Psalms 31:20

Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy presence.

Hid in light

The word rendered “presence” is literally “face,” and the force of this very remarkable expression of confidence is considerably marred unless that rendering be retained.

I. the hiding-place. “The light of Thy face” is “secret.” What a paradox! Can light conceal? Look at the daily heavens--filled with blazing stars, all invisible till the night falls. The effulgence of the face is such that they that stand in it are lost and hid, like the lark in the blue sky. “A glorious privacy of, light is Thine.” Light conceals when the light is so bright as to dazzle. They who are surrounded by God are lost in the glory, and safe in that seclusion, “the secret of Thy face.” The old Greek mythologies tell us that the radiant arrows of Apollo, shot forth from his far-reaching bow, wounded to death the monsters of the slime and unclean creatures that crawled and revelled in darkness. And the myth has a great truth in it. The light of God’s face slays evil, of whatsoever kind it is. Thus “the secret of His countenance is the shelter of all that is good.” Nor need I remind you how, in another aspect of the phrase, the “light of His face” is the expression for His favour and loving regard, and how true it is that in that favour and loving regard is the impregnable fortress into which, entering, any man is safe. Only let us remember that for us “the face of God” is Jesus Christ. He is the “arm” of the Lord; He is the “name” of the Lord; He is the “face.” All that we know of God we know through and in Him; all that we see of God we see by the shining upon us of Him who is “the eradiation of His glory and the express image of His person.” So the open secret of the “face” of God is Jesus, the hiding-place of our souls.

II. God’s hidden ones. “Thou shalt hide them in the secret of Thy face.” Whom? Those that flee for refuge to Thee. The act of simple faith is set forth there, by which a poor man, with all his imperfections, may yet venture to put his foot across the boundary line that separates the outer darkness from the beam of light that comes from God’s face. Remember that Jesus Christ is the hiding-place, and that to flee to Him for refuge is the condition of security, and all those who thus, from the snares of life, from its miseries, disappointments, and burdens; from the agitations of their own hearts, from the ebullition of their own passions; from the stings of their own conscience, or from other of the ills that flesh is heir to, make their hiding-place--by the simple act of faith in Jesus Christ--in the light of God’s face, are thereby safe for evermore. But the initial act of fleeing to the refuge must be continued by abiding in the refuge. But not only by communion, but, also by conduct, must we keep in the light. An eclipse of the sun is not caused by any change in the sun, but by an opaque body, the offspring and satellite of the earth, coming between the earth and sun. And so, when Christian men lose the light of God’s face, it is not because there is any variableness or shadow of turning in Him, but because between Him and them has come the blackness--their own offspring--of their own sin. You are not safe if you are outside the light of the countenance. These are the conditions of security.

III. what the hidden ones find in the light. This burst of confidence in my text comes from the psalmist immediately after plaintively pouring out his soul under the pressure of afflictions. His experience may teach us the interpretation of his glad assurance. God will keep all real evil from us if we keep near Him; but He will not keep the externals that men call evil from us. Though it may leave the external form of evil it takes all the poison out of it and turns it into harmless ministers for our good. Again, we shall find if we live in continual communion with the revealed face of God, that we are elevated high above all the strife of tongues and the noise of earth. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

The soul’s refuge in God

These are great words surely. They are an expression of David’s confidence in God’s power and will to hide His people in Himself. He is to be hid from “the pride of men,” and from “the strife of tongues.” I suppose that by these phrases we may understand the whole of that cruel and disturbing interference of one man’s life with another’s, which may take such an endless variety of forms. The abuse and fault-finding and frivolousness, the foolish quarrellings, strifes of social ambition, of business rivalry, from these we need a refuge as strong as David needed from his enemies. It is good to see how God comes and offers Himself, just here, to the human soul. “In the secret of My presence I will hide you.”

1. Try first to understand how the soul finds refuge in communion with God. Of all the deep phrases in the Bible, where can we find one deeper than this of David, “Thou wilt keep him in the secret of Thy presence”? They mean that when a man is spiritually conscious of the presence of God it secludes and separates him from every other presence. Can we understand that? You go into a room full of people, and the tumult of tongues is all about you. You are bewildered and distracted, in the ordinary language of society, which sometimes hits the truth of its own condition rightly, you “feel lost.” You lose yourself in the presence of so many people. You are merely part of the tumult. But by and by you meet your best friend there; somebody whose life is your life; somebody whom you sincerely love and trust; somebody who thoroughly satisfies you, and, by the contact of his nature, makes your taste and brain and heart and conscience work at their very best. As you draw near to him it seems as if you drew away from all the other people. As he takes hold of you, he seems to claim you, and they let you go. The worry and vexation of the Crowd sink away as he begins to talk with you, and you understand one another. By and by you have forgotten that all those other men are talking around you. You have escaped from the strife of tongues. You are absorbed in him. He has hid you in the secret of his presence. And now it is possible, instead of your best friend, for God Himself to be with you, so that His presence is real, so that lie lets you understand His thoughts and lets you know that He understands yours, so that there is a true sympathy between you and Him, if mere vision and hearing are not necessary go the Divine company, and as close to you--nay, infinitely closer--than the men who crowd you round, and whose voices are in your ears, the unseen God is truly with you, what then? Can any tumult of those men distress you? They parade their foolish vanities before you, and you hardly see them. This gives the very simplest notion of the meaning. Now we suppose that this becomes habitual, the constant temper and condition of a life. We suppose this friendly meeting with one who interests you thoroughly to pass into a friendship, pure, continual, devoted. If not in bodily presence, still in thought and sympathy, our friend is always with us. We always judge ourselves by his standard. We think what he would like or what he would condemn; we appeal even in his absence to his approbation. Is not the protection which we saw given to a man by his friend’s company for an hour while they talked together extended now over all his life?

2. A true Christian faith starts with the truth of a personal redemption and leads the man up to personal duties. It takes this poor indistinguishable atom and says to him: “God knows you. To Him you are not only one of the race; He knows you separately; He made you separately, His Son died for you, and there is in you that which, in some way which belongs to you alone, can glorify Him. What are you doing in this feeble, unconscientious life? Have you never heard of such a thing as responsibility? Get up; repent. Come to God. Get the pattern of your life from Him, and then go about your work and be yourself.” If the man is really a Christian he hears that summons, and it is the birth of a true personality, of the real sense of himself in him. It is a revelation.

3. As we look over Christ’s career, how can we describe its serenity and composure except in these words: “God hid Him in the secret of His presence from the pride of man, and kept Him secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues.” How the strife of tongues raged about Him all His life I From the time when Herod and the scribes debated where He was to be born, that they might murder Him, till the day when the people cried, “Crucify Him,” and mocked Him as He hung upon the Cross. But, close to His Father always, clear in His own duty always, and always trying to help men so earnestly that He was not capable of being provoked by them, He was completely apart from all the strife. He was hid in the secret of His Father’s presence. (Bp. Phillips Brooks.)

Our refuge in God

All temples in ancient times were asylums. Whosoever could flee to grasp the horns of the altar, or to sit, veiled and suppliant, before the image of the god, was secure from his foes, who could not pass within the limits of the temple grounds, in which strife and murder were not permissible. We too often flee to other gods and other temples for our refuges. Aye! and when we get there we find that the deity whom we have invoked is only a marble image that sits deaf, dumb, motionless whilst we cling to its unconscious skirts. As one of the saddest of our modern cynics once said, looking up at that lovely impersonation of Greek beauty, the Venus de Mile, “Ah! she is fair; but she has no arms.” So we may say of all false refuges to which men betake themselves. The goddess is powerless to help, however beautiful the presentiment of her may have seemed to our eyes. There is only one shrine where there is a sanctuary, and that is the shrine above which shines the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ; into the brightness of which poor men may pass and therein may hide themselves. God hides us, and His hiding is effectual, in the secret of the light and splendour of His face. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

The refuge from talk

The author of this psalm had evidently suffered much from the talk of society. The strife of tongues had raged, and its armies had wounded him. And his experience is that of not a few. A large share of good men’s troubles come out of the talk of others. Every man has his own little public, and that public talks, and their talk worries, so that the subject of it cries out for the wings of a dove that he may fly away and be at rest.

I. the strife of tongues. What an expressive phrase that is. How the element of contention asserts itself in the great mass of the world’s talk. I remember being once at a fair in a foreign city, and before each booth stood a crier, sometimes aided by musical instruments; each crier endeavouring to raise his voice above the others in advertising the attractions of his show. It was a good picture of the world at large, where so many people have something to say, something which they are determined the world shall hear, no matter who else goes unheard. Then, how much debate--often useless--there is. And how selfish, carried on not for others, but the man’s own advantage. And, then, there is the hiss of slanderous tongues striving against the innocent, and of gossiping tongues striving which can tell most news--bad or good, false or true, it matters not. Now, men get weary of this. We grow blinded and stunned by this excess of talk. We want leisure to think, and to weigh, and to adjust things. If perchance a great seed-thought has floated to us on these winds of oratory and debate, we would fain give it time to strike its roots deep down into our hearts and minds. And we grow ashamed of ourselves, because we are so often drawn into this current of talk about our neighbours. We hear the gossip, and we happen to know a fact or to have heard a piece of news, and almost ere we know it, in it goes into the common stock: and, if we are not very careful, we find ourselves falling into censorious talk, flinging out sharp arrows of sarcasm or pulling a neighbour’s defects a little farther out into the light; and when we come to sit down and think over what we have said, unless we are very much hardened, we feel ashamed.

II. the refuge.

1. Now, it will not do for us to defy public talk, and to do, wantonly, what shocks social sentiment and multiplies talk. For the talk of society is by no means an unmixed evil. It hurts a good many men, and that unjustly; but it also keeps not a few men steady. It begets a wholesome fear. It is good to have a manly respect for public opinion, and a manly desire for society’s esteem. Defiance of society, then, is not our refuge from the strife of tongues.

2. The world does not afford it. To get out of the reach of talk is to quit the world altogether, which is no man’s duty but his sin if he attempts it. God provides better for men than by withdrawing them from the world where their work lies.

3. Man is delivered from temptation, not by being taken out of it, but by being helped to conquer it. In putting a man in right relations with Himself, God puts him in right relation to the world’s talk.

III. Let us look at some illustrations of this, growing out of what has been already said.

1. There is the matter of slander and abuse. God does not always exempt good men from these. The man of science delights to show you how he can handle fire, and even go into the fire unhurt. That is a greater achievement than keeping away from the fire. A good man is given to thinking that, if his good name in the world is gone, if the world’s talk casts up nothing hut mire and dirt, it is all over with him. God shows him that he can live, and live quietly and cheerfully, on the simple fact of his conscious integrity before God.

2. Sometimes God saves one from the strife of tongues by putting him where he cannot talk and where others cannot talk to him. He sends a calamity so overwhelming that his friends do not know what to say to him, and the man himself cannot reason about it, cannot argue, cannot explain, is simply reduced to silence. All that he can say is, “I am dumb; I open not my mouth because Thou didst it.” He must find his only explanation in that simple fact, God did it. God seems to say to him, “Be still! There is only one thing you can know about this matter. Be still and know that I am God.”

3. Again, God shields good men from the world’s talk by hardening them against it. Exposure is often the best remedy for certain bodily ailments, and that is a kind of cure God often employs for the soul. Archbishop Whately, of Dublin, who died in 1863, was among the sturdiest men of his time, a man of undaunted courage, and withal of that genuine originality which awakens comment and opposition. Much of his official life was passed under a fire of censure, lie once said of himself, “My stumbling-block most to be guarded against was the dread of censure. Few would conjecture this from seeing how I have braved it all my life, and how I have perpetually been in hot water, when, in truth, I had a natural aversion to it. So I set myself resolutely to act as though I cared nothing for either the sweet or the bitter, and in time I got hardened. But no earthly object could ever pay me for the labour and the anguish of modelling my nature in these respects. I have succeeded so far that I have even found myself standing firm where some men of constitutional intrepidity have given way. And this will always be the case more or less, through God’s help, if we will but persevere from a right motive.”

4. Again, God hides His servant from the strife of tongues by filling his hands with work for others. Tim more one is interested in the welfare of men, the less he will care for their talk; for a good deal of sensitiveness is merely selfishness, after all. That, is a kind of sensitiveness which may be cured; and the best way of curing it is to get the life filled with Christ’s spirit of ministry. Then what the world is saying of you will go by you like the idle wind. I remember how I went with the Christian commission during the war to help in nursing the sick and wounded. I was peculiarly sensitive to the sight of physical suffering, and my friends laughed at me and said, “You will faint at the sight of blood.” And I quite feared I should. But it was not so. From the moment that I sat down beside the first man that met my eye, a poor fellow with a muskeg-bullet through his jaw, and tried, while I applied the cooling water, to drop a word or two about Christ and His rest for the weary--all my shrinking vanished. I thought only of those wounded men. I had little or no self-consciousness left. I saw only that colossal misery. That experience was worth a great deal to me, and that is the reason I tell it to you, for it illustrates a universal truth. Get yourself thoroughly interested in other people’s bodies and souls; get the question, “What can I do for them?” uppermost in your thought, and the world’s gossip about you will attract as little notice as the drifting sea-weed.

5. And I need scarcely add that this is the best way to keep ourselves from being sharers in the world’s gossip. He who dwells in the secret of God’s presence learns to take God’s attitude toward infirmity and error--the attitude of One who remembers that His children are dust, and pities them accordingly. The tongue of such an one will not be a weapon of strife. These are some of the methods in which God hides His people from the strife of tongues; and all these methods are embraced in this one comprehensive fact--that He hides them in the hiding-place of His presence. Then, “your life is hid with Christ in God.” If we are really Christ’s, then back into the very bosom of His Father where Christ is hid, there lie will carry us. We, too, shall look out and be as calm and as independent as He is. The needs of men shall touch us just as keenly as they touch Him, but the sneers and strifes of men shall pass us by as they pass by Him and leave no mark on His unruffled life. This, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter. In this world we must be exposed to the strife of tongues. Let God hide thee in the secret of His pavilion and thou needest not fear. (M. R. Vincent, D. D.)