Psalm 93:1-5 The LORD reigns, he is clothed with majesty; the LORD is clothed with strength, with which he has girded himself… I. IN RELATION TO CREATION. Life has no intelligible meaning, there is no satisfactory explanation of anything apart from the belief, "The Lord reigneth." To find "laws," yet to deny the Lawmaker; to admit processes, yet to negative the mind which started and controls the processes; to gaze on astounding effects, and yet ignore the only adequate cause; to talk of kingdoms, and yet reject the reigning Sovereign, is, to all intents and purposes, the climax of folly, and a gross violation of all correct logical principles. "Worlds are but signs of His presence, systems are but His initials in bold type, and the universe but His flaming superscription. All the activities displayed are but a faint symbol of the unlimited and ceaseless movements of the King. They are but bubbles on the rushing torrent of His onward sweep, sprays from the cataracts of His operations, wavelets upon the fathomless ocean of His activity." II. IN THE SPHERE AND MYSTERIES OF PROVIDENCE. In all the dramas of life — individual life, family life, national life, Church life — we must rise in thought and faith from secondary causes to the great First Cause: from mere caprice to Eternal Sovereignty: from the seeming accidental to the actual Divinity, which governs every life, evolves every history, and works all things after the counsel of His own Will. His march is in mystery — through the shadowed avenues of His "Hidings," the very emblems of His Majesty being the robes of His concealment. What can we know of the interlacings of life with life? of the mysterious and untraceable effects of blood relationship? of hereditary and transmitted evil, disease, influence, and so forth, down through the vast chain of human life and history? Here, the highest created intellect must pause in adoring wonder, and say, "Just and true are Thy ways, O King of saints." Are any of you troubled and dismayed about the outcome of events, complicated and strange in your eyes, relative to the Church? "The Lord reigneth." We have nothing to fear. III. IN THE HISTORY AND PROGRESS OF CHRISTIANITY. Christianity does not rest on such side-issues as the miracles of Christ, but on Christ Himself, and its culminating fact — the miracle of His Resurrection. He is its grand historic Reality, its abiding supernatural fact. How came it to be a history, if it is not true? How came it to be first reported, and then to be written, if it were wholly or in part false? The magnetism of Christianity was never greater among the nations than it is to-day. "Think of the undermining process that has been slowly but surely going on in the hoary systems of idolatry, and how the old mythologies have been transfixed by rays of light from Bethlehem and Tabor. Brahma and Vishnu are quaking on their precarious thrones, and Buddha lies sprawling on the rivers of China. Add to this the fact that the Christian religion is making in our day a vast impression on society, and enters more deeply than ever into the thoughts and life of the world. It is leavening all literature. Essays, poems, treatises, biographies, and even novels are almost as full of it as sermons are. It affects legislation, sweetening the Statute-book, and purifying the fountains of justice. It is never weary of erecting hospitals, asylums, orphanages, homes, colleges, and other monuments of beneficence whose name is legion." Do these look like the symptoms of an exhausted force or a dying cause? (J. O. Keen, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: The LORD reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; the LORD is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved. |
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