God hath His uplands, bleak and bare,
Where He doth bid us rest awhile — Crags where we breathe the purer air,
Lone peaks that catch the day's first smile. » H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Day by Day DxUy, 27.
PSALM cxxi. I, 2 39
Lift me, 0 Lord, above the level plain.
Beyond the cities where life throbs and thrills,
And in the cool airs let my spirit gain
The stable strength and courage of Thy hills.
They are Thy secret dwelling places. Lord.
Like Thy majestic prophets, old and hoar, They stand assembled in divine accord,
Thy sign of stablished power for evermore.
Lead me yet farther, Lord, to peaks more clear, Until the clouds like shining meadows lie,
Where through the deeps of silence I may hear The thunder of Thy legions marching by.
IL
The Cry of Helplessness.
"From whence shall my help come?"
1. The exile in Babylon had a dreary desert, peopled by wild tribes hostile to him, stretching between his present home and that home where he desired to be ; and it would be difficult for him to get away from the dominion that held him captive, unless by consent of the power of whom he was the vassal. So the more the thought of the mountains of Israel drew the Psalmist, the more there came into his mind the thought. How am I to be made able to reach that blessed soil ? And surely, if we saw, with anything like a worthy apprehension and vision, the great- ness of the blessedness that lies yonder for Christian souls, we should feel far more deeply than we do the impossibility, as far as we are concerned, of our ever reaching it. The sense of our own weakness and the consciousness of the perils upon the path ought ever to be present with us all.
^ Man knows that he is low, that he needs to be lifted up, that he cannot lift himself — he can but lift up his eyes. He knows that his lowness is not lowly, but degraded and proud. By his natural birth he has come into low places, and in himself he has forsaken the heights. What he is by nature he has con- firmed by choice, and allowed the conditions of his natural birth to form his character and determine his life. He has inverted
40 HELP FROM BEYOND THE HILLS
the true order of his parts and powers, degraded his nobler faculties, and raised to a bad eminence his lower passions and propensities.^
2. All the delights of Babylon could not satisfy the exile's longing. He was perfectly comfortable in Babylon. There was abundance of everything that he wanted for his life. The Jews there were materially quite as well off as, and many of them a great deal better off than, ever they had been in their narrow little strip of mountain land, shut in between the desert and the sea. But for all that, fat, wealthy Babylon was not Palestine. So amid the luxuriant vegetation, the wealth of water and the fertile plains, the Psalmist longed for the mountains, though the mountains are often bare of green things. It was that longing that led to his looking to the hills. Do we know anything of that longing which makes us "that are in this tabernacle to groan, being burdened " ? Unless our Christianity throws us out of harmony and contentment with the present, it is worth very little. And unless we know something of that immortal longing to be nearer to God, and fuller of Christ, and emancipated from sense and from the burdens and trivialities of life, we have yet to learn what the meaning of walking "not after the flesh but after the Spirit " really is.
^ Writing from Aberdeen to Lady Boyd, Samuel Rutherford says : " I have not now, of a long time, found such high spring- tides as formerly. The sea is out, and I cannot buy a wind and cause it to flow again; only I wait on the shore till the Lord sends a full sea. . . . But even to dream of Him is sweet." And then just over the leaf, to Marion McNaught : "I am well : honour to God. . . . He hath broken in upon a poor prisoner's soul like the swelling of Jordan. I am bank and brim full: a great high springtide of the consolations of Christ hath over- whelmed me." But sweet as it is to read his rapturous expres- sions when the tide is full, I feel it far more helpful to hear how he still looks and waits for the return of the tide when the tide is low, and when the shore is full, as all left shores are apt to be, of weeds and mire, and all corrupt and unclean things. Rutherford is never more helpful to his correspondents than when they con- sult him about their ebb tides, and find that he himself either has been, or still is, in the same experience.'
* W. Pulsford. ' A. Whyte, Samuel Rutherford and Some of his Corrcspondent$.
PSALM cxxi. I, 2 41
3. Even the hills could not send help. Verse 2 declares that, although the hills stand for earth's best defence, the singer's hope is in the Creator, not in things created, in Him who set fast the mountains, and is higher than they as heavens are higher than earth. The insufiBciency of the hills is again implied in the two striking pictures of the third and fourth verses. Smooth rock or sliding sand, loose rubble or sUppery turf, landslide beneath or avalanche from above, may betray the climber to injury or destruction. But Jehovah delivers His people from falling, and establishes their goings. Again, the recumbent hills lie ever wrapt in proverbial and unbroken sleep. They heed not, they hear not, and they suffer the night to change the clifif from a defence to a danger, and the slumbering slopes sound no alarm as the enemy scales them under cover of the night. But God is ever wakeful for His own — and darkness and the light are both alike to Him. The contrast is continued in verse 5. The hills are passive, God is active ; He guards, He is fortress, garrison, and patrol. The strongest hill-forts must be well defended, or Petra will fall to Eome, the Heights of Abraham to Wolfe, Hannibal will pass the Alps, and Xerxes outflank Leonidas by Thermopylae. The soldier must guard the hill that guards him, but God guards all.