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The words "I had fainted" are not in the original. The sentence is a broken one, such as one utters under strong emotion, suggesting possibilities, but leaving the hearer or reader to supply them for himself. "O had I not believed to see the goodness of Jehovah in the land of the living" — and then he breaks off, and we are left to imagine what dreadful thing would have happened.

I. GOD'S GOODNESS IS OFTEN A MATTER OF FAITH RATHER THAN OF SIGHT. A good purpose of His often takes time to ripen. Sometimes it is long before it even appears above ground. Meanwhile there is the bleak, dreary field. In Nature we know what to expect, so that the harvest is hardly a matter of faith. Still, our Lord teaches that the attitude of the farmer, while he waits for the harvest, should be that of His disciples in regard to the Kingdom of God. Faith in God implies faith in good. The word "God" is "good." God is not God except He be good. But it is easier to believe this as an abstract fact than in its practical applications; for there are times when we cannot see the goodness of the Lord.

II. WE FAINT BECAUSE WE DO NOT SEE IT. This brought out more strongly by the added words, "in the land of the living." It is here where we want to see it, here in this scene of strife, rebellion, cruelty, extortion, and all manner of evil. We are not troubled about God's goodness in the next world. The believer takes it for granted, indeed, that there every cloud will be dispelled and every hard question settled. It is God's goodness in the land of the living which sometimes puzzles him. It might be comparatively easy, as I have said, to frame an abstract conception of a perfect being, and to write under it "Supremely Good," but. goodness is not an abstract thing. Goodness takes shape and consistency only by contact with objects. As a mere abstract quality it has no practical significance. You may as well affirm it of a statue. It has meaning only as it is exercised. But if God be infinitely good, how can sin and evil be? This is the knotty point. Neither the Epicurean, by getting rid of God in human life; nor the Deist, nor the Pantheist, give any real help. Given the existence of a personal God, and the existence and work of evil is not an easy matter to resolve. The question is summed up in a passage of that favourite book of our childhood, Robinson Crusoe, where the poor heathen Friday asks in all simplicity why God, being all-powerful, did not kill the devil. Many of us have asked the same question. And yet the fact of such goodness visible in the world and in human life is assumed by the psalmist. He has faith in it. He believed to see it in the land of the living. Can we see as much?

1. God does not throw us entirely upon testimony as to this, for His goodness can be seen, both here and now. However hard we may find it to reconcile this fact with other facts, it is true that the world and human life furnish multiplied evidences of God's goodness which appeal to the ordinary sense. The provisions of Nature are illustrations of this. It was something more than mere ingenious artifice which made the bread-fruit grow in the tropics and not in the northern latitudes. Similarly this goodness is seen in a thousand things in the social and domestic life of men. There is the setting of the solitary in families, and the blessed ties which unite husband and wife and parent and child. There are these things and many more like them. And each one of us if we had our sorrows, we have had our joys. Life has brought blows, but it has also brought balsams: calamities, but also mitigations. Labour has been offset with rest; tears with smiles. No life has been utterly bleak and barren. And for many of the worst of our calamities we have had only ourselves to blame. They have come through our refusing the goodness of God. Now all these appeal to our senses, and God would have us reason from the seen to the unseen, from that we can comprehend to that which we cannot. If we look at the state of society alone and affirm the evidence of a beneficent will, we must often confess what seems as if the contrary were true.

2. But we must hold to what we know of God's goodness and trust where we cannot know. The popular proverb says, "Seeing is believing"; but the Scripture reverses that proverb; "believing is seeing." We shall faint if we do not believe. Because there is an earthquake shall I cease to believe in gravitation? I remember a land-locked bay, which, from some peculiarity or other, the tide used to leave two-thirds bare when it ebbed. It was one of the loveliest spots I ever saw at high water, but one of the most ghastly when the tide was out. I might stand by the shore and look out over the dismal expanse of mud, and say, "The place is ruined: it never will be beautiful any more." I look down into the stagnant pools, and they are glassy and motionless under the hot sun, and I say, "The tide is gone, the joy and life of the ocean come hither no more." Fool that I am. Out yonder in the ocean depths, even while I mourn, the sea is rallying, and gathering itself up to move upon the land. By and by the stagnant pools will begin to stir, and the little eddies to whirl, and pool to reach over to pool and to run into one, until soon the bay will be brimming again, and the mud-banks hidden and the fresh, living tide enfolding the rocks. There are periods of slack-water in the history of individuals, of churches, and of nations; periods of mud and stagnation; days and years without a ripple. And when the ripple begins to come, and the stagnation begins to be stirred, that which is the presage of better things often makes the prospect look uglier than before. It takes-strong souls to go through such periods; believing souls, which have settled faith in the laws of God's tides, and which believe in the force when they do not see the ripple or the wave. Breaking-up is a not uncommon fact in the lives of good men and women. Occasionally they are thrown out of their tight, comfortable ships, and see the strips go to pieces, and have to cling to fragments or make rafts. It is hard to see goodness in such wreck as that; and yet when a ship goes down at sea, the man who has a life-preserver or a timber thinks himself happy. The question is whether we can bring ourselves to think that God is good when He transfers us from the ship to the timber: whether we can stretch the word goodness to cover timbers and rafts, and life-preservers as well as ships. If we have taken it for granted that God's goodness means only a sound ship and a voyage compassed the whole way with its protections and comforts, then the wreck and the raft will come to us as terrible surprises. If, on the other hand, we believe in the fact of the goodness of the Lord, any way, ship or raft, storm or sunshine, sailing into port or washed ashore, we shall be strong-hearted and hopeful on the raft no less than on the ship. Only it is well that we take care how we build our ship to begin with. If it is to go to pieces, it is well that the pieces be strong; well that we provide something that will float when the wreck breaks up. If a man's life is put together with selfishness, greed, pride, vanity, he stands a poor chance when the structure is broken up. If he puts out to sea with only his money or his cunning or his social repute or his political or professional or business-standing under him, he will find that such timbers will not float him. They will break with the breaking of the ship. But faith, hope and love are buoyant. If a man has in his ship this triple plank of faith, nothing can send him to the bottom. Life's currents will bear him to land alive.

(M. R. Vincent, D. D.)

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KJV: I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.

WEB: I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of Yahweh in the land of the living.