Psalm 100:3-5 Know you that the LORD he is God: it is he that has made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.… There is a superficial way of reading these words which makes them a mere truism. That noble paraphrase of the psalm, "All people that on earth do dwell," seems rather to fall flat and stale. "Without our aid He did us make." The psalmist is not giving utterance to a commonplace of that sort. That is not the point at all. The psalmist is, as you will see, calling upon all lands, the heathen lands, to believe in God, to believe that He is the Lord, and there is no other, because His workmanship is manifest in the people whom He has chosen; His guiding and shaping Spirit has been within them and upon them to make them what they are. All that they have of moral and religious training and continuance is the gift of His grace, and the result of His training. They are the witness to the world of God's constancy, faithfulness, truth, and mercy. Consider the application of these words — I. Is THE INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN LIFE. No man with any religious conviction, or any religious emotion, can look back on the story of his life up to this point, through all these changes, wrestlings, temptations, and moral victories, without feeling that God's shaping hand has been with him there all through. That man sees nothing clearly, and feels nothing deeply, who does not both see and feel that all the best things in him are not self-wrought, but are the result of forces not his own, and higher than his own. Alas, there is much of the self-made left in all of us, and it is the part of which we are the least proud. There are in us bits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, that have not been crucified with Christ; and there are hard lumps in the tenderest heart which have not felt the melting of His love. Would God they were replaced by Diviner stuff! But all the good you have and know, the noble faith, the uplifting, cheering hope, the recoil from sin, and the patience, and the courage, and the self-sacrifice, and the wells of pity, and the fountains of love, the joy in God, and the sweet singing in your heart at Jesu's Name — all these have been woven in you by God, and the Spirit of God, and the indwelling Christ. II. IN THE NATION TO WHICH WE BELONG. How a reader of the Bible can find God in every page of Jewish history and not see His overshadowing and guiding presence in the wonderful story of Britain's growth and greatness is to me an indication of incomprehensible dulness. We are not a self-made people, no, indeed. "Our builder and maker has been God." For no human thought would ever have imagined, and no prophet's vision would ever have foreseen, the unexampled and extraordinary growth and expansion of this little island and its people. Looked at on the map, it is a mere dot on the surface of the globe; yet its name, and flag, and ruling power, and shaping ideas have girdled and well-nigh embraced the globe. Men say we owe it to our insular position, our sea-protected shores, or perhaps to our climatic influences, or to the singular mixture of races in our composition, or to the blunders and failures of other nations, or to the grit and determination in our character; or we owe it to the wisdom of our statesmen, the enterprise of our merchants, the daring of our sailors, the valour of our soldiers, and to the sturdy, self-reliant independence which has been at the base of all the rest. And they do not see that most of these are moral and religious causes; that behind them, in the shadow, God has been standing watching and working, and that underneath them all have been the everlasting arms. They forget how heavenly light dawned and shone down on the people in their superstitious and benighted days to give them religion in its purest form and to make them righteous, truth-loving, and strong in the fear of God. They do not remember that our fathers were delivered almost in spite of themselves from the blight of superstition, how the truth set them free and gave them room to expand. They do not take into account how large a part has been played by our open Bible and our praying heroes. They do not see that reverence and faith, and faith-rooted justice and Christian virtues have been the very soul and backbone of our people's strength, and that nearly all our greatest thinkers, writers, statesmen, sailors, soldiers have grown up in nurseries of prayer. They are blind to the fact, moreover, that once and again in days of stress and trial, in the dark and cloudy days when the fortunes of the nation have been well-nigh overwhelmed, the outstretched arm of God brought our fathers through Red Seas of trouble to a safe and wealthy place. Nay, we may say that hundreds of times the very blunders, follies and crimes of our statesmen have been overruled and our people led along paths which their own wisdom and foresight would never have chosen; and it may be all summed up in this, that through all the guilts and sins which have had their part in the upbuilding, the Almighty Architect has been the chief worker in carrying our name and commerce to the uttermost parts of the earth and in bringing hundreds of millions of souls under our rule. (J. G. Greenhough, M.A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. |
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