Expositions of Holy Scripture: PsalmsMaclaren, Alexander
Religion
Expositions of Holy Scripture: Psalms
Maclaren, Alexander
Bible. Psalms -- Commentaries
'None of them that trust in Him'--I need not, I suppose, further dwell
upon the absolute identity shown by this phrase between the Old and the
New Testament conceptions; but I should like to make a remark, which I
dare say I have often made before--it cannot be made too often--that,
whatever be the differences between the Old and the New, this is not the
difference, that they present two different ways of approaching God.
There are a great many differences; the conception of the divine nature
is no doubt infinitely deepened, made more tender and more lofty, by the
thought of the Fatherhood of God. The contents of the revelation which
our faith is to grasp are brought out far more definitely and
articulately and fully in the New Testament. But in the Old, the road to
God was the same as it is to-day; and from the beginning there has only
been, and through all Eternity there will only be, one path by which men
can have access to the Father, and that is by faith. 'Trust' is the Old
Testament word, 'faith' is the New. They are absolutely identical, and
there would have been a flood of light--sorely needed by a great many
good people--cast upon the relations between those two complementary and
harmonious halves of a consistent whole, if our translators had not been
influenced by their unfortunate love for varying translations of the
same word, but had contented themselves with choosing one of these two
words 'trust' or 'faith,' and had used that one consistently and
uniformly throughout the Old and New books. Then we should have
understood, what anybody who will open his eyes can see now, that what
the New Testament magnifies as 'faith' is identical with what the Old
Testament sets forth as 'trust.' 'None of them that trust in Him shall
be condemned.'
But there is one more remark to make on this matter, and that is that a
great flood of light, and of more than light, of encouragement and of
stimulus, is cast upon that saving exercise of trust by noticing the
literal meaning of the word that is rightly so rendered here. All those
words, especially in the Old Testament, that express emotions or acts of
the mind, originally applied to corporeal acts or material things. I
suppose that is so in all language. It is very conspicuously so in the
Hebrew. And the word that is here translated, rightly, 'trust,' means
literally to fly to a refuge, or to betake oneself to some defence in
order to get shelter there.
There is a trace of both meanings, the literal and the metaphorical, in
another psalm, where we read, amidst the Psalmist's rapturous heaping
together of great names for God: 'My Rock, in whom I will trust.' Now
keep to the literal meaning there, and you see how it flashes up the
whole into beauty: 'My Rock, to whom I will flee for refuge,' and put my
back against it, and stand as impregnable as it; or get myself well into
the clefts of it, and then nothing can touch me.
'Rock of Ages! cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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