The chief part of our text sets before us God in the variety and boundlessness of His loving nature, and the close of it shows us man sheltering beneath God's wings.
I. We have, first, God in the boundlessness of His loving nature. The one pure light of the Divine nature is broken up in the prism of the Psalm into various rays, which theologians call, in their hard, abstract way, Divine attributes. These are "mercy, faithfulness, righteousness." Then we have two sets of Divine acts: judgments and the preservation of man and beast; and finally we have again "loving-kindness," as our version has unfortunately been misled, by its love for varying its translation, to render the same word which begins the series and is there called "mercy." (1) Mercy and loving-kindness mean substantially this: active love communicating itself to creatures that are inferior and that might have expected something else to befall them. This "quality of mercy" stands here at the beginning and the end. It is last as well as first, the final upshot of all revelation. (2) Next to mercy comes faithfulness. God's faithfulness is, in its narrowest sense, His adherence to His promises. Not only His articulate promises, but His past actions, bind Him. His words, His acts, His own nature, bind God to bless and help. His faithfulness is the expression of His unchangeableness. (3) The next beam of the Divine brightness is righteousness. The notion of righteousness here is that God has a law for His being to which He conforms, and that whatsoever things are fair, and lovely, and good, and pure down here these things are fair, and lovely, and good, and pure up there; that He is the archetype of all excellence, the ideal of all moral completeness; that we can know enough of Him to be sure that what we call right He loves, and what we call right He practises. (4) God's judgments are the whole of the ways, the methods, of the Divine government. They are the expressions of His thoughts, and these thoughts are thoughts of good, and not of evil.
II. Look at the picture of man sheltering beneath God's wings. God's loving-kindness, or mercy, is precious,for that is the true meaning of the word translated "excellent." We are rich when we have that for ours; we are poor without it. The last verse tells us how we can make God our own: "They put their trust under the shadow of Thy wings." God spreads the covert of His wing, strong and tender, beneath which we may all gather ourselves and nestle. And how can we do that? By the simple process of fleeing unto Him, as made known to us in Christ our Saviour, to hide ourselves there.
A. Maclaren, A Year's Ministry,2nd series, p. 211.