If we would only lay to heart that the very essence of religion lies in this 'flight of the lonely soul to the only God,' we should understand better than we do what He asks from us in order that He may defend us, and how blessed and certain His defence is. So let us clear our minds from the thought that anything is worth calling trust which is not thus taking refuge in God Himself.
Now, I need not remind you, I suppose, that all this is just as true about us as it was about David, and that the emotion or the act of his will and heart which he expresses in these words of my text is neither more nor less than the Christian act of faith. There is no difference except a difference of development; there is no difference between the road to God marked out in the Psalms, and the road to God laid down in the Gospels. The Psalmist who said, 'Trust ye in the Lord for ever,' and the Apostle who said, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved,' were preaching identically the same doctrine. One of them could speak more fully than the other could of the Person on whom trust was to be rested, but the trust itself was the same, and the Person on whom it rested was the same, though His Name of old was Jehovah, and His Name to-day is 'Immanuel, God with us.'
Nor need I do more than point out how the context of the words that I have ventured to detach from their surroundings is instructive: 'Let all those that put their trust in Thee rejoice because Thou defendest them.' The word for defending there continues the metaphor that lies in the word for 'trust,' for it means literally to cover over and so to protect. Thus, when a man runs to God for His refuge, God
'Covers his defenceless head With the shadow of His wings.'
And the joy of trust is, first, that it brings round me the whole omnipotence of God for my defence, and the whole tenderness of God for my consolation, and next, that in the very exercise of trust in such defence, so fortified and vindicated by experience, there is great reward. All who thus flee into the refuge shall find refuge whither they flee, and shall be glad.
II. Then the next thought of my texts, which I do not force into them, but which results, as it seems to me, distinctly from the order in which they occur in the context, is that love follows trust.
'All those that put their trust in Thee--they also that love Thee.' If I am to love God, I must be quite sure that God loves me. My love can never be anything else than an answer to His. It can only be secondary and derived, or I would rather say reflected and flashed back from His. And so, very significantly, the Psalmist says, 'Those that love Thy Name,' meaning by 'Name,' as is always meant by it, the revealed character of God. If I am to love God, He must not hide in the darkness behind His infinity, but must come out and give me something about Him that I know. The three letters G O D mean nothing, and there is no power in them to stir a man's heart. It must be the knowledge of the acts of God that brings men to love Him. And there is no way of getting that knowledge but through the faith which, as I said, must precede love. For faith realises the fact that God loves. 'We have known and believed the love that God hath to us.' The first step is to grasp the great truth of the loving God, and through that truth to grasp the God that loves. And then, and not till then, does there spring up in a man's heart love towards Him. But it is only the faith that is set on Him who hath declared the Father unto us that gives us for our very own the grasp of the facts, which facts are the only possible fuel that can kindle love in a human heart. 'We love Him because He first loved us,' and we shall never know that He loves us unless we come to the knowledge through the road of faith. So John himself tells us when he says, in the words that I have already quoted, 'We have known and believed.' He puts the foundation last, 'We have known,' because 'we have believed' 'the love that God hath to us.'