When righteous [men] do rejoice, [there is] great glory: but when the wicked rise, a man is hidden.
Ver. 12. When righteous men do rejoice, there is great glory.] That is, There is cause of common joy to all; for they have public spirits, and rectified judgments, neither can they be merry at heart when it goes ill with the Church. All comforts are but Ichabods to them, if the ark be taken; all places but Hadadrimmons, if the Church be in heaviness. Terentius, under Valens, the Arian emperor, asked nothing but that the Church might be freed from Arians, and when the emperor tore his petition, he said that he would never ask anything for himself if he might not prevail for the Church, for that his happiness was laid up in hers.
But when the wicked rise, a man is hidden.] That is, When tyrants are set up, "a man," that is, a good man - for God reckons of men by their righteousness Jer 5:1 - "is hidden," lies close, and hath no heart to show himself, lest he should suffer either in his own person or in his possession. Thus the man Moses fled and hid himself from Pharaoh, David from Saul, Eliah from Ahab, Obadiah's clients from Jezebel, Jeremiah from Jehoiakim, Joseph and the child Jesus from Herod; those worthies, of whom the world was not worthy, Heb 11:38 from Antiochus, that little Antichrist, and other persecutors, and the Christian Church from the greater Antichrist, Rev 12:1-17 so that she was not to be sought in tectis et exteriori pampa, sed potius in carceribus et speluncis, in palaces of worldly pomp, but in dens and dungeons, as Hilary hath it: "She fled into the wilderness, into her place, from the face of the serpent." Rev 12:14