A Recollection of a Lecture at Plainfield, Aug. 2nd, 1884.

(Psalm 108:6-13.)

This psalm is the second of the Deuteronomic book of the Psalms. The Psalms are divided in the Hebrew into five books, which have been styled amongst the Jews" The Pentateuch of David."As some of us are aware, it is in fact a real Pentateuch, answering, book for book, to the five books of Moses. The fifth and last book begins with the one hundred and seventh psalm, and is therefore the Deuteronomy of the Psalms. If we look at this one hundred and seventh psalm, we shall find that in it Israel is seen prophetically as gathered together out of their dispersion, and just ready to enter into possession of their land. It is the celebration of His mercy by there deemed of the Lord, redeemed out of the hand of the enemy, and gathered out of the lands from the east and the west and the north and the south. He has brought them out of the wilderness, out of the solitary way, where they found no city to dwell in. Their distress has made them cry to the Lord, and He has led them forth by the right way, to go to a city of habitation. His ways with man are thus celebrated:ways of discipline necessitated by what He is and by what men are, the end of which is blessing, and that men may praise the Lord for His goodness and for His wonderful works to the children of men.

In the book of Deuteronomy you will find, in exact accordance with this, the people gathered in the plains of Moab, looking across into the land which they were shortly to have in possession; and before they enter it, Moses recounts to them the story of their journeyings, and all the Lord's dealings with them,-how He had caused them to hunger, and fed them with manna, which they knew not, neither did their fathers know, that He might make them to know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live. Such lessons are they to carry with them into the land of their inheritance, to be their practical wisdom there.

Deuteronomy thus gives us the ways of divine government, to which men must needs be con-formed in order to find blessing from God's hand; and these ways are found, in the fifth book of the Psalms, illustrated in the whole history of Israel until the time when sovereign grace brings them to the final blessing which from the first had been designed for them. But these ways with Israel are just His ways with man as man. Ways of sore and various trial, from which alone He can deliver, and which make Him known to their souls in this absolute necessity. The end is, He satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness. But how terrible oftentimes the way by which one must be led to the experience of these circumstances out of which no hand but one can deliver, and there the consciousness of sin, which forbids all claim upon Him, men sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, bound in affliction and iron (in hopeless incapacity to escape), because they rebelled against the words of God and contemned the counsel of the Most High; their heart brought down with labor, they fall down and there is none to help? Have you, be-loved friends, realized such a condition? Except you have, you can scarcely have realized the grace and power of a living God. "They cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He saved them out of their distresses. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and brake their bands in sunder."

But it is not only when we are first brought to God that we are called thus to experience His power and grace:it is "they that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep." The place of need is still the place in which the God of salvation discovers Himself. The living God, making Himself known as such. It is thus the apostle commends us to God as well as to the word of His grace,-to the God who is made known in Christ, made known by the word of His grace, but a distinct and living reality. It is thus the way of trial is the way of blessing, and the deeper the trial the greater the blessing. David and all his afflictions are the theme, we may say, of the Psalms, in which are foreshadowed the un-equaled sorrows of One infinitely greater; but David is none the less the beloved, as his name means, because of these afflictions. They are the school in which the sweet psalmist of Israel finds his necessary training,-the means by which his heart is tuned to be an instrument of many strings to make melody to the Lord. ' For this there must be the deep tones as well as the high ones. The song is the song of salvation:no angel is ever said to sing to God. God gets His song of praise from the redeemed of the earth:the Holy One inhabits the praises of Israel.

The one hundred and eighth psalm is a very remarkable one. Could you imagine an inspired psalm made, as one may say, with a pair of scissors ?Such, in fact, is this. We have the latter half of two psalms-the fifty-seventh and sixtieth -joined together to produce a third, an instance which the rationalist would hold up to scorn as impossible to be a divine procedure; but "the foolishness of God is wiser than man."It is just this which gives its character and beauty to the psalm in question. The ends of these psalms are taken, cut off from the experience of their former parts, to illustrate the end of the Lord, how that the Lord is very pitiful and of tender mercy. It is in Israel, of course, that this mercy is seen,- Israel who, brought out of her sorrows, is to sing the praises to God among the nations. And the latter part, which I have specially before me, is God now claiming the land for His redeemed, securing their inheritance, putting down finally all their enemies. Israel, as His beloved, are delivered, saved with His right hand. And God having spoken, and able to speak in His holiness in their behalf, Shechem is divided, and the valley of Succoth measured out; He claims, or Christ in His name, Gilead and Manasseh, Ephraim and Judah. Moab, Edom, and Philistia are put down forever. These two psalms, therefore,-the hundred and seventh and the hundred and eighth-give us the way and the end of the Lord with regard to His people.

And I may say that the psalms which follow these, in perfect accordance with them, illustrate also God's way and His end; but as before with sinful and fallen man, so now with Christ the one perfect One. Here the hundred and ninth psalm shows us the Lord also in the depths of distress, rejected of man, and in poverty and need cast upon God alone for His answer and help. But here it is not discipline. Evil is on the part of His adversaries only. Their enmity is without a cause, and in the hundred and tenth psalm God lifts up the head of Him who has been thus content to drink, in lowliness, of the brook in the way. He sets Him at His right hand in royal priesthood, His people made willing subjects to Him, and His enemies His footstool. The last three psalms of the first section of this book give us, then, a threefold hallelujah. Jehovah is praised for His wonderful works in the hundred and eleventh psalm, for His ways in the hundred and twelfth, and for His mercy in the hundred and thirteenth. This is the final issue to which in God's infinite grace we shall all come at length. But now let us return to this hundred and eighth psalm, to look more closely at it.

It is seldom that I speak of merely personal experiences., but there are times when it is fitting to declare what God has done for one's soul. That which illustrates the actuality and power of the living God is quite within the scope of our present subject, and the manner in which the inner meaning of this psalm was declared to me was in very striking answer to a deep personal experience.

It was a time when my soul had been passing through as deep a conflict as perhaps I have ever known. Satan, the accuser of the brethren, had been bringing up against me things which lay in the depths of my soul, skillfully interwoven with his own malice and wickedness, until it seemed with me, as John Bunyan says of his pilgrim, I no longer knew the sound of my own voice. Cling indeed I did to God, and to the work of His Son, with a grip from which by grace nothing could detach me; and yet when I looked into the face of God, it seemed as if over it were written these terrible things,-as if, at least in this life, they could never more be blotted out or forgotten, and my soul sank in misery which words are feeble to express. Out of this, in a wonderful way, God delivered me, and as it were in a moment, by the words of this psalm:and how do you think? He to)d me Gilead was His and Manasseh was His!

I was in no condition, as you may imagine, for entering into nice points of Scripture-interpretations, nor for flights of fancy in any direction; nor had I ever attributed to these words other than their obvious meaning. I knew that they had reference to Israel's possession of their land in the last days; but what this could have to say to me, I knew no more than, I will venture to say, any of you here may now know. The thought of any meaning in the names had never occurred to me; and yet in the depths of my distress I found myself repeating, how or why I knew not, " Gilead is Mine, and Manasseh is Mine."

A moment after, and God interpreted it to me. The meaning of "Manasseh" is of course, as you know, " Forgetfulness:" it was the name Joseph gave to his son born in Egypt, where, he said, " God hath made me to forget all my kindred, and my father's house." That, then, had some meaning for me, although a familiar thought enough. I knew God could forget:I knew that our sins and iniquities He remembered no more; and if this were all, it might be only imagination, and not the Spirit of the Lord, that applied it to me.

What, then, about "Gilead"? "Gilead" is "a heap of witness." It is the same, essentially, as Jacob's Galeed, set up upon this very Gilead as a witness before God of his covenant with Laban. Who could doubt the designed contrast between " Gilead," the perpetual memorial, and " Manasseh," forgetfulness ? I had been fearing just this perpetual remembrance-this ineffaceability of what, uneffaced, could be only darkness and distress. God told me that Gilead was His as Manasseh was, that there was no real contradiction between the two. He could forget at the same time that He remembered. He could remember without in the least impairing the blessedness of His forgetfulness; and if He could thus remember, so could I too, and forget also, even while remembering.

How blessed to realize that these things are true of God! If there were one thing that had ever been done on earth which needed to be absolutely blotted out of the book of remembrance forever, in order either to the glory of God or the blessing of His people, that thing would be indeed a real derogation to the glory of God. He maketh the wrath of man to praise Him, and the remainder of wrath He restrains. When God judges the secret things of man, every work will come into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil, and God will be glorified about the whole. It is only thus that there is no more for us any hopeless darkness. Sin will be seen, of course, and seen in all its terrible reality as that, but it will be seen as that which God has triumphed over, and made His people sharers of His triumph. Hell will be the perpetual restraint upon an evil which, if permitted, would now no longer glorify God. It is not, as men suppose, a place in which sin will be permitted a certain activity forever; nor therefore will there be, as some imagine, a continual increase of punishment brought down upon themselves by its hopeless inhabitants. Judgment, although it be eternal, will be measured by the sins done in the body, and thus even in judgment the mercy of God becomes apparent. In hell itself every knee shall bow to Christ, and every tongue confess that He is Lord. Men will remain indeed essentially unchanged, but let any one look at the sixteenth of Luke, and see the Lord's own picture there of a sinner, though in hades yet, and not after the final judgment, and he must needs see the power of repression that is in God's hand upon him there. These texts are not universalist in character, as so many are maintaining now, and to accept them frankly will only deliver us from all the appearance of truth in universalism.

But thus as to our former lives we must not think or hope for forgetfulness, as any part of the element of our eternal happiness. Would we forget the cross? but the cross is Gilead and Manasseh both in one. It is there that we find our sins put away forever, so that God can say, " Their sins and iniquities will I remember no more." But it is there that we have the abiding memorial of those very things. Would any of us be thankful to enjoy eternity as angels instead of sinners re-deemed by Christ? Surely we would not. It is just the apprehension of grace which will give us a song indeed-a song which none can sing but the redeemed of the Lord. The enjoyment of everlasting love will be only infinitely sweeter and more wonderful as we realize the depths out of which it has drawn us-the lower parts of the earth into which He had to descend who has ascended up again for us far above all heavens. Gilead is His, and Manasseh is His. We shall find these parts of our inheritance, as we find them in the inheritance claimed for Israel. Had we skill to realize it, what features of our inheritance might we not trace in this land possessed by the earthly people. We may trace not a few things, in fact, in this very psalm. Going back to the verse preceding, how beautiful to see again the contrast between Shechem and Succoth! She-chem is a shoulder, a ridge; Succoth is a valley. Shechem is the place of power; Succoth, the low place, the valley. The meaning of "Succoth" is "booths," and it carries us on to the day in which Israel will enjoy their final feast of tabernacles, when they will make booths to dwell in, in remembrance of their wilderness-journey, now indeed passed forever. But of all these wilderness experiences they will enjoy then the fruit, in that very lowliness so painful in the learning, so happy as finally attained. It is to the valleys that the heights minister;-it is to the valley that they send down all their streams:it is there that fruit-fulness is secured ;–it is there that all the wealth of blessing is found. Whatever we may know of Shechem,-whatever heights of power and glory may be ours,-our rest will be still in Succoth, in a scene whose moral characteristics are described in the pregnant words, " God all in all." There, dependence will no longer have the least trial in it:there, our creature-needs will be the avenues of eternal blessing:there, the restlessness of our spirits will have passed away for evermore.

Pass on to the eighth verse, and we find a beautiful thing. " Judah," says God, "is My lawgiver." The word is better " scepter." The meaning of "Judah" is, as we all surely know, "praise." Praise is God's scepter, the sign of His dominion alone thus fully maintained among His own. What can insure, if one may speak thus, the obedience due, so well as this praise that rises up to God from every heart unceasingly? The consciousness of perfect blessing; the contrast with the known effects of evil now left behind; the sense of how God has displayed Himself in His dealing with the evil and the deliverance of His own; the Lamb Himself upon the throne; His voice, too, that which leads the praises of His people; the divine authority will be established in a manner thoroughly according to God's own heart. The Father's throne, the Father's kingdom, where all the subjects are children also, will give that character to which eternity will put the seal of divine satisfaction. Judah will be His scepter.

In verse nine we find the enemies, and here too God's power is manifest, and in behalf of His own. We find Moab, Edom, and Philistia. Moab, the expression of the impurity of evil; Edom, of enmity and antagonism; Philistia, of heavenly things held in unreal possession by those who are in heart strangers to heaven. All these God triumphs over. Moab, the unclean, God uses as His wash-pot. Did you ever realize why God allowed the flesh, defined as that, to remain in His own? Did you ever realize how God uses the knowledge of evil so acquired by the Christian man in effect to purify him? Understand me that I am not talking of the breaking out of sin, still less of any laxity in the judgment of it. Of those who could use the argument that because God is glorified about sin, therefore it will lose its character as that and be incapable of judgment, the apostle says, " Whose damnation is just." But the sin in us, however little it may come out, the constant cause of sorrow and humiliation to us, God has some purpose in leaving us still to be tried with, as He surely makes also all the out breaking of corruption in the world around us to be a daily discipline to our souls. Moab, enemy as He may be to God and to His people, God uses as His wash-pot.

Edom, on the other hand, the steady and malignant foe, is brought to thorough humiliation and ignominious defeat. The casting of the shoe over it is the expression of this. It is brought into final and disgraceful submission. Thus surely will all opposition to the divine counsels end. Philistia too, the last enemy before the kingdom in Israel, for us the type of the last form of evil as we see it in Laodicea,-the form of godliness without the power of it,-truth only used by those who can glorify themselves with it, instead of its abasing them in the dust. The empty hollowness which we feel too, every one of us, so much, as an internal enemy as well as an external:-over Philistia will be final triumph. No more traffic with unfelt truth; no more self-complacent pretension in that which is our shame; no more pride of knowledge, holding the living Truth outside. Philistia in that day will be dispossessed forever, smitten by the true David into the dust of His feet. Then shall there be no more adversary or evil occurrent. That which will be true for Israel when she sings praises to God among the nations will be true in how deep a sense to the heavenly saints, brought home and possessing the many mansions of the Father's house. Beautifully thus the internal sense of this wonderful psalm agrees with its first literal application, the earthly being here as ever the type of the heavenly. We are admitted now by, faith, if faith be in activity, to the joy of it all. We are permitted to go already through the dried-up Jordan into the land of our inheritance, assured that every place that the sole of our foot treads on is our own. Shall we not covet this joy ? shall we not seek to possess ourselves more than ever of that which thus lies invitingly before our eyes? God is opening these things before us to attract our hearts. Shall we not seek His grace that there indeed we may abide, in that which is eternal ? there where no rust or moth corrupts, there where no thief enters, there where to covet and acquire delivers us from the corruption that is in the world through lust, there where already we may breathe the purity of an atmosphere where the tabernacle of God is with men, and He dwells with them, and is their God, and God is all in all?