Psalms 145:4

Psalms 145:4

I. The text places the transmitting generation first, but in our use of it we ought perhaps to invert the order. For the ages can hand down nothing which did not come to them from without; if we mount upward step by step, we find at last that the heritage of truth and grace was a free gift of revelation to mankind: and therefore the earliest was a receiving generation. Men can give nothing that they did not first receive. (1) All the ages of time are in their unceasing flow recipients of parcels and fragments of one great manifestation of God in the glory of His name, His works, and His redeeming grace. (2) This revelation has not flowed on equably from age to age. There have been great critical periods in this general evolution of the majesty of God's revelation accumulating through the centuries, and we in our day inherit the last and best tradition. (3) The past generations have bequeathed to us as a people a special heritage in the general unfolding of the ways and works of God. We have inherited from our fathers the common Christianity in the fulness of time. Our duty is: (a) to glorify God for the privileges thus transmitted; (b) to use these privileges aright.

II. The receiving generation is the transmitter also. Each is a link in the golden chain that eternity let down into time, and which from time is ascending to eternity again. Each age receives only what it has to pass on to the next. It has pleased God to make every generation a trustee for the generations to come. And all sacred history attests that the gradual unfolding of the name and works of God has been bound up with the fidelity of the successive depositaries of the Divine counsel. There is no law more patent in the administration of the moral government of the world than that each generation receives its portion in due season from its predecessor, and is responsible only for that; secondly, that each generation impresses its own influence for good or evil on what it receives; and, thirdly, that it must needs transmit what is received to the generation following with the impress of its own character.

W. B. Pope, The Inward Witness,p. 160.

References: Psalms 145:4. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 562.Psalms 145:6; Psalms 145:7. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxxi., No. 1828. Psalms 145:7. Ibid.,vol. xxv., No. 1468.