Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: July 3rd

A TRIUMPHANT ASSURANCE

Thou hast made the Most High thy habitation; there shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy tent. - Psalms 41:9-10

We shall understand God’s dealings with us, and get to the very throbbing heart of such promises as these in this 91st Psalm, far better if we start from the certainty that whatever it means it does not mean that, with regard to external calamities and disasters, we are going to be God’s petted children, or to be saved from the things that fall upon other people. No! no! we have to go a great deal deeper than that. If we have felt a difficulty, as I suppose we all have sometimes, and are ready to say with the half-despondent Psalmist, " My feet were almost gone, and my steps had well-nigh slipped "; when we see what we think the complicated mysteries of the Divine providence in this world, we have to come to this belief, that the evil that is in the evil will never come near the man sheltered beneath God’s wing. The physical external event may be entirely the same to him as to another, who is not covered with His feathers. Here are two partners in a business, the one a Christian man, and the other is not. A common disaster overwhelms them. They become bankrupts. Is their insolvency to the one the same as it is to the other? Here are two men on board a ship, the one putting his trust in God, the other thinking it all nonsense to trust anything but himself. They are both drowned. Is drowning the same to the two? As their corpses lie side by side among the ooze, with the weeds over them, and the lobsters at them, you may say of the one, but only of the one, " There shall no evil befall thee, neither any plague come nigh thy dwelling."

For the protection that is granted to faith is only to be understood by faith. It is deliverance from the evil in the evil which indicates, as no exaggeration, nor as merely an experience and a promise peculiar to the old theorizing of Israel, but not now realized - the grand sayings of this psalm. The poison is all wiped off the arrow by that Divine protection. It may still wound, but it does not putrefy the flesh. The sewage water comes down, but it passes into the filtering bed, and is disinfected and cleansed before it is permitted to flow over our fields.

And so, if any of you are finding that the psalm is not outwardly true, and that through the covering wing the storm of hail has come and beaten you down, do not suppose that that in the slightest degree impinges upon the reality and truthfulness of this great promise, "He shall cover thee with His feathers." Anything that has come through them is manifestly not an " evil." "Who is he that will harm you if ye be followers of that which is good?" "If God be for us, what can be against us?" Not what the world calls, and our wrung hearts feel that it rightly calls, "sorrows" and "afflictions." These all work for our good; and protection consists, not in averting their blows, but in changing their character.