Ps. cxvi. 1 — 7. / love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and my supplications. Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore toill I call upon him as long as I live. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gat hold upon me : I found trouble arid sorroiv. Then called I upon the name of the Lord; O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul. Gracious is the Lord, and righteous ; yea, our God is merciful! The Lord preserveth the simple: I teas brought low, and he helped me. Return unto thy rest, 0 my soul ; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.
THE abruptness of this psalm shews, that it was the fruit of much previous meditation : the writer of it had been " musing in his heart, till at last the fire kindled, and he spake with his tongue." It begins, " I love :" and, though our translators had not sup- plied the deficiency, there would have remained no doubt on the mind of the reader, who it was that
was the object of the Psalmist's regard. The fact is, that nothing so endears the Deity to the souls of men as answers to prayer ; nor does any thing so encou- rage sinners to address him with unwearied impor- tunity. The two first verses of the psalm are a kind of summary of the whole ; setting forth in few words what he afterwards expatiates upon more at length : but though we shall, on this account, pass them over in our discussion, we shall not be unmindful of the resolution contained in them, but shall conclude our subject with commending it to your most serious attention.
The points which now call for our notice are, I. The troubles he had endured —
[We know not for certain what these were ; but we are sure, that the psalm was written after the ark had been brought up to Mount Zion, and the worship of God had been perma- nently settled at Jerusalem a : and therefore we apprehend, that is was written on occasion of David's deliverance from some overwhelming distress both of body and mind, resembling that specified in the sixth psalm b. The terms used in our text might indeed be interpreted of death only ; because the word " hell " often means nothing more than the grave : but we rather think that terrors of conscience, on account of his sin committed in the matter of Uriah, had given a ten-fold poignancy to the fear of death, and that his experience was similar to that de- scribed in the 25th Psalm, where he says, "The troubles of my heart are enlarged ; O bring thou me out of my distresses ! Look upon mine affliction and my pain ; and forgive all my sins0/ " But whatever was the precise occasion of David's sorrows, it is manifest, that, sooner or later, we must all be brought into a situation wherein his language will be exactly suitable to us. "The sorrows of death" will shortly "encompass us," and " the pains of hell," if we have not previously obtained a sense of reconciliation with God, will " get hold upon us ; " and, in the contemplation of an approaching eternity, " we shall find trouble and sorrow," such as in our present state of carelessness and security we have no conception of. O that we could but bring our hearers to realize that awful hour, when we shall look back upon our mis-spent hours with unavailing regret, and look forward to our great account with fear and trembling, wishing, if it were possible, that we might have a fresh term of probation allowed us, or that the hills and mountains might cover us from
a ver. 18, 19. h Ps. vi. 2, 3. " Ps. xxv. 17, 18.