mark
their own feet and keep the Lord’s way.
Pride lies at the root of all sin:
if men were not arrogant they would not be
disobedient.
God rebukes pride even when the
multitudes pay homage to it, for he sees
it in rebellion against his own
majesty, and the seeds of yet further
rebellions. It is the sum of sin.
Men talk of an honest pride; but if they
were candid they would see that
it is of all sins the least honest, and the
least becoming in a creature, and
especially in a fallen creature: yet so little
do proud men know their own lame
condition under the curse of God, that
they set up to censure the godly,
and express contempt for them, as may be
seen in the next verse. They are
themselves contemptible, and yet they are
contemptuous towards their betters.
We may well love the judgments of
God, when we see them so decisively
leveled against the haughty upstarts
who would fain lord it over righteous
men; and we may well be of good
comfort under the rebukes of the
ungodly, since their power to hurt us is
destroyed by the Lord himself.
“The Lord rebuke thee” is answer enough
for all the accusations of men
or devils.
In the fifth of the former octave
the Psalmist wrote, “I have declared all
the judgments of thy mouth,” and
here he continues in the same strain,
giving a particular instance of
the Lord’s judgments against haughty rebels.
In the next two portions the fifth
verses deal with lying and vanity, and
pride is one of the most common
form of those evils.
22. “Remove from me reproach and
contempt; for I have kept thy
testimonies?”
“Remove from me reproach and contempt.”
These are painful things to
tender minds. David could bear
them for righteousness’ sake, but they
were a heavy yoke, and he longed
to be free from them. To be slandered,
and then to be despised in consequence
of the vile accusation, is a grievous
affliction. No one likes to be
traduced, or even to be despised. He who
says, “I care nothing for my reputation,”
is not a wise man; for in
Solomon’s esteem “a good name is
better than precious ointment.” The
best way to deal with slander is
to pray about it: God will either remove it
or remove the sting from it. Our
own attempts at clearing ourselves are
usually failures: we are like the
boy who wished to remove the blot from
his copy, and by his bungling made
it ten times worse. When we suffer
from a libel it is better to pray
about it than go to law over it, or even to
demand an apology from the inventor.
O ye who are reproached, take your
matters before the highest court,
and leave them with the Judge of all the
earth. God will rebuke your proud
accuser; be ye quiet, and let your
advocate plead your cause.
God rebukes pride even when the
multitudes pay homage to it, for he sees
it in rebellion against his own
majesty, and the seeds of yet further
rebellions. It is the sum of sin.
Men talk of an honest pride; but if they
were candid they would see that
it is of all sins the least honest, and the
least becoming in a creature, and
especially in a fallen creature: yet so little
do proud men know their own lame
condition under the curse of God, that
they set up to censure the godly,
and express contempt for them, as may be
seen in the next verse. They are
themselves contemptible, and yet they are
contemptuous towards their betters.
We may well love the judgments of
God, when we see them so decisively
leveled against the haughty upstarts
who would fain lord it over righteous
men; and we may well be of good
comfort under the rebukes of the
ungodly, since their power to hurt us is
destroyed by the Lord himself.
“The Lord rebuke thee” is answer enough
for all the accusations of men
or devils.
In the fifth of the former octave
the Psalmist wrote, “I have declared all
the judgments of thy mouth,” and
here he continues in the same strain,
giving a particular instance of
the Lord’s judgments against haughty rebels.
In the next two portions the fifth
verses deal with lying and vanity, and
pride is one of the most common
form, of those evils.
“For I have kept thy testimonies.”
Innocence may justly ask to be cleared
from reproach. If there be truth
in the charges alleged against us, what can
we urge with God?. If, however,
we are wrongfully accused, our appeal
has a locus standi in the court
and cannot be refused. If through fear of
reproach we forsake the divine
testimony we shall deserve the coward’s
doom; our safety lies in sticking
close to the true and to the right. God will
keep those who keep his testimonies.
A good conscience is the best
security for a good name; reproach
will not abide with those who abide
with Christ, neither will contempt
remain upon those who remain faithful
to the ways of the Lord.
This verse stands as a parallel
both in sense and position to verse 6, and it
has the catchword of “testimonies,”
by which it chimes with verse 14.
23. “Princes also did sit and speak
against me: but thy servant did
meditate in thy statutes?”
“Princes also did sit and speak
against me” David was high game, and
the great ones of the earth went
a-hawking after him. Princes saw in him a
greatness which they envied, and
therefore they abused him. On their
thrones they might have found something
better to consider and speak
about, but they turned the seat
of judgment into the seat of the scorner.
Most men covet a prince’s good
word, and to be spoken ill of by a great
man is a great discouragement to
them; but the Psalmist bore his trial with
holy calmness. Many of the lordly
ones were his enemies, and made it their
business to speak ill of him, they
held sittings for scandal, sessions for
slander, parliaments of falsehood,
and yet he survived all their attempts
upon him.
“But thy servant did meditate in
thy statutes.” This was brave indeed. He
was God’s servant, and therefore
he attended to his Master’s business; he
was God’s servant, and therefore
felt sure that the Lord would defend him.
He gave no heed to his princely
slanderers; he did not even allow his
thoughts to be disturbed by a knowledge
of their plotting in conclave. Who
were these malignance that they
should rob God of his servant’s attention,
or deprive the Lord’s chosen of
a moment’s devout communion? The
rabble of princes were not worth
five minutes’ thought, if those five
minutes had to be taken from holy
meditation. It is very beautiful to see the
two sittings: the princes sitting
to reproach David, and David sitting with
his God and his Bible, answering
his traducers by never answering them at
all. Those who feed upon the word
grow strong and peaceful, and are by
God’s grace hidden from the strife
of tongues.
Note that in the close of the former
octave he had said, “I will meditate”;
and here he shows how he had redeemed
his promise, even under great
provocation to forget it. It is
a praiseworthy thing when the resolve of our
happy hours is duly carried out
in our seasons of affliction.
24. “Thy testimonies also are my
delight and my counselors.” They were
not only themes for meditation,
but “also” sources of delight and means
of guidance. While his enemies
took counsel with each other, the holy man
took counsel with the testimonies
of God. The fowlers could not drive the
bird from its nest with all their
noise. It was their delight to slander and his
delight to meditate. The words
of the Lord serve us for many purposes; in
our sorrows they are our delight,
and in our difficulties they are our guide;
we derive joy from them and discover
wisdom in them. If we desire to find
comfort in the Scriptures we must
submit ourselves to their counsel, and
when we follow their counsel it
must not be with reluctance, but with
delight This is the safest way
of dealing with those who plot for our ruin;
let us give more heed to the true
testimonies of the Lord than to the false
witness of our foes. The best answer
to accusing princes is the word of the
justifying King.
In verse 16 David said, “I will
delight in thy statutes,” and here he says,
“They are my delight”: thus resolutions
formed in God’s strength come to
fruit, and spiritual desires ripen
into actual attainments. Oh that it might be
so with all the readers of these
lines!
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