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We have no difficulty in accepting the merciful character of God until we enter the realm of retribution and judgment. In the nature of the ease our conclusions must be imperfect, from our meagre knowledge.

I. THE GENERAL LAW. God administers in perfect equity the legitimate results of every man's efforts to himself. The term "render" has the germinal sense of restoring, paying back, or making up the account of — "rendering judgment."

1. This law — or method of God's procedure — is universal in His dominions. "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Material, intellectual, moral. Yet we must not get the idea of law as above the Lawgiver or Executor. Unintelligent power is not a swaying sceptre: "Power belongeth unto God."

2. Nor must we think of God as held by any force, aside from His own wisdom, in the production of successive events in the universe: "There is no power but of God; the powers that be are ordained of God."

II. THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO THE TREMENDOUS FACT OF LAW.

1. The awful side. The side which thrills with its tremendous import — which threatens and yet invites. In its security of the reproduction of human actions. In nature. The fifth reproduction of a grain of wheat is 25,600,000,000 grains. Plant a cottonwood tree beside a stream in western prairies, and soon you will fringe the streams for ten thousand square miles. Memory is a reproductive spring of power as lasting as the soul. Panoramas, words, acts, buried for fifty years, spring from their graves with the bloom of youth upon them. How subtle, majestic and awful this power in moral realms! How large a sum of human life is fashioned by the subtle power of potent influence!

2. The other side of this awful fact of law is a glorious one.

(1) Without it there would be no permanency in the domain of active matter or spirit. Permanency, and the sense of it, is essential to satisfaction in every field of pursuit. We struggle for it in our contest with nature, with the world, with life itself. This underlies our great hope of heaven: it will abide.

(2) Without it there would be no incentive to effort.

(3) Without it there would be no standing and universal warning against sin, or incentive to virtue. The Judgment Day is to test our whole being and doing. The mighty environment of law is to hold our destiny and establish our glory or seal our doom. Sin will generate an awful cyclone. Righteousness will sail into a quiet harbour of eternal placidity and safety.

(4) There seem difficulties. It is hard for us to see and say, at all times, "the Judge of the whole earth doeth right," and "His mercy is unto children's children." In the chamber of death, specially of the young. In the wake of the cyclone. But think: it is after the war-cloud has cleared away that we see and feel the glory of results. When we are so infatuated with one department of life as to lose sight of the import of its outcome, it is difficult to see that mercy inspires justice and law. Yet so we teach our children by painful discipline, if necessary. Is it unkind to hold the boy to his books though he squirm and cry? No; the delights to come from acquired mental power lead us in kindness to hold him to toil now. When we judge of Divine administration from the narrow limitations of human judgment. How often, if we only knew, would our tears be turned into smiles! A mother prayed for her sick young son that "his life might be spared whether it Was God's will or not," and he grew up to curse her life and break her heart, Two lessons this life under law should teach us —

1. Faith in God: as an Administrator — Governor — wise, powerful, merciful, good. A personal Friend.

2. Obedience to His commands. How shortsighted the soldier who stops to question the orders from headquarters!

(M. D. Collins, D. D.).

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KJV: Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy: for thou renderest to every man according to his work.

WEB: Also to you, Lord, belongs loving kindness, for you reward every man according to his work. A Psalm by David, when he was in the desert of Judah.