Psalms 100:3-5

Know ye that the Lord He is God.

The claims of God

“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him for ever.” There is a vast amount both of theology and philosophy in that simple answer, which our old divines have put into the mouth of a child. Were we to-day what we should be, it would be our element to love, to serve, to adore our God, and we should not need ministers to stir us to our pleasurable duty or remind us of Jehovah’s claims.

I. Thy claims of God, on what are they grounded?

1. They are grounded, first of all upon His Godhead. “Know ye that Jehovah He is God.” As Matthew Henry has very properly said, ignorance is not the mother of devotion, though it be the mother of superstition. True knowledge is the mother and the nurse of piety. Really to know the deity of God, to get some idea of what is meant by saying that He is God, is to have the very strongest argument forced upon one’s soul for obedience and worship.

2. The second ground of the Lord’s claim is His creation of us. “It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” You never saw a child startled when it was told for the first time that God made it, for within that little mind there dwells an instinct which accepts the statement.

3. A third reason for living unto the Lord lies in His shepherding of us. “We are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.” God has not left us and gone away. He has not left us as the ostrich leaves her eggs, to be broken by the passer’s foot. He is watching over us at every hour; even as a shepherd guards his flock. Over us all He exercises an unceasing care, a watchful providence, and therefore we should return to Him daily praise. Men, because ye are men, adore the God who keeps you living men; but saintly men, men renewed and fed out of the storehouse of Divine grace, serve your God, I pray you, with all your heart, and soul, and strength, because you especially are the sheep of His pasture and the people of His hand.

4. A fourth reason for adoration and service is the Divine character (verse 5). Here are three master motives for serving the Lord our God. Oh that all would feel their weight. First, He is good. Now, if I were to lift up a standard in this assembly and say, “This banner represents the cause of everything that is just, right, true, kind, and benevolent,” I should expect many a young heart to enlist beneath it; for when pretenders in all lands have talked of liberty and virtue choice spirits have been enchanted and rushed to death for the grand old cause. Now, God is good, just, right, true, kind, benevolent; in a word, God is love, and therefore who would not serve Him? Then it is added, “His mercy is everlasting.” Who would not serve one whose mercy endureth for ever? Cruel is that heart which infinite gentleness does not persuade. If God be merciful, man should no more be rebellious. It is added, “His truth endureth to all generations,” that is to say, you will not find in God one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow. What He promises He will perform. Every word of His stands fast for ever, like Himself, immutable. Thus I have set before you the grounds of God’s claims; are they solid? Do you consent to them? Oh, that sovereign grace would constrain each of us to live alone for the glory of God. It is His most righteous due.

II. The claims of God--how have we regarded them? Answer for yourselves. Alas, some have paid no respect to these claims--in fact they have denied them, and have said in effect, “Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice?” Sorrowfully must we all confess also that where we have tried to honour the Lord, and have done so in a measure by His grace, yet we have failed of perfection; we have to confess that oftentimes the pressure of the body which is near, and of the things that are seen and tangible, has been greater upon us than the force of the things which cannot be seen, but are eternal. We have yielded to self too often, and have robbed the Lord. What shall we do in this case? Why, we have to bless our everlasting God and Father, that He has provided an atoning sacrifice for all our shortcomings, and that there is One, partaker of our nature who stands in the gap on our behalf, in whom we can be accepted, notwithstanding all our shortcomings and offences. Let us go to God in Christ Jesus.

III. The claims of God, when they are regarded, how do they influence men? Let me show you how healthy it is to serve God. The man who serves God, led by the Spirit of God so to do, is humble. Were he proud it were proof at once that he was not serving God; but the remembrance that God is his sovereign, and has made him, that in His hand is his breath, makes the good man feel that he is nothing but dust and ashes at his very best. How horrible it is when man lives for lust, and puts forth all his strength to indulge his passions! Brutes! beasts! Alas! I slander the beasts when I compare them to such men. The man who lives for God is a far nobler being. Why, in the very act of self-renunciation and of dedication to God the man has been lifted up from earth, and from all that holds him down to its dust and mire, and he has risen so much nearer to the cherubim, so much nearer, in fact, to the Divine. This makes a man a man, for a man who serves is courageous, and too manly to be a slave. The love of God makes heroes. Give a man a resolve to serve God, and he is endowed with wondrous perseverance. Look at the apostles, and martyrs, and missionaries of the faith, how they have pressed on, despite a world in arms; when a nation has been apparently inaccessible they have found an entrance; when the first missionary has died another has been ready to follow in his footsteps. The first Church, in her weakness, and poverty, and ignorance, struggled with philosophy and wealth, and all the power of heathen Rome, till at last the weak overcame the strong, and the foolish overthrew the wise. O Lord, Thy service makes us akin to Thee. Blessed are they that wear Thy yokel How strong they grow, how patient to endure, how firm to stand fast, how swift to run. They mount with wings as eagles when they learn to serve Thee. The man who is led by the Holy Ghost to serve God is incited thereby to a zeal, a fervour, and a self-sacrifice to which nothing else could bring him. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.--

God-made or man-made?

There is a superficial way of reading these words which makes them a mere truism. That noble paraphrase of the psalm, “All people that on earth do dwell,” seems rather to fall flat and stale. “Without our aid He did us make.” The psalmist is not giving utterance to a commonplace of that sort. That is not the point at all. The psalmist is, as you will see, calling upon all lands, the heathen lands, to believe in God, to believe that He is the Lord, and there is no other, because His workmanship is manifest in the people whom He has chosen; His guiding and shaping Spirit has been within them and upon them to make them what they are. All that they have of moral and religious training and continuance is the gift of His grace, and the result of His training. They are the witness to the world of God’s constancy, faithfulness, truth, and mercy. Consider the application of these words--

I. Is the individual Christian life. No man with any religious conviction, or any religious emotion, can look back on the story of his life up to this point, through all these changes, wrestlings, temptations, and moral victories, without feeling that God’s shaping hand has been with him there all through. That man sees nothing clearly, and feels nothing deeply, who does not both see and feel that all the best things in him are not self-wrought, but are the result of forces not his own, and higher than his own. Alas, there is much of the self-made left in all of us, and it is the part of which we are the least proud. There are in us bits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that have not been crucified with Christ; and there are hard lumps in the tenderest heart which have not felt the melting of His love. Would God they were replaced by Diviner stuff! But all the good you have and know, the noble faith, the uplifting, cheering hope, the recoil from sin, and the patience, and the courage, and the self-sacrifice, and the wells of pity, and the fountains of love, the joy in God, and the sweet singing in your heart at Jesu’s Name--all these have been woven in you by God, and the Spirit of God, and the indwelling Christ.

II. In the nation to which we belong. How a reader of the Bible can find God in every page of Jewish history and not see His overshadowing and guiding presence in the wonderful story of Britain’s growth and greatness is to me an indication of incomprehensible dulness. We are not a self-made people, no, indeed. “Our builder and maker has been God.” For no human thought would ever have imagined, and no prophet’s vision would ever have foreseen, the unexampled and extraordinary growth and expansion of this little island and its people. Looked at on the map, it is a mere dot on the surface of the globe; yet its name, and flag, and ruling power, and shaping ideas have girdled and well-nigh embraced the globe. Men say we owe it to our insular position, our sea-protected shores, or perhaps to our climatic influences, or to the singular mixture of races in our composition, or to the blunders and failures of other nations, or to the grit and determination in our character; or we owe it to the wisdom of our statesmen, the enterprise of our merchants, the daring of our sailors, the valour of our soldiers, and to the sturdy, self-reliant independence which has been at the base of all the rest. And they do not see that most of these are moral and religious causes; that behind them, in the shadow, God has been standing watching and working, and that underneath them all have been the everlasting arms. They forget how heavenly light dawned and shone down on the people in their superstitious and benighted days to give them religion in its purest form and to make them righteous, truth-loving, and strong in the fear of God. They do not remember that our fathers were delivered almost in spite of themselves from the blight of superstition, how the truth set them free and gave them room to expand. They do not take into account how large a part has been played by our open Bible and our praying heroes. They do not see that reverence and faith, and faith-rooted justice and Christian virtues have been the very soul and backbone of our people’s strength, and that nearly all our greatest thinkers, writers, statesmen, sailors, soldiers have grown up in nurseries of prayer. They are blind to the fact, moreover, that once and again in days of stress and trial, in the dark and cloudy days when the fortunes of the nation have been well-nigh overwhelmed, the outstretched arm of God brought our fathers through Red Seas of trouble to a safe and wealthy place. Nay, we may say that hundreds of times the very blunders, follies and crimes of our statesmen have been overruled and our people led along paths which their own wisdom and foresight would never have chosen; and it may be all summed up in this, that through all the guilts and sins which have had their part in the upbuilding, the Almighty Architect has been the chief worker in carrying our name and commerce to the uttermost parts of the earth and in bringing hundreds of millions of souls under our rule. (J. G. Greenhough, M.A.)

God the Maker

It is not in God’s work in creation that the text is laid, but in His redemptive work in history. It is an exultant historical consciousness that teaches the lips of the psalmist to sing, “It is He that fashioned us; and His are we.”

I. God’s fashionings of human life constitute the chief witness of His power and glory to men. The hand of God was unmistakably the power that fashioned the striking course of Israel’s history. The great difference between the history of Israel and that of contemporary nations corresponded precisely to the difference in their relation to Jehovah. While other nations had wandered after the gods which were no gods, Israel had been the servant of Jehovah. The authority of Jehovah, and the influence of their worship of Him, had been beyond all question the shaping force of their distinctive and remarkable history. Other nations waxed great in external splendour; Israel’s own consciousness of national greatness lay in inward truth. Other nations produced statesmen and conquerors; Israel’s preeminent sons were its seers and prophets. Other nations fell when the foot of the conqueror trampled them into bondage; Israel waxed greater in the dark years of captivity.

II. God’s method in fashioning human lives is selective. The conspicuous instance of the nation of Israel I have already mentioned. This little nation was, by a marvellous process of selection which can be conceived only in reference to a Divine plan, singled out of the general mass of humanity for special blessings, spiritual potencies, and religious responsibilities. In spite of its per-versifies and infirmities, the elective call of God was so effective that it answered to the call, became conscious that it was chosen of God, and was made the radiant centre of truth for the whole world. In varying degrees and for different ends, one can see the elective operations of God’s shaping hand in reference to other nations, and not least in the startling history of our own England. The history of nations is full of acts which irresistibly point to a Divine elective and discriminative power. This principle is still more evident, if possible, in the life of individual men. In the circle of the nation, of the city, of the village, or of the family, we constantly see this process of election, sometimes in very startling forms. By the operation of some unseen and mysterious force, “the one is taken and the other left.” God’s strongest men have always lived and acted in the holy consciousness that they were singled out by God.

III. God’s selective method is one of concentration with a view to the most effectual universalization. The inward essence of “particular election” is the yearning of God’s love for the salvation of the world. God’s “vessels of mercy” are chartered to bear the freight of His grace to every shore. The “few are chosen” in order that the many may be more effectually reached. Exclusion is but a fleeting phase of God’s elections; the abiding soul of them is a graciously determined and comprehensive inclusion. The mountain of the house of the Lord is exalted above the hills, in order that all nations may flow into it. This gracious development of God’s elective purpose multiplies the honour and glory of the elect spirit. For in this glowing light, every “election” is twofold. It is an election of a human soul into the grace and Kingdom of God, and it is also an election into the special ministry of salvation to others. (J. Thomas, M.A.)

There is inspiration in the thought that God made us

Our powers are finite, and sometimes we are troubled about that fact, wishing we could do more for our Lord: but we need not fear when we remember that He hath made us, and therefore fixed the measure of our capacity. In Roger de Wendover’s “Flowers of History,” an ancient Saxon chronicle, we read of a Saxon king, who, riding through a forest, came upon a little church in which a priest was saying prayers, and this priest was lame and hump-backed; and therefore the rough Saxon king was ready to despise him, till he heard him chant these words, “It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” The king blushed, and owned his fault. If, then, we are of small beauty or slender talent, let us not complain, but serve Him who has made us what we are. (C. H. Spurgeon.)

We are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.--

The pasture or provision for God’s sheep

I. God provides good pasture (Ezekiel 34:14). Although spoken of Israel, yet surely God’s spiritual Israel may lay the hand of faith and appropriation upon the promises of this chapter. One chief idea of good pasture in the mind of a shepherd would be pasture from which nutriment could be derived without fear of deleterious herbs. The psalmist says, “Thy Word is very pure” (Psalms 119:140), and again (Psalms 12:6). The writings of men may be good and very helpful, but God’s Word is essence. No other book will fully satisfy the soul that has found a living Christ in the written Word, and that knows experimentally how pregnant with life and meaning the Holy Ghost can make the simplest verses of God’s Book.

II. God provides large pastures (Isaiah 30:23). This seems to refer to literal cattle, but 2 Timothy 3:16, embodies the same thought. In God’s Word may be found everything necessary for the soul’s real good, but not anything for curious speculation. Yes, large--wide as the needs of the human heart--extensive as the infinite fulness of God. Every promise from cover to cover belongs to the believer, and there is no need of man which has not its corresponding supply in the promises of God. But the mere letter of the Word will profit little; it is only as Christ the living Word, in whom all fulness dwells, is seen and appropriated through the written Word, that the need of the human heart and the infinite fulness of God are brought together.

III. God provides green pastures (Psalms 23:2). “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures;” or, as the margin, “pastures of tender grass”--some one has rendered it “springing grass.” Evidently the idea is that of freshness--not stale food. There is a great tendency in our day to feed upon stale spiritual food. One says, “I had a great blessing last year through Mr. So-and-So’s preaching.” Another says, “My Bible seemed to be lit up one morning last week, and I have been living upon the blessing I got then ever since.” If God’s pasture is ever green and springing, why have you had no fresh food to-day? In the country you will see the sheep turn from the rank grass of long growth to seek the delicate fresh-springing grass. Your body cannot be strong upon yesterday’s food, neither can your soul be strong upon past experiences of blessing in the Word. The fresh pasture is still there, and the Holy Spirit waits to nourish the soul by means of it. Get fresh food daily.

IV. God provides fat pasture (Ezekiel 34:14). Those who have the charge of sheep sometimes say a piece of pasture land has “no heart in it”; and Christians sometimes say they find their Bibles lifeless--they read them regularly, but get no good from them. It is possible to read chapter after chapter without blessing, for the letter of the Word alone may be compared to the husk which covers the grain--to the casket which contains the precious gem. But use it as revealing Christ; see Him in and through it; take home its warnings; claim the fulfilment of its promises; touch Christ in the Word; feed on Him; seek to extract the kernel from its covering, the gem from its casket, ever seeking and depending upon the Holy Spirit’s teaching and power, and there will be no more complaint over a dull Bible; but it will be found to be fat, rich pasture that will abundantly satisfy (Psalms 36:8), and upon which the soul will gain new life, strength, joy, and power for useful service.

V. God provides pasture in high places (Isaiah 49:9). And in Ezekiel 34:13, the Lord promises to feed His flock upon the “mountains” and “upon the high mountains.” May not a New Testament parallel to these “high places” be found in the “heavenly places,” or heavenlies, of the Epistle to the Ephesians? Five times in that epistle the words occur, and in no other epistle. A careful study of the context would seem to show that it is a position attained through union with Christ in death and resurrection--a death unto sin (Romans 6:1), in His death, that, raised with Him, His resurrection life may be ours; not judicially only, but in actual fact and realization, through faith in God’s mighty power (Ephesians 1:19) and promise. A daily death unto self and sin, “that the life of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh” (2 Corinthians 4:10), that we may be able to say with the apostle (Galatians 2:19). (The Christian.)