I. God is in all modes of personal existence. These are all covered by the contrast between heaven and hell, than which no words would suggest a completer contrast to every thoughtful Hebrew.
II. God's presence is in the yet untrodden ways of human history. There came sometimes to the untravelled Israelites a perception that the world was very large. The ninth verse of this Psalm gives us an image of the Psalmist, standing by the sea-shore, watching as the rising sun broadens the horizon, and brings into view an islet here and there, which, by catching the sight, serves but to lengthen still more the indefinite expanse beyond. The fancy is suggested, half of longing, half of dread, What would it be to fly until he reached the point where now the furthest ray is resting, to gaze upon a sea still shoreless or to land in an unknown region and find himself a solitary there? But he is not daunted by the vision; one Presence would still be with him. Vast as the world is, it is contained within the vaster God. In a similar mood of not wholly barren dreaming we sometimes look out over the boundless possibilities of human life. Amid all possibilities one thing is sure: go where we may, go the world how it may, we shall find the ever-present God.
III. God's presence is in the perplexities of our experience. The untrodden ways of life are not the only, nor even the principal, obscurities in life; there are incidents in man's experience which seem only the more perplexing the more we know of them. There is the mystery of pain, and that strange fluctuation of spiritual emotion which pain often brings; there are the complications of human relations, in which the saintliest seem often the victims of the basest or the sacrifices for the sins of others; there are the conflicts of noble affections, of the purpose of patience with the impulse of indignation, of our love of men in its pleadings against the fear of God. It is by perceiving the fruitful issues of perplexity in our experience that we gain the confidence that God is in the discipline, its Author and Controller. He who believes in God enters into rest; a large faith means a repose which cannot be shaken.
A. Mackennal, Sermons from a Sick-room,p. 85.