Psalms 89:7

God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the saints.

A model social gathering

Men meet in vast multitudes for pleasure, for counsel, and for worship. The text indicates a social gathering of the highest type.

I. The characters united in this gathering. The word “saint” means a sanctified or godly person.

II. The Divine presence in this gathering. God is in this “assembly.” All the members “are about Him.”

1. There is more of God seen in these assemblies than can be seen elsewhere on earth. There is more of God seen in the thoughts, emotions, and aspirations of the holy soul than the brilliant firmament can reveal.

2. There is more of God felt in these assemblies than can be felt elsewhere on earth.

III. The heavenly spirit pervading this gathering. God is great--great in kindness there, and they have reverent gratitude; He is great in glory there, and they have reverent adoration. (Homilist.)

On the fear of God

I. The reasons which render a great fear of God, in religious services, necessary and becoming.

1. The mysteriousness and un-searchableness of God, and of all those things which employ our mind in worship.

2. The infinite fulness of peculiar glory, which resides in the Divine Being.

3. His Majesty, as the Creator, Law-giver, and Judge of mankind.

4. The sublime majesty which appears in the character and procedure of God in the work of redemption.

(1) Its first projection in the sovereign counsels of God.

(2) The terrible events that have come to pass in subserviency to this work, and, as it were, to make room for its glory.

(3) How shall we think or speak of that unspeakable majesty, which beams forth from the Son of God, when we contemplate Him as descending into our low nature, and accomplishing the mysterious purchase of salvation!

(4) The awful majesty which attends the Spirit’s work in applying redemption to the souls of the elect.

II. The quality of this holy fear.

1. Our fear of God, in solemn approaches to Him, is not worthy to be called “great” fear until it begins almost to overwhelm the strength both of soul and body.

2. Those who fear God greatly are brought to a pressing sense of their need of shelter and support by a fresh and powerful application of Christ to their souls.

3. This great fear makes the soul exceedingly deliberate, cautious, and diligent in preparation for the more solemn seasons of communion with God.

4. This fear gives such an impulse to the soul as makes it break through all reluctance in the exercises of self-denial and the mortification of sin.

5. Where God is greatly feared there will be much regard to His sacred institutions, even in their minutest circumstances.

6. There will also be much coolness and indifference as to those outward circumstances in religious duties which engage the chief attention of carnal minds.

7. This great fear of God raises the soul above the cowardly fear of man, or of outward sufferings in the cause of Christ.

8. The greatness of this fear of God is manifested by an undaunted adherence to the people of God in the most hazardous times.

9. This great fear keeps a man at an awful distance from the pollutions of the world. Unhallowed pleasure, unjust gains, profane witticisms, are no better, in such a man’s eyes, than a cup of sweetened poison.

10. The great degree of this holy fear is manifested by the vehement transports of joy, gratitude, and triumph which accompany a refreshing sense of the love of Christ.

Application:--

1. To those who are concerned and troubled in spirit, for their being destitute of the true fear of God.

(1) Beware of stifling your convictions, or suffering them to be blown out by others.

(2) Beware of resting in convictions, or of thinking yourselves safe, merely because you see the misery of your state.

(3) Use your utmost endeavour to put yourselves in the hands of Christ, unreservedly, that He may powerfully draw you to Himself, and bring you to the true fear of God.

(4) Do not conclude that your state is good till you find in yourselves a holy light, and a holy propensity of soul, leading you out to desire and to delight in the fear of God for its own sake (Nehemiah 1:11).

2. To those who know experimentally what it is to fear God and to fear Him greatly.

(1) Glorify the distinguishing mercy of God. You might have been hardened, as others are.

(2) Beware of resting in your attainments and frames. These are precious effects of grace; but they are not your righteousness before God.

(3) Beware of losing what you have attained. “Hold fast that which thou hast,” etc.

(4) Press forward, after a higher perfection in the service of God. They who think themselves perfect are not, yet sincere.

(5) Strive for the conversion of others. Seek earnestly that the power and majesty of God may be more gloriously visible in His sanctuary and in the lives of professed Christians. (John Love, D.D.)

Reverence

Reverence is defined as that spiritual susceptibility of our nature by which we touch and realize the sacred in life. Comparing reverence with awe, there is the element of fear in both. Fear enters into reverence, and fear enters into awe. But there is this important difference: the fear in reverence is born of love. The child that reveres its father fears because it loves. But reverence has in it, respect as well as fear. A lad respects his mother, but you cannot respect a mountain or the sun. You can admire these. So that in awe there is admiration, while in reverence there is respect; and respect can only be moral in its nature and personal in its object. Now, what are those objects which alone can inspire true reverence, objects in which the age has too truly lost faith, and in the going of faith there has been the going of reverence?

1. There is the highest of all objects--God. But what has been the teaching of the age? The answer is “Material Science.” The age has produced vivisection (in the interests, of course, of science), and not, only physical but literary vivisection, and this has made for irreverence. The most sacred things in life are cut up on the dissecting-tables of our literature, such as marriage, chastity, woman, truth, the Sabbath. The result of all this is that the age has lost real faith in God--I mean such a faith as Oliver Cromwell had. Much of the faith which remains is half-hearted, unreal, and semi-atheistic or semi-agnostic.

2. From the Divine Being--the highest possible object--we come to the revelation of this Infinite Being contained in the Holy Scriptures. The only fitting reverence, according to the notion of too many people, is to put the Holy Book on a shelf by itself, and never to commit the sacrilege of opening its pages with unholy hands; and when the dust gathers thick on its covers, not to commit the sacrilege of removing the dust with so secular a thing as a duster. That is the way too many people show their reverence for this holy Book. Besides, in this generation there has grown up a great Biblical literature--i. e., a literature on the Bible, books of exposition and commentary and theology on the different books of the Bible, and the result is that even the student of the Bible is face to face with a great temptation--a temptation peculiar to our times--viz, of reading those books on the Bible, and neglecting to read the Bible itself. Furthermore, we no longer believe--to put, the matter extremely--that this Book dropped from the sky, as the Koran is said to have done. The spirit of the age has convinced us that it is the production of earth. Man, under Divine inspiration, was the penman; man as prophet, priest, psalmist, apostle; man in many places, at many times; man with his powers lifted to the highest--but, still man, exhibiting everywhere the human hand; man, real man, and not a mere machine. We have the treasure in an earthen vessel. Our day has brought out into bold relief the sarthenness or the earthiness of the vessel, that there is danger in us forgetting the treasure, or in making the treasure to be earthen too.

3. After the object of the Bible we come to the object of man. Man ought to inspire reverence in man. But our age is essentially democratic, and while we heartily believe in democracy, this spirit, nevertheless, has been making for irreverence. Democracy preaches the doctrine of the rights of man on the broad basis of manhood, irrespective of his place in society. And in transferring the emphasis from mere place, birth, station, belongings, rank to character, sterling worth, brains, service, wisdom, it has tended to destroy reverence based on the former things, and to create a reverence based on the latter things. But while the democratic spirit has been tending thus, teaching us that brain and heart, life and character, spirit and service, hitherto underrated perhaps, or even entirely neglected when not linked to social status, ought to be, wherever found, the object of our respect and homage, and that no man with a spark of self-respect should bemean himself to act the snob, and bow down to wealth and position for their sole sake, at the same time this democratic spirit has had an unhealthy tendency in many, unable to discriminate between man and man. You hear the phrase, “Jack is as good as his master,” and “One man is as good as another.” All this tends to the destruction of faith in man, and therefore of reverence to man. When faith in man disappears, reverence to him cannot continue. How can I reverence man if every man is on my own level? To reverence man I must be able to look up to him, and neither down upon him nor at him on my own level.

4. The fourth object is human nature, and this comes after that of man; and I ask, Is not the temper of the times cynical? What faith is there in disinterestedness? The question of Satan is constantly repeated, “Does Job fear God for nought?” The pure and disinterested motivity of Christian service is questioned. The cynical spirit is fatal to any faith in human nature. We cannot reverence that in which we have no faith. But we ought to reverence human nature, and therefore we ought to have faith in it. Degraded human nature may become--as it often has become--redeemed, sanctified human nature. No man is so low in the pit that he cannot be dug out. The worst we need not despair of. Disinterested goodness is a grand possibility to every man, as it is a blessed actuality to some. When we think of the great souls of the earth like Francis or Elizabeth Fry or John Howard, who readily renounced ease and comfort and refinement and civilized life, and even life itself, because they had a passionate love for Christ and for men, we are filled with a new “respect for our nature, and a new hope for the world.”

5. The last object I will mention as a legitimate source of reverence is the past. The mighty past ought to call forth in me the feeling of respect; not all the past, for much there was in the life of yesterday which we can only renounce and denounce in our life to-day. Still the roots of our life to-day are in the soil of yesterday. The present always has its roots in the past. Let us remember--

(1) That our day is not perfect. There is very much to deplore all round; there are dangerous tendencies in the air.

(2) What good there is in our life to-day has its roots in the life of yesterday. The knowledge that the life of our day is better than the life of yesterday ought not to rob us of respect for the day of our beginnings. But our real beginning is God. God is our source as well as our goal. Religion goes backward as well as forward. Behind us are the reformers, the fathers, the apostles, the prophets, the patriarchs, God. (P. McPhail.)