The Lord looseth the prisoners.
The Lord’s famous titles
There are five famous titles of God here.
I. Emancipator. He looseth those in mental, moral, and spiritual bondage.
II. Illuminator. The Lord has opened the eyes of many a man who could not see himself, and so proved how blind he was; and could not see the Lord, and so showed still more how blind he was. The Lord has given the inner sight to many a man who was without spiritual understanding, to whom the Gospel seemed a great mystery, of which he could make neither head nor tail.
III. Comforter. He “raiseth them that are bowed down” with--
1. Bereavement.
2. The burdens of life.
3. Inward distress.
4. A sense of sin.
IV. Rewarder. He “loveth the righteous”--with a love of complacency, communion, favour, and honour.
V. Preserver.
1. He “preserveth the strangers.” Father is dead, mother is dead, friends are all gone, and even in the very village where you were born you are a stranger; come along, your God is not dead, your Saviour liveth: “The Lord preserveth the stangers.”
2. “He relieveth the fatherless and widow.” If you turn to the first books of the Bible, you will see there God’s great care of the fatherless and the widow. Who had the tithes? Well, the Levites; but also the poor, and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow (Deuteronomy 14:28; Deuteronomy 26:12). Now, then, you who feel like widows, you who have lost your joy and earthly comfort, you who feel like the fatherless, and cry, “No man careth for my soul,” oh, may the sweet Spirit of the Lord entice you to come to Him. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Jesus--the Liberator
Liberty--a free country! Those are words dear to us all. We love and honour the memory of those who in the old days fought for England’s freedom, We read with pride of the Swiss hero who flung himself upon the Austrian spears and made a way for liberty. But what shall we say of Jesus, who gives us the truest liberty, whose service is perfect freedom, who loosest men out of prison? There are few words which have been more misused than that word liberty. Well might the French woman, victim of the Revolution, point to the Statue of Freedom, as she came to die upon the scaffold, and say, “O Liberty, how many crimes have been committed in thy name!” “Truly,” says one of our great preachers, “there are two freedoms--the false, where a man is free to do what he likes; the true, where a man is free to do what he ought.” “The Lord looseth men out of prison.” He looseth out of the hard prison of the ancient law, and setteth our feet in the large room of grace, and bringeth us into a wealthy place. He looseth out of the prison of sin and death, the prison of the curse. He who went down into Hades, and preached to the spirits of the fathers in prison, hath broken for us the gates of brass, and smitten the bars of iron in sunder. Are there none of us who are prisoners--captives and slaves to our own bad passions, our own undisciplined will, evil habits of our own making? If so, and if we have the will to be free, Jesus, the Liberator, will loose us, even though we be in the innermost prison of sin, and our feet made fast in the stocks of evil habits. But we shall never be free till we know that we are in prison, till we feel the chain. The young man following his own lusts and pleasures, walking in his own way, talks to us of his freedom; he knows not that he is a prisoner, and so he will not cry to the Lord to set him free. (H. J. Wilmot Buxton, M. A.)