Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 467
“So foolish was I and ignorant: I was as a beast before You. Nevertheless I am continually with You: You have held me by my right hand. You shall guide me with Your counsel and afterward receive me to glory. Whom ha ve I in Hea ven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You.” Psalm 73:22-25.
OUR Lord Jesus was tempted in all points like we are. With some reserve we might almost say the same of David. Of all the worthies whose lives are written out at length in Holy Writ, David possesses an experience of the most striking, varied and instructive character. In his history we meet with temptations, and complications of temptations not to be discovered, at least as a connected whole, in other saints of ancient times. Trials which stand out in the lives of other men as isolated hills form whole chains and ranges of mountains in the case of the son of Jesse. David knew the trials of all ranks and conditions of men.
Kings have their troubles and David wore a crown—the peasant has his cares and David handled the shepherd’s crook. The wanderer has many hardships and David abode in the caves of Engedi—the captain has his difficulties and David found the sons of Zeruiah too hard for him. The Psalmist of Israel was tried by his friends. His counselor, Ahithophel, forsook him. “He that eats bread with me has lifted up his heel against me.” His worst foes were of his own household. His children were his greatest afflictions. Amnon disgraces him, Absalom excites revolt, Adonijah disturbs his dying bed.
The temptations of poverty and wealth, of honor and reproach, of health and sickness, all tried their power upon him. He had tribulations from without. I need not remind you that during his long life they came from every quarter. He had temptations from within, for the man after God’s own heart not only knew what it was to be assailed, but to be carried by storm, by fierce and terrible passions. I may grant, perhaps, that Job’s trial was more severe than any that fell to David. But yet I know not. Possibly the burning of Ziklag—when his wives were carried away captive, and all that he had was consumed, and his men spoke of stoning him—may have been even a severer trial than Job’s when he sat upon a dunghill and scraped himself with a potsherd.
And I am not sure, but I think that mournful procession over the brook Kedron in David’s later life, when his own son thirsted for his blood, had in it a Gethsemane bitterness that is hardly to be found in the tribulation which fell to the Patriarch of Uz. Job must fairly yield the palm in one respect, for his was no life-long siege but only one sharp and furious attack. David, however, no sooner escaped from one trial, than he fell into another. He no sooner emerged from one season of despondency and alarm, than he was again brought into the lowest depths and all God’s waves and billows rolled over him.
Now, it is from this cause, I take it, that David’s Psalms are so universally the delight of experienced Christians. Into whatever frame of mind we may be cast, David seems to have described our emotions, whether they ARE of ecstasy or depression, to the very letter. He was an able master of the human heart, because he had been tutored in that best of all schools, the school of real, heartfelt, personal experience. You will find that as we grow matured in Divine Grace and in years, we love the Psalms more.
Many young Believers are most fond of the doctrinal parts of Scripture, and I admire that holy curiosity which leads them to desire to understand all the revelation of God in the Doctrines of Grace. Practical Christians are often more fond of studying the Evangelists and Proverbs. But I find that the gray-headed veterans, the sorely troubled Christians, those who have done business on great waters—while they love the doctrines, while they delight in the practices set forth in the life of Christ—yet somehow or other the Psalms of the sweet Singer of Israel yield them savory meat such as their soul loves. And they are made in the Psalms to “lie down in green pastures” of tender grass.
Probably the first remark which will be suggested by reading the Psalms will be this—how varied they are. What an extraordinary man David is, what changes there are in the weather of his soul, what bright sunlight days, what dark cloudy nights, what calms as though his life were a sea of glass, what terrible trials as if the glass were mingled with fire. One time we find him crying, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me,” and another he sings, “Bless the Lord, O my Soul and all that is within me bless His holy name.” One hour we hear him sigh forth, “I sink in deep mire where there is no standing,” and then we find him exulting, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear: the Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?”