Psalms 6

AN INTOLERANT PSALMIST

‘Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed: let them return and be ashamed suddenly.’

Psalms 6:10

I. Consider those passages in the Bible which are constantly objected to as most inconsistent with toleration—I mean the so-called imprecatory portions of the Psalms. (1) I see little reason for considering these psalms as the utterance of David’s longing for personal revenge. It is not likely that he should keep malice hoarded up in his soul, and relieve himself of it in the moments when he held communion with his God, cursing just as he saw by faith the city of eternal peace. (2) When, under the old covenant, earthly prosperity was the portion of the wicked, and earthly adversity of the pious, the whole moral government of God seemed to be veiled in clouds. The very fact that immortality was not clearly discovered to him made the pious Israelite long more passionately for the speedy shining forth of God’s power and justice. (3) We must interpret every book by the mind of the author. If so, we must apply this to the Bible, and to the Psalms. Their real Author is the Holy Spirit. It is remarkable that in the first chapter of the Acts the very strongest of these imprecations is applied as a prophecy to the betrayer of our Lord.

II. Notice two passages in the New Testament which give us the very type of the tolerance and intolerance of the Gospel.—For its tolerance, read Luke 9:40, etc. The two incidents inculcate toleration, ecclesiastical and civil, on the spiritual and on the material side. For its intolerance, see 2 John 1:10: ‘If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed.’ This can have no other meaning than that ‘the elect lady and her children’ should show no kindly hospitality to impugners of the Incarnation. (1) St. John, living when and where he did, realised, as we can scarcely do, that ‘the world lieth wholly in wickedness.’ (2) He saw, as we do not, that its best hope lay in the Incarnation, and so the man who went about bringing men to deny this was the enemy of the human race. (3) The honour of Jesus was dear to His apostles. In the estimate of him who wrote, ‘The Word was God,’ to deny that Jesus was the God-Man was to question His legitimacy and impugn His truth.

III. Let me commend to you the spirit of tolerance.—(1) To all whom our Church tolerates. (2) Towards those that are without.

Archbishop Alexander.

Illustration

‘This psalm might have a history to itself. It is the first of the seven penitential psalms. It is a wail of pain and sorrow ending in hope. One of the strangest though not happiest things in its records is, that it was, along with Psalms 42, the choice of Catherine de Medici, the Jezebel of the French monarchy. She was irreligious but superstitious, profligate, and devoured by ambition; and the fact that she had no children seemed likely to deprive her of the control she hoped to gain in the counsels of the monarchy. She took the psalm as an expression of her grief and sense of loss. She became the mother of Francis II. and Charles IX., whose character she corrupted by ministering to his vices, and whom she urged to the massacre of St. Bartholomew. “Her desire was realised,” says a French historian, “for the misery of France; and that family, which then took pleasure in the Psalms, put to death thousands of the Reformed for singing them.” ’