For the protection that is granted to faith is only to be understood by faith. It is deliverance from the evil in the evil which vindicates as no exaggeration, nor as merely an experience and a promise peculiar to the old theocracy of Israel, but not now realised, the grand sayings of this text. The poison is all wiped off the arrow by that divine protection. It may still wound but it does not putrefy the flesh. The sewage water comes down, but it passes into the filtering bed, and is disinfected and cleansed before it is permitted to flow over our fields.
And so, brethren! if any of you are finding that the psalm is not outwardly true, and that through the covering wing the storm of hail has come and beaten you down, do not suppose that that in the slightest degree impinges upon the reality and truthfulness of this great promise, 'He shall cover thee with His feathers.' Anything that has come through _them_ is manifestly not an 'evil.' 'Who is he that will harm you if ye be followers of that which is good?' 'If God be for us who can be against us?' Not what the world calls, and our wrung hearts feel that it rightly calls, 'sorrows' and 'afflictions,'--these all work for our good, and protection consists, not in averting the blows, but in changing their character.
Then, there is another region far higher, in which this promise of my text is absolutely true--that is, in the region of spiritual defence. For no man who lies under the shadow of God, and has his heart filled with the continual consciousness of that Presence, is likely to fall before the assaults of evil that tempt him away from God; and the defence which He gives in that region is yet more magnificently impregnable than the defence which He gives against external evils. For, as the New Testament teaches us, we are kept from sin, not by any outward breastplate or armour, nor even by the divine wing lying above us to cover us, but by the indwelling Christ in our hearts. His Spirit within us makes us 'free from the law of sin and death,' and conquerors over all temptations.
I say not a word about all the other beautiful and pathetic associations which are connected with this emblem of the covering wing, sweet and inexhaustible as it is, but I simply leave with you the two thoughts that I have dwelt upon, of the twofold manner of that divine protection.
II. And now a word, in the second place, about the flight of the shelterless to the shelter.
The word which is rendered in our Authorised Version, 'shalt thou trust,' is, like all Hebrew words for mental and spiritual emotions and actions, strongly metaphorical. It might have been better to retain its literal meaning here instead of substituting the abstract word 'trust.' That is to say, it would have been an improvement if we had read with the Revised Version, not, 'under His wings shalt thou trust,' but 'under His wings shalt thou take refuge.' For that is the idea which is really conveyed; and in many of the psalms, if you will remember, the same metaphor is employed. 'Hide me beneath the shadow of Thy wings'; 'Beneath Thy wings will I take refuge until calamities are overpast'; and the like. Many such passages will, no doubt, occur to your memories.
But what I wish to signalise is just this, that in this emblem of flying into a refuge from impending perils we get a far more vivid conception, and a far more useful one, as it seems to me, of what Christian faith really is than we derive from many learned volumes and much theological hair-splitting. 'Under His wings shalt thou flee for refuge.' Is not that a vivid, intense, picturesque, but most illuminative way of telling us what is the very essence, and what is the urgency, and what is the worth, of what we call faith? The Old Testament is full of the teaching--which is masked to ordinary readers, but is the same teaching as the New Testament is confessedly full of--of the necessity of faith as the one bond that binds men to God. If only our translators had wisely determined upon a uniform rendering in Old and New Testament of words that are synonymous, the reader would have seen what is often now reserved for the student, that all these sayings in the Old Testament about 'trusting in God' run on all fours with 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.'