Four Psalms | Page 2

trampled sand in front of the low doorways, that a man has to stoop
uncomfortably to enter. But conceive coming to these a man who is
fugitive--fugitive across such a wilderness. Conceive a man fleeing for
his life as Sisera fled when he sought the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber
the Kenite. To him that space of trampled sand, with the ragged black
mouths above it, mean not only food and rest, but dear life itself. There,
by the golden law of the desert's hospitality, he knows that he may eat
in peace, that though his enemies come up to the very door, and his
table be spread as it were in their presence, he need not flinch nor stint
his heart of her security.

That was the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to
reflect the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life. Human life
was just this wilderness of terrible contrasts, where the light is so bright,
but the shadows the darker and more treacherous; where the pasture is
rich, but scattered in the wrinkles of vast deserts; where the paths are
illusive, yet man's passion flies swift and straight to its revenge; where
all is separation and disorder, yet law sweeps inexorable, and a man is
hunted down to death by his blood-guiltiness. But not in anything is life
more like the Wilderness than in this, that it is the presence and
character of One, which make all the difference to us who are its silly
sheep; that it is His grace and hospitality which alone avail us when we
awaken to the fact that our lives cannot be fully figured by those of
sheep, for men are fugitives in need of more than food--men are
fugitives with the conscience and the habit of sin relentless on their
track. This is the main lesson of the Psalm: the faith into which many
generations of God's Church have sung an ever richer experience of His
Guidance and His Grace. We may gather it up under these three
heads--they cannot be too simple: I. The Lord is a Shepherd; II. The
Lord is my Shepherd; and, III. if that be too feeble a figure to meet the
fugitive and hunted life of man, the Lord is my Host and my Sanctuary
for ever.
I. _The Lord is my Shepherd_: or--as the Greek, vibrating to the force
of the original--_The Lord is shepherding me; I shall not want_. This is
the theme of the first four verses.
Every one feels that the Psalm was written by a shepherd, and the first
thing that is obvious is that he has made his God after his own image.
There are many in our day who sneer at that kind of theology--pretty,
indeed, as the pearl or the tear, but like tear or pearl a natural and partly
a morbid deposit--a mere human process which, according to them,
pretty well explains all religion; the result of man's instinct to see
himself reflected on the cloud that bounds his view; man's honest but
deluded effort to put himself in charge of the best part of himself,
filling the throne of an imaginary heaven with an impossible
exaggeration of his own virtues.
But it is far better to hold with Jesus Christ than with such reasoners.
Jesus Christ tells us that a man cannot be wrong if he argues towards
God from what he finds best in himself. _If ye then, being evil, know

how to give good gifts to your children: how much more shall your
Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him? What man
of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave
the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost,
until he find it? Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she
lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek
diligently till she find it? ... Likewise, I say unto you, There is joy in the
presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth_.
That is a true witness, and strikes Amen out of every chord of our
hearts. The Power, so evident in nature that He needs no proof, the
Being so far beyond us in wisdom and in might, must also be our great
superior in every quality which is more excellent than might. With
thoughts more sleepless than our thoughts, as the sun is more constant
than our lamps; with a heart that steadfastly cares for us, as we fitfully
care for one another; more kingly than our noblest king, more fatherly
than our fondest fatherhood; of deeper, truer compassion than ever
mother poured upon us; whom, when