O Lord, my strength, and my fortress.
What God is to His people
One of the Puritans was accustomed to describe prayer as the flight of the lonely man to the only God. There is such prayer here. This man is very lonely. He is like a speckled bird, set on by all the birds of the flock. He looks right and left, but there is no man to care for his soul; then he addresses himself to God in these touching words:
I. My strength. The Psalmist spoke of God as the strength of his life. The Apostle of love said that little children could overcome the world, because He that was in them was greater and stronger than he that was in the world. “God is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”
II. My stronghold. A stronghold is what holds strongly. A keep is that which keeps. We keep God’s deposit, which is His Gospel: God keeps our deposit, which is ourselves. And none, man nor devil, can snatch us away.
III. My refuge in the day of affliction. The night darkening the sky drives the chicks to the hen’s wings; so affliction drives us to God. “In the shadow of Thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast.” Do you wish to know Him thus? See that you do not burden yourself by your endeavours. Be still and know. Enter into the still and peaceful land of inward spiritual fellowship. Commune with your own heart. Be a child before Him, innocent, unaffected, unrestrained. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)
Safe from trouble
Travellers tell us that they who are at the top of the Alps can see great showers of rain fall under them, but not one drop of it falls upon them. They who have God for their portion are in a high tower, and thereby safe from all troubles and showers. (G. Swinnock.)
The Gentiles shall come unto Thee from the ends of the earth.--
Heathenism and its prospects
I. The confession which the Gentile nations are here prophetically described to make. “Surely our fathers have inherited lies,” etc. Need I say, that the produce of “lies” must be “vanity and things wherein there is no profit”? It may be granted, that if we only esteem things by the partial and short-sighted standard of this present world, falsehood may sometimes bring its gain; there are pleasures of falsehood and gains of falsehood. But then the pleasures of sin are but for a moment; the day is shortly coming, when falsehood shall be found as a rope of sand, as a quicksand on which any structure may have been based; and therefore if it be true that the heritage of the heathen is a heritage of “lies,” it follow that it is a heritage of vanity, and things wherein there is no profit.
II. The purposes of God respecting these idolaters. You have here the repetition of God’s purpose. He is not satisfied with stating once, “I will cause them to know,” but He adds a second time, “I will cause them to know My hand and My might; and they shall know that I am the Lord.” There is a distinctness and a certainty upon this matter which is most refreshing to a humane and considerate mind. The intimation of this design is here presented to us as the distinct purpose of God. “Therefore”--since man admits that he has inherited lies, since he sees that he is destitute of any resources in himself, and since the allotment which father has given to son during many an elapsing century, since all the property that could descend from sire to son as ages rolled away was only “falsehood, vanity, and things wherein there is no profit”--since all that this accumulated mass of human skill and industry bestowed, was based on falsehood--now that the confession is made,--“I will cause this people to know My hand and My might.” And how was the hand of God to be known? Was it to be the hand of power, crushing to perdition the sinner whose heart was disaffected and his intellect degraded? No; He was to stretch out His hand to heal and to save. There is no power so great, and no power so beautiful in nature, as this hand of God, when it is stretched out to heal. There are needful accompaniments of this wonderful accomplishment of Divine mercy and love to man. There are the ministers of His Gospel. By the instrumentality of these human communications, does the Spirit of God act; and when therefore God says, “And they shall know that I am Jehovah,” it is meant that to these nations shall be sent the records of the Scriptures; that to them shall go the heralds of peace; that among them shall the voice of mercy be heard; that amidst their thronged population shall the accents of salvation come forth, from lips which He has touched with a coal from the altar, and made to be the bearers of kind sayings to their poor suffering and degraded sinners. This is God’s declaration.
III. The generous consolation which the mind of the prophet derives from this knowledge of God’s gracious design in favour of these Gentiles. “O Lord, my strength, and my fortress, and my refuge in the day of affliction.” When beat down by sorrow, when prostrate in calamity, when standing amidst the decay of national comforts, and amidst the manifestation of God’s righteous judgments, he turned for rest to God; God was his strength, God was his fortress God opened to him an asylum whither the wicked could not follow him, whither Satan could not follow him. (G. T. Noel, M. A.)
Shall a man make gods unto himself, and they are no gods?--
God-making
Is not that impossible? From a certain point of view it is utterly impossible, and yet from another point of view it is the very thing men are doing every day in the week. Questions cannot always be answered literally. There may be a moral explanation under the literary definition. Who does not make himself gods as he needs them?--not visible god, otherwise they might bring down upon themselves the contempt of observers, and the contempt of their very makers; but ambitions, purposes, policies, programmes, methods of procedure,--all these may be looked upon as refuges and defences and hidden sanctuaries into which the soul would go for defence and protection when the tempest rages loudly, and fiercely. A subtle thing is this god-making. Every man is at times a polytheist--that is, a possessor or a worshipper of many gods. The Lord could never bring the mind of His people directly and lovingly to the reception of the One Deity. It would seem to be the last thought of man that there can be, by metaphysical necessity, only one God. There cannot be a divided Deity. Yet it is this very miracle that the imagination of man has performed. He has set all round the household innumerable idols which he takes down according to the necessity of the hour. He knows he is intellectually foolish, morally the victim of self-delusion, practically an utterly unwise and impracticable man; yet somehow, by force not to be put into equivalent words, he will do this again and again, yea he takes to himself power to fill up vacancies, so that if any clay god or imagined idol has failed him he puts another in the place of the one that did not fulfil his prayer. (J. Parker, D. D.).