3. The life which the Psalmist knows to be undying is the continual energy of loving fellowship with God. The death to which this life can never yield is the silence of the land of forgetfulness, where there is no revelation and no praise of God. These two ideas are embodied for the Psalmist under the form of life in this world on the one hand and death and Sheol on the other. Now the religious consciousness can never be satisfied by asserting a noumenal transcendental truth without applying it to actual phenomenal experience. The indissoluble- ness of the life in God is to the Psalmist a present reality. As such it must approve itself true under the present forms and conditions of his existence, that is, in physical life as contrasted with physical death. In no other way can he conceive the great truth as present and practical. It would be ridiculous for the inspired singer, who possesses an ideal truth in ideal certainty, to pause in the fulness of his faith, and reflect on the empirical fact that, after all, no man escapes death. He knows that he cannot yield to death in the only form in which he fears it, namely, as separation from God ; and he conceives this immunity in the only form in which he has any means of conceiving it, namely, as continued physical life. It is true that this persuasion
' J. R. Miller, The Shining Life.
PSALM XVI. 5, 6 275
is a paradox. It is true that so high a confidence, so uncondition- ally expressed, can reign to the exclusion of all doubt and fear only in a moment of highest elevation, and that the same singer, under a sense of sin and weakness, of failing strength and of God's displeasure, must soon have passed through bitter experiences such as we read of in other Psalms — experiences far removed from the joyful confidence and energy of the words before us. But so long as the strong sense of full loving communion with God which our Psalm expresses remains undimmed, no doubt can receive entrance. What we call physical impossibilities never had any existence for the faith of the Old Testament, which viewed every physical condition as implicitly obedient to Jehovah's law of righteousness. So long, then, as the Psalmist stands in unfailing fellowship with God he must live, and cannot cease to live. It is only when the sense of sin arises as the consciousness of impeded fellowship with God that there can arise at the same time a sense of uncertainty and limitation in the hope of life.^
^ When a river is dry and shallow in the summer-time, you see the rocks that rise within its bed. And they obstruct the stream, and make it chafe, and fret it as it journeys to the ocean. But when the rains have come, and the river is in flood, it covers up the rocks in its great volume, and in the silence of a mighty tide, flows to its last home within the sea. It is not longer than it was before. It is only deeper than it was before. Measure it by miles, it is unchanged. Measure it by volume and how different ! So with the life that is the gift of Jesus. It is not longer than God's immortality. It is only that same river deepened gloriously, till death itself is hidden in the deeps. Knowledge is perfected in open vision ; love is crowned in an unbroken fellowship ; service at least shall be a thing of beauty, fired by the vision of the God we serve. That is eternal life, and that alone. That is its difference from immortality. That is the gift of the Lord Jesus Christ to the immortal spirit of mankind.^
^ One lovely summer evening some years ago I received a message that an elder in the church I used to serve was taken suddenly ill. He was a man looked up to and loved by the whole community, but modest and retiring, making no parade of the religion that in reality coloured all his life. When I arrived
1 W. Robertson Smith. 2 q_ jj. Morrison, The After glow of God, 219.
276 A GOODLY HERITAGE
at his home I found that the hand of death was upon him, and he knew it. Falterii^gly, and in broken words, for I loved him, I tried to talk to him, and to speak some comforting v/ord. " I am glad to see you," he said, " and it was good of you to come " ; and then looking at me with a look of calm resignation on his face, he said, " I am not going to live, but I am not afraid to die. No one can do anything for me now. This is a matter between my own soul and God, and I settled it long ago." Then briefly he gave me an outline of his religious life. Every day he contrived, no matter how busy, to spend, in addition to the usual family devotions, a portion of time alone with God. Sometimes this was done in the fields of his farm, at other times in the loft of one of the out- houses, just wherever he happened to be employed, and his own family or servants never knew it. As I said, he made no parade of his religion, and never, as far as I knew, prayed in public ; but he lived his religion. He was a hard-working, industrious man all his life, and had not the opportunity of getting much education in his youth. One thing, however, he knew; he knew Christ and lived in daily communion with Him. I left him that night promising to see him again in the morning, but before the morning came he had gone to be with Christ whom he loved and served.^