The Biblical Illustrator
Psalms 89:49
Lord, where are Thy former lovingkindnesses, which Thou swarest unto David in Thy truth?
Ethan’s psalm
Of Ethan the Ezrahite we may form a much more complete conception than of Heman, his colleague and friend. Like Heman, he was born in the age of David, but moulded chiefly by the influences, literary and religious, which characterized the time of Solomon. Like Heman, he was one of the four pages who were deemed so wise that it was held a compliment to pay of Solomon himself that he was even wiser than they (1 Kings 4:31). Like Heman, too, he was one of the three singers set over the service of song in the house of the Lord (1 Chronicles 6:44), one of the leaders, or conductors, of the Temple orchestra, who marked time for the singers and players on instruments, not with a baton, but, as the fashion then was, by the clash of his brazen cymbals (1 Chronicles 15:19). He must have been, therefore, a man of high culture, of large and varied experience, of trained and practised wisdom, as well as a poet, and a musician of the most approved skill. In his psalm he gives us the last results of a long life of observation and experience. This psalm could not have been written until the fifth year of Rehoboam’s reign. The occasion which prompted it was, probably, that memorable invasion of Palestine by Shishak, the reigning Pharaoh of Egypt, which is recorded in 2 Chronicles 12:1, and to the result of which allusion has been found in the sculptures of Karnac. If you read the psalm with the facts of this invasion, and its effect on Rehoboam, full in mind, it will become wholly new to you. The King of Judah, the Lord’s anointed, the psalmist wails (verses 38-45), has been dishonoured, his crown has been hurled to the ground and defiled in the dust; his frontier-fortresses have been broken down; all his strongholds reduced; his glory has passed away; a haggard old age has come upon him in early manhood; he is covered with shame. Ethan meditates on these facts; he sets himself to understand them, to get at their inmost meaning, their Divine intention, and to learn the lesson with which they are fraught. He raises this problem--the apparent opposition between faith and fact, between the events of human life and the declarations of Divine will. He remembers the assurance given to David, “Thy seed will I establish for ever,” and yet David’s grandson lost ten of the tribes--lost, indeed, his own kingdom, and became a vassal of Egypt. What ground was left for faith and hope? He asks himself, Is not God able, is He not strong enough to keep His word, and to carry out the purposes of His love and compassion? And then he asks, Is He not good enough, is He not true and faithful to the word He has spoken, to the purpose He has framed and announced? His answer is untinged by doubt or hesitation (verse 8). Obviously Ethan is a man of more robust temperament than Heman. As meditative, as experienced, as wise, but not fretted into pessimistic misgivings by doubt, he can face the facts of life unalarmed, and the contradictions of thought which those facts are apt to breed in those who reflect on them. On what ground did he take his stand? One refuge, in which many take shelter, was closed against him. He could not admit, with Mill, that God was limited in goodness or in power. Nor could he admit that men have no claim on the God who made them. Ethan found ground for trust and hope by cherishing the conviction that God had sent these calamities in mercy, for correction, for discipline, and not in anger, for destruction. He cherished the belief and hope that God was keeping His covenant with the seed of David, not breaking it. Hence he could plead with God: “How long, O Lord? Wilt Thou hide Thyself for ever?” It is this indomitable trust in the power and goodness of God; it is this resolute and unyielding conviction that all the apparent contradictions between the facts of experience and the declared will of God are only discords which will make the ultimate harmony more profound and sweet. This conviction we, too, need. We have to face the problem which pressed on the mind of the Hebrew sage. God has declared His will to us; He has entered into covenant with us. And yet is the world saved? The wise and much-experienced Ethan steps in to our help. Without in any manner seeking to abate our sense of sin, or our shame for sin, he teaches us that all our sorrow and shame, so far from proving that God has forgotten to be gracious to us, is a proof that He is correcting us for our transgressions and purging us from our iniquity. He affirms that by this discipline God is once more drawing us to Himself. (Samuel Cox, D.D.)
The lovingkindnesses of God
“Where are Thy old lovingkindnesses?” As he sings Ethan looks around him, and his eye rests on a scene of degradation and ruin. He suffers as a patriot; he suffers as a religious man; he suffers as the descendants of the old Roman families suffered where they beheld Alaric and his hosts sacking the eternal city; as the countrymen of Frederick the Great suffered when the French entered Berlin after Jena; as in their turn the conquerors of Jena and Austerlitz suffered when the Allies entered Paris. These are the tragical incidents of history, and the house of David and its adherents were, it might have seemed, experiencing one of those great reverses by which the compensating justice that rules the world so often balances an overwhelming pre-eminence. But, then, in the case of the house of David, much more was at stake than the civil fortunes of the country. Bound up with, and behind the patriotic feeling was the religious and the theocratic one. Ethan’s pain is in its kind, though not in its degree, that of Jeremiah in the greater catastrophe in a later century; it is that of the sorrowing Christians, who, as an Arab chronicler describes, saw their religion sink into ruins before the hosts of Islam; it is that of the Romanized Britons, who beheld in our own Saxon forefathers, yet pagan, the implacable enemies, not merely of their civilization, but of their faith. The throne of David was in the dust; David’s grandson was a subject of the Egyptian king; the military defences of the country had been stormed by Egyptian forces; unprotected populations were pillaged by hordes of Suakims and Ethiopians who wandered at will over the sacred soil, carrying wherever they went desolation and ruin. The edge of the king’s sword was turned; no resistance to the foes attempted in the open field; the unhappy monarch himself had been subjected to treatment which degraded him, and the psalmist apprehends that the days of his youth would be shortened by the ruin and dishonour which had thus overtaken the man who five short years before had ascended the mightiest throne in Western Asia, and who in his day impersonated the best hopes not merely of the children of Abraham but of the human race. Here, then, was the psalmist’s difficulty. What had become of the lovingkindness of God? what of His faithfulness? what of His power? Ethan, in his report of the promise, has, in fact, answered his own difficulty. The covenant with David was not an absolute covenant. It depended upon conditions--conditions which were summed up in fidelity to Him who had done so much for it. Ethan himself states this supreme condition in the words of the Divine Author of the covenant (verses 30-32). The promise, however, continued thus (verses 33-35). The lovingkindness of God, overclouded for the moment, was not withdrawn, the punishment of the race of David was not its final extinction. Among Rehoboam’s descendants were good and powerful kings not unworthy of their high and sacred ancestry, and when at last continued disobedience to the terms of the covenant led to the destruction of the monarchy in Zedekiah and to the ruin of the sacred city, the covenant still remained. Of the race of David one at last was born who should reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of whose kingdom there should be no end. Ethan’s cry has often been raised by pious men in bad days of Christendom. Over and over again Rehoboam has appeared in Christendom. The foolish lover of spiritual absolutism, the divisions which its pretensions render well nigh inevitable, and then the triumphs of the world over a weakened and divided Church--all these have been repeated once and again, and then goes up the cry, “Lord, where are Thy old lovingkindnesses?” and the answer is, “They are where they were.” “The gifts and calling of God are without repentance.” Now, as always, the promises of God to His people are largely conditioned. If the gates of hell shall not prevail against His Church, much short of this may happen as a consequence of the unfaithfulness of her members or her ministers. God makes His work dependent for its complete success on the loyal co-operation of human wills. He accepts the semblance of defeat and failure rather than suspend the terms on which His gifts are given. But His promise all the while is sure; it is we who forget the conditions on which it is made, and Ethan’s question is often answered in another connection. Every child, as you know, is taught in the Catechism to say that “In my baptism I was made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.” Now, this statement appeals to a mass of Scriptural testimony which is summarized by the statement of St. Paul that as many that have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. The covenant which God makes at its baptism with every Christian soul, is, indeed, a bountiful and magnificent gift, too great to be believed in if it were not the consequence and application of a gift which is still greater; for “God so loved the world,” etc. But here comes in the sad contrast between this account of baptism and the actual lives of thousands, nay of millions, of the baptized. “Look,” men exclaim, “at baptized Christendom. Look at the millions whom you have taught to say that they are made members of Christ in their baptism.” Certainly Christendom is at first sight a libel on and an apparent contradiction to the highest gifts and promises of Christ, and yet in saying that do we not forget that those gifts and promises like the covenant with David are always conditioned? The grace of God whether given in baptism or at any other time, though it is promised for ever to the collective Church, is not a gift which is bestowed on any one of us irrespective of our method of receiving and treasuring it. The promises that none shall pluck those whom the Father has given to His Christ out of His hand, and that the predestined are called, and the called justified, and the justified glorified, are all of them accompanied by tacit conditions expressed elsewhere that these receivers of grace must correspond to the grace which they received. “God,” says St. Augustine, “will not save us through ourselves, but He will not save us without ourselves.” The grace of regeneration is not a talisman which wins heaven, be the baptized what they may; it is a conditioned gift which, like the crown of David, will be retained or forfeited by the monarch that wears it as men are careful or not to recognize its obligations. Of this let us be most sure, that if God’s promises seem to any to have failed, the fault lies not with Him but with ourselves; it is we who have changed, not He. All we have to do if our lot is cast amid discouraging circumstances, or if we seem to be coming short of what He has promised us, is to lift up our hearts to Him in repentance and faith, and all will be well. (Canon Liddon.)
Former mercies
It is probable that the psalmist here refers to some special manifestation of God’s mercy vouchsafed him in a season of past dangers and troubles, which being brought to his recollection in this his present calamity, he is encouraged to pray for a like deliverance. The recollection of former deliverances is a great help in praying for a rescue from present evils. Or, it may be that he was inquiring for those mercies which God had promised him, and this was a still greater source of confidence: “Which Thou swarest unto David in Thy truth.”
I. The contents of the inquiry.
1. The fact of an inquiry being made argues an acquaintance, either personal or by report, between the inquirer and the one sought for.
2. It implies an imagined temporary cessation of intercourse.
3. It exhibits an ardent desire for a renewal of the intercourse.
4. It breathes a spirit of sincerity.
II. The cheering replies to the inquiry.
1. Mercy still exists. Many of her former gifts are now no more; many of the instruments by whose means, in former days, she performed mighty deeds have been laid aside; many of her former messengers to you have become silent in death (Zechariah 1:5). No; a race that some of you still remember have passed away. But Mercy is still alive.
2. She is with the Lord, and is always to be found at home.
3. She is still in possession of all her faculties. She has sufficient strength of arm for the hardest undertaking, while she retains a firmness of hand and delicacy of touch for the most intricate work.
4. She is still equally well disposed toward you.
III. The probable results of such inquiry made in a proper spirit.
1. It will gain the Divine approbation
2. Every probability of a renewal of the intercourse. (D. Roberts.).