Lives rooted in God through faith in Jesus Christ are not vanity. Let us lay hold of Him with a loving grasp--and 'we shall live also' _because_ He lives, _as_ He lives, _so long_ as He lives. The brief days of earth will be blessed while they last, and fruitful of what shall never pass. We shall have Him with us while we journey, and all our journeyings will lead to rest in Him. True, men walk in a vain show; true, 'the world passeth away and the lust thereof,' but, blessed be God! true, also, 'He that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.'
'Many, O Lord my God, are Thy wonderful works which Thou hast done, and Thy thoughts which are to us-ward: they cannot be reckoned up in order unto Thee: if I would declare and speak of them, they are more than can be numbered ... 12. Innumerable evils have compassed me about: mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to look up; they are more than the hairs of mine head; therefore my heart faileth me.'--PSALMS xl. 5, 12.
So then, there are two series of things which cannot be numbered, God's mercies, man's sins. This psalm has for its burden a cry for deliverance; but the Psalmist begins where it is very hard for a struggling man to begin, but where we always should begin, with grateful remembrance of God's mercy. His wondrous dealings seem to the Psalmist's thankful heart as numberless as the blades of grass which carpet the fields, or as the wavelets which glance in the moonlight and break in silver upon the sand. They come pouring out continuously, like the innumerable undulations of the ether which make upon the eyeballs the single sensation of light. He thinks not only of God's wonderful works, His realised purposes of mercy, but of 'His thoughts which are to us-ward,' the purposes, still more wonderful, of a yet greater mercy which wait to be realised. He thinks not only of God's lovingkindness to Him, but his contemplations embrace God's goodness to his brethren--'Thy thoughts which are to us-ward.' And as he thinks of all this 'multitude of His tender mercies,' his lips break into this rapturous exclamation of my text.
But there is a wonderful change in tone, in the two halves of the psalm. The deliverance that seems so complete in the earlier part is but partial. The triumph and the trust seem both to be clouded over. A frowning mass lifts itself up against the immense mass of God's mercies. The Psalmist sees himself ringed about by numberless evils, as a man tied to a stake might be by a circle of fire. 'Innumerable evils have compassed me about.' His conscience tells him that the evils are deserved; they are his iniquities transformed which have come back to him in another shape, and have laid their hands upon him as a constable does upon a thief. 'Mine iniquities have taken hold upon me'--they hem him in so that his vision is interrupted, the smoke from the circle of flame blinds his eyes--'I cannot see.' His roused conscience and his quivering heart conceive of them as 'more than the hairs of his head,' and so courage and confidence have ebbed away from him. 'My heart faileth me----,' and there is nothing left for him but to fling himself in his misery out of himself and on to God.
Now what I wish to do in this sermon is not so much to deal with these two verses separately as to draw some of the lessons from the very remarkable juxtaposition of these two innumerable things--God's tender mercies, and man's iniquity and evil.
I. To begin with, let me remind you how, if we keep these two things both together in our contemplations, they suggest for us very forcibly the greatest mystery in the universe, and throw a little light upon it.