I will sing of the mercies of the Lord for ever.
A majestic song
This psalm is one of the very choicest songs in the night. Midst a stream of troubled thoughts there stands a fair island of rescue and redemption, which supplies standing-room for wonder and worship; while the music of the words, like the murmuring of a river, sounds sweetly in our ears. The writer was bearing bitter reproach, and was almost broken-hearted by the grievous calamities of his nation. Yet his faith was strong in the faithfulness of God, and so he sang of the stability of the Divine covenant when the outlook of circumstances was dark and cheerless. Nor did he ever sing more sweetly than he sang in that night of his sorrow.
I. The eternal builder, and His wonderful work (Psalms 89:2). I can see a vast mass of ruins. Heaps upon heaps they lie around me. A stately edifice has tottered to the ground. Some terrible disaster has occurred. There it lies--cornice, pillar, pinnacle, everything of ornament and of utility, broken, scattered, dislocated. The world is strewn with the debris. Journey where you will the desolation is before your eyes. Who has done this? Who has cast down this temple? What hand has ruined this magnificent structure? Manhood, manhood it is which has been destroyed, and sin was the agent that effected the fall. Alas for manhood that it should be thus fallen and destroyed! But what else do I see? I behold the great original Builder coming forth from the ivory palaces to undo this mischief; and He cometh not with implements of destruction, that He may cast down and destroy every vestige, but I see Him advancing with plummet and line, that He may rear, set up, and establish on a sure foundation a noble pile that shall not crumble with time, but endure throughout all ages. He cometh forth with mercy. So “I said” as I saw the vision, “Mercy shall be built up for ever.” The psalmist has the idea of God’s mercy being manifest in building, because a great breach has to be repaired, and the ruins of mankind are to be restored. As for building, it is a very substantial operation. A building is something which is palpable and tangible to our senses. We may have plans and schemes which are only visionary, but when it comes to building there is something real being done, something more than surveying the ground and drawing the model. And oh, what real work God has done for men! What real work in the gift of His dear Son! The product of His infinite purpose now becomes evident. He is working out His great designs after the counsel of His own will. A building is an orderly thing as well as a fixed thing. There is a scheme and design about it. Mercy shall be built. I see that it shall. This is no load of bricks shot out. It is polished stones builded one upon another. God’s grace and goodness toward me have not come to me by chance, or as the blind distribution of a God who cared for all alike, and for none with any special purpose. No, but there has been as much a specialty of purpose to me as if I were the only one He loved, though, praised be His name, He has blessed and is blessing multitudes of others beside me. Now, think upon these words--“built up.” It is not merely a long, low wall of mercy that is formed, to make an inclosure or to define a boundary, but it is a magnificent pile of mercy, whose lofty heights shall draw admiring gaze, that is being built up. God puts mercy on the top of mercy, and He gives us one favour that we may be ready to receive another. Once again would I read this verse with very great emphasis, and ask you to notice how it rebukes the proud and the haughty, and how it encourages the meek and lowly in spirit. “I have said mercy shall be built up for ever.” In the edification of the saints there is nothing else but mercy. I wish I had an imagination bold and clear, uncramped by all ideas of the masonry of men, free to expand, and still to cry, “Excelsior.” Palaces, methinks, are paltry, and castles and cathedrals are only grand in comparison with the little cots that nestle on the plain. Even mountains, high as the Himalaya range or broad as the Andes, though their peaks be so lofty to our reckoning, are mere specks on the surface of the great globe itself, and our earth is small among the celestial orbs, a little sister of the larger planets. Figures fail me quite: my description must take another turn. I try, and try again, to realize the gradual rising of this temple of mercy which shall be built up for ever. Within the bounds of my feeble vision I can discern that it has risen above death, above sin, above fear, above all danger; it has risen above the terrors of the judgment day; it has outsoared the “wreck of matter and the crash of worlds”; it towers above all our thoughts. Our bliss ascends above an angel’s enjoyments, and he has pleasures that were never checked by a pang; but he does not know the ineffable delight of free grace and dying love. The building-up will go on throughout eternity.
II. An everlasting singer (Psalms 89:1). Here is a good and godly resolution: “I will sing.” The singing of the heart is intended, and the singing of the voice is expressed, for he mentions his mouth; and equally true is it that the singing of his pen is implied, since the psalms that he wrote were for others to sing in generations that should follow. “I will sing.” We cannot impart anything to the great temple which He is building; yet we can sit down and sing. This singing praise to God is a spiritual passion. The saved soul delights itself in the Lord, and sings on, and on, and on unwearily. “I will sing for ever,” saith he. Not, “I will get others to perform, and then I will retire from the service”; but rather, “I will myself sing: my own tongue shall take the solo, whoever may refuse to join in the chorus. I will sing, and with my mouth will I make known Thy faithfulness.” Now, note his subject. “I will sing of the mercies of the Lord.” What, not of anything else? Are the mercies of the Lord his exclusive theme? “Arma virumque cano”--“Arms and the man, I sing,” says the Latin poet. “Mercies and my God, I sing,” says the Hebrew seer. “I will sing of mercies,” says the devout Christian. This is the fount of mercy, whereof if a man doth drink he shall sing far better than he that drinketh of the Castalian fount, and on Parnassus begins to tune his harp. This singing of Ethan was intended to be instructive. How large a class did he want to teach? He intended to make known God’s mercy to all generations. Modern thought does not adventure beyond the tithe of a century, and it gets tame and tasteless before half that tiny span of sensationalism has given it time to evaporate. But the echoes of truth are not so transient; they endure, and by means of the printing press we can teach generation after generation, leaving books behind us as this good man has bequeathed this psalm, which is teaching us to-night, perhaps more largely than it taught any generation nearer to him. Will you transmit blessed testimonies to your children’s children? It should be your desire to do something in the present life that will live after you are gone. We instinctively long for a sort of immortality here. Let us strive to get it, not by carving our names on some stone, or writing our epitaphs upon a pillar, as Absalom did when he had nothing else by which to commemorate himself; but get to work to do something which shall be a testimony to the mercy of God, that others shall see when you are gone. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
The uncovenanted mercies of God
Ethan was the author of this psalm. It belongs to the early reign of Rehoboam, and to the invasion of Shishak. As Ethan recalled and weighed the clauses of the covenant, and compared them with the political facts of this distressful year, his mind was tossed into an agitation and distress from which he could find no relief, save in the large adventure and conclusion of faith, that the calamities which had fallen on David’s kingdom and seed were, after all, only the loving corrections by which God was chastening them for their transgressions; and that, therefore, so far from breaking, God was fulfilling His covenant with them. Even God’s covenants with men are but particular instances of His general ways, of His dealings with humanity at large; so that, in the very fullest sense which the words can be made to bear, it is true that His mercy endures for ever, that His faithfulness extends to all generations. There is a general impression abroad that a radical and vast difference obtains between what are called the covenanted and the un-covenanted mercies of God; that but for certain promises which He has made, and certain engagements into which He has entered, we should have little to hope for from Him. The doctrine of covenants plays, and must play, a large part in every system of theology. But every Divine promise is but a limited expression of a general principle. Every Divine covenant, even if it be made with a few, is nevertheless made for the benefit of the many, and can only be an instance of His ways, an illustration of a mercy as wide as the heavens, and of a faithfulness which extends to all generations of mankind. God can make no promise inconsistent with His character. Any momentary glimpse we can catch of God’s attitude towards men reveals His constant and unchanging attitude. To every man who loves and trusts and serves Him He will be all that He was to David. .. Who can deny the mercy of that high Will which made the law of retribution the law--or rather, one of the laws--of human life? As for the inexorable severity with which this law of retribution is administered, how can we but acknowledge that it needs to be administered with an invariable and constant severity? Take all the facts of human experience, then, and you will feel that there is mercy even in that law of retribution which seems most opposed to the rule of an Infinite Compassion and Love. If you believe in a work of redemption as well as in a law of retribution, there is absolutely no reason why you should not sing, with Ethan, of a mercy which is being built up for ever, and of a faithfulness which is establishing itself in the all-embracing heavens. (Samuel Cox, D.D.)