How many there are whose afflictions seem to lead to this sad consequence; who, when mercies and blessings are removed, abandon themselves to sullen and morbid fretfulness; who, instead of bowing submissive to the hand that wounds and is able to heal, seem to feel as if they were denuded of their rights! Their language is the bitter reproach of Jonah--"_I do well to be angry, even unto death_." Muffling themselves in hardened unbelief, their wretched solace is that of despair--"_It is better for me to die than to live_."
"_Blessed is the man that_ ENDURETH _temptation_," not who rushes away to pine, and bleed, and die;--or to feed still on husks and the garbage of the wilderness, but who makes the nobler resolve, "_I will arise and go to my Father_." Blessed is the man whose cry, like that of the child, is answered by his heavenly Parent bending over the cradle of his sorrow;--who feels, as the Psalmist did, that his gracious Father and God is never so near him as in a time of trial. "_When my spirit was overwhelmed,_ THEN THOU _knewest my path._" The bird of the desert is said to bury its head in the sand on the approach of its foes, and to abandon itself to destruction; but blessed is the man who rather is like the bird of the grove, the first twigs of whose nest have been ruthlessly pulled to pieces by the hand of violence. Hovering for a while over her pillaged home, she fills the wood with her plaintive lament, then soars away from the haunt of the destroyer to begin a fresh one, in a place of safety, on the top branch of some cedar of God!
Such was the case with David on the occasion of this Psalm. He had read to him the most touching homily the world _could_ read on the precarious tenure of earthly blessings. His sceptre, his crown, his family, were like the bubbles on that foaming stream on which he gazed, dancing their little moment on its surface, then gone, and gone for ever. Is he to abandon himself to an ignoble despair? Is he to conclude that the Lord has made him a target on which to exhaust His quiver--that He has "forgotten to be gracious?" Is he to join marauding chiefs beyond the Jordan, savage freebooters--become a mountain adventurer on these Gentile borders, and forget Zion and Zion's God? No! the earthly crown may fade, but the homeless, uncrowned, unsceptred monarch has a better home and a better King above; invisible walls and battlements, better than all the trenches and moats of an earthly fortress, encompass the wanderer. With his eye on these, thus he weaves his warrior song--"_I will say of the Lord, He is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower_." (Ps. xviii. 2.)