The bonds that press and fetter, That chafe the soul and fret her, What man can know them better, 0 brother men, than I ?
And yet, my burden bearing, The five wounds ever wearing, — I too in my despairing
Have seen Him as I say; — Gross darkness all around Him Enwrapt Him and enwound Him, — O late at night I found Him
And lost Him in the day ! • George Adam Smith. ' May Kendall.
PSALM Lxviii. 19 193
Yet bolder grown and braver At sight of one to save her My soul no more shall waver,
With wings no longer furled, — But cut with one decision From doubt and men's derision That sweet and vanished vision
Shall follow thro' the world.i
^ F. W. H. Myers, A Vision.
PS. XXV. CXIX. — 13
A Sun and a Shield.
>M
Literature.
Davies (D.), Talks with Men, Women and Children, v. 145.
Foxell (W. J.), God's Garden, 142.
Kirkpatrick (A. F.), The Booh of Psalms (Cambridge Bible), 509.
Maclaren (A.), The Book of Psalms (Expositor's Bible), ii. 449.
Morrison (G. H.), Tlie Unlighted Lustre, 65.
Peabody (F. G.), Mornings in the College Chapel, ii. 127.
Pearce (J.), The Alabaster Box, 96.
Pearse (M, G.), The God of Our Pleasures, 49.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tahernacle Pulpit, xxviii. (1882),
No. 1659. Voysey (C), Sermons, xi. (1888), No. 20. Wiseman (N.), Children's Sermons, 36. Christian World Pulpit, xxiv. 332 (H. W. Beecher).
196
A Sun and a Shield.
The Lord God is a sun and a shield. — Ps. Ixxxiv. ii.
An ancient legend tells that Abraham, in his untaught devoutness and yearning reverence, took the sun for his God until he observed the setting of its beams in the west. In the absence of authentic revelation, it is no more strange that reflective and reverential minds should exclaim, in the presence of a world of light, " The sun is our God," than that the Heaven-instructed Hebrew singer, dwelling in the light of God's countenance, should declare, " The Lord God is a sun " ; for a more fitting material symbol of God than the sun it would be diflficult to find, whether we consider the vastness of it, the glory of it, or the beneficence of it. Hidden by its very glory ! So far off, yet finding out our distant world and bathing it in its genial warmth, breathing about it a new hope ! So mighty, yet so gentle ! Stooping not only to the lowest and least forms of life, but ministering to its hidden and shapeless beginnings.
Could there be a more felicitous and apposite representation of Him of whom an Apostle wrote : " God is light, and in him is no darkness at all " ? As the sun opens the gates of day, floods the world with light, gives it without stint to palace or cottage, to peasant and prince, and enables us to discern a thousand pleasing objects, so God shines into our lives and gives us power to see a thousand mcral glories. The secret of seeing is not in us. God is the great revealer. We are the organs favoured with the holy visions. We can see only what He is pleased to shovi^ us. But He is not slow to reveal Himself to our understanding, nor is the light inadequate. No nook or corner of our being need go unirradiated. If we open the life to God as we open the eye to the sun, we shall no longer be children of the darkness. " For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."
X97
198 A SUN AND A SHIELD
^ Nowhere else in the Old Testament is Jehovah directly called a sun, though the ideas conveyed by the metaplior are frequent. Cp. Ps. xxvii. i; Isa. x. 17, Ix. 19, 20; Mai. iv. 2. Perhaps the prevalence of sun-worship in the East led to the avoidance of so natural and significant a metaphor. Even here the oldest Versions either had a different reading or shrank from a literal rendering. The LXX and Theodotion have : " For the Lord God loveth mercy and truth." The Targ, paraphrases : " For the Lord God is like a high wall and a strong shield," reading shemesh ( = sun), but taking it in the sense of "battlement" (RV. "pinnacles"), which it has in Isa. liv. 12. The Syr. gives: " Our sustainer and our helper." Only the later Greek Versions render the Massoretic text literally.^
^ In his Hibbert Lectures on the Eeligion of the Babylonians Professor Sayce quotes a hymn to Samas the Sun-god, beginning :
0 Sun-god, king of heaven and earth, director of things above
and below, 0 Sun-god, thou that clothest the dead with life, delivered by
thy hands, Judge unbribed, director of mankind.
Supreme is the mercy of him who is the lord over difficulty. Bidding the child and offspring come fortJi, light of the world, Creator of all thy universe, the Sun-god art thou.
^ Another time Napoleon breaks out [in conversation with Gourgaudj : " Were I obliged to have a religion, I would worship the sun — the source of all life — the real God of the earth." ^