Psalm 119:126-128 It is time for you, LORD, to work: for they have made void your law. The Christian who is wholly satisfied with the outlook on the condition of society either possesses a faith of unusual and heroic fibre, or has but feebly mastered the moral phenomena around him. I. A MELANCHOLY FACT. "Men have made void Thy law." 1. By assailing its authority. (1) You assail the authority of law when you deny the Personality of its source, and this is the form in which the assault upon the authority of law has been conspicuously made in our days. I refer to that subtle and pathetic theory of the universe which finds in pantheism a sufficient explanation of all its phenomena, whether physical or moral. (2) But the authority of the law of God can be assailed in other ways, as, for example, by palliating the gravity of its transgressions. The fact of sin must lie at the foundation of any system of religion which has to assume the form and function of a redemption; and where sin is denied, or reduced to a hardly culpable minimum, then the redemptive idea seems disproportionate, exaggerated, and almost preposterous. (3) Another way in which men make void the law of God by assailing its authority is by restricting the area of its rule. To imagine that there can be a sphere in which the aims and activities of men can be released from the authority and sanction of God, is to suppose that there are spheres in which He ceases to be God, and to claim the homage of His creatures. 2. There is another method of making void the law of God, and that is by disparaging its sufficiency. And it is seen mainly in its relation to that law which is the highest revealed to man — the law of the Gospel, the perfect law of liberty, the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus. II. THE URGENT APPEAL. "It is time for Thee, Lord, to work." Such challenge is the privilege of earnest men. It is the violence which takes heaven by force. God does not resent it. He hears, invites, answers it. But when He arises to work we know not what will be the form of His operations. He worketh according to the counsel of His own will; and who knows but that when once He awakes, and puts on His strength, it may not he confined in its results to the immediate and exclusive quickening of the spiritual life of the Church, but may be associated with providential upheavals and convulsions, which will fill the heart Of the world with astonishment and dismay. There have been times when God has worked, and the signs of His presence have been seen in terrible shakings of the nations, in the ploughing up from their foundations of hoary injustice, in the smiting of grinding tyrannies, and in the emancipation of peoples whose life had been a long and hopeless mean. There have been times, too, and many, when He has worked through the elements of nature — through blasting and mildew, through floods and famine, etc. But this working of God will also take other shapes. Will it not be seen in the inspiration of the Church with faith in its own creed, so far as that creed has the warrant of the Divine Word? Then we may expect a wondrous effusion of the Holy Spirit both upon His Church and the world which is still estranged from His law and love. Can that be the Gospel in its fulness and efficacy which is unmindful of the personality and the agency of that Spirit whose functions were to be so lofty, so searching, So beneficent, and so enduring?. (E. Meller, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: It is time for thee, LORD, to work: for they have made void thy law. |
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