Psalms 69 - James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary

MISUSED PRIVILEGES AN OCCASION OF FALLING

‘Let their table be made a snare to take themselves withal: and let the things that should have been for their wealth be unto them an occasion of falling.’

Psalms 69:23 (Prayer Book Version)

We are familiar with the comments that are often made on inspired words like these. ‘What a spirit,’ men say, ‘is here! How unlike the mild, tender, charitable spirit of our Master, Christ! How unfit to be repeated by Christians who have been taught in the school of Christ!’ This, and the like of this, is what is said, and it proceeds upon two leading mistakes. (1) The first is that the New Testament was meant somehow to abrogate the Old. (2) The second is that God’s love is in some kind of way the antagonist of His justice; that He cannot be really just without ceasing to love; that He cannot love without trifling with His instinct of justice. Let us remember that, in the verse before us, we are listening, not to David, but to the perfectly righteous Being in whose person David sings. Here we have a sentence which has nothing to do with human passion, which is based on the most certain laws which govern the moral world. The sentence is a penal judgment uttered against those who have been sinners against the light vouchsafed to them.

I. God does under certain circumstances make the very blessings which He bestows instruments of punishment.—A time comes when long unfaithfulness provokes this sentence on a nation, a Church, a soul. By the figure of ‘a table’ is meant a supply of necessary nourishment, whether of soul or body. The table which God prepared before David in the presence of his enemies was the food which sustained his physical life, the grace which sustained the life of his spirit. The table which is spread out before associations of men—before nations, before Churches—is the sum total of material, moral, mental, and spiritual nourishment which God sets before them in the course of their history. The table becomes a snare when the blessings which God gives become sources of corruption and of demoralisation, when that which was intended to raise and to invigorate does really, through the faithlessness or perverseness of the man or the society, serve only to weaken or depress.

II. This is exactly what happened to the great majority of the Jewish people in the days of our Lord and His Apostles.—One by one the spiritual senses which should have led Israel to recognise the Christ were numbed or destroyed. A perverse insensibility to the voice of God made God’s best gifts the instruments of Israel’s ruin.

III. This verse applies to the religious life of the individual Christian.—Every Christian has a certain endowment of blessings, what the Psalmist calls a ‘table.’ Every Christian has to fulfil a certain predestined course. He has a work to do—a work which God’s gifts enable him to do—before he dies. Resistance to truth, to duty, may bring upon us this penal judgment. In the life of the soul, not to go forward is to go back. Unknown to ourselves, our religious life may be tainted with half-heartedness and insincerity. The dread sentence may have gone forth in heaven, ‘Let the things that should have been for his wealth be made to him an occasion of falling.’ It need not be so with any for whom Jesus Christ has died.

—Canon Liddon.

Illustration

‘The imprecations in this verse and those following it are revolting only when considered as the expression of malignant selfishness. If uttered by God they shock no reader’s sensibilities, nor should they when considered as the language of an ideal person, representing the whole class of righteous sufferers, and particularly Him who, though He prayed for His murderers while dying (St. Luke 23:34), had before applied the words of this very passage to the unbelieving Jews (St. Matthew 23:38), as Paul did afterwards (Romans 11:9-10). The general doctrine of providential retribution, far from being confined to the Old Testament, is distinctly taught in many of our Saviour’s parables. (See St. Matthew 21:41; Matthew 22:7; Matthew 24:51.)’