By J.G. Bellet
Psalm 74
We have in this Psalm a sample of very tender and sorrowful pleading with God. It is evidently the utterance of the Remnant in sight of the desolation of Zion. The enemy is seen triumphing in the full pride of victory over God's house and people, and the congregation of the Lord left to reproach without sign or prophet. The desire is, that the Lord will show Himself as the kinsman-avenger of Israel. For under the law, the kinsman was to ransom, to avenge, and to build up the brother's house. And this is a cry to Him to act as an avenger. At the exodus from Egypt He had so acted, and that is pleaded here. He had then, as their kinsman, both ransomed Israel out of Egypt, and avenged Israel upon Egypt, dividing the waters for His people, and breaking the heads of leviathan. Deborah celebrates Jehovah as an avenger in judges 5, and the heavens celebrate the Lord God as the same in Rev. 19: 2.
The prophet or suppliant is moved by the same deep and aggrieved heart as Isaiah, when he in spirit looked on the same scene of desolation. He would fain know how long the misery was to last. (v. 10, Isa. 6: 11)
The suppliant further pleads the promises which secure Israel and the earth. (See ver. 17, with Gen. 8: 22; and ver. 16 with Jer. 33: 20) He pleads also the covenant, and that this cause was God's cause. And this is according to their mediator Moses, in his day, who pleaded the fathers, and the covenant of promise, and the honour of the name of Him who had redeemed them from Egypt. (See Ex. 32: 12, 13) And the Lord says Himself, that in the present preserving of Israel and their final establishment, He has respect to His own name. (Deut. 32: 27) And in the rehearsal of His ways with Israel, in Ezek. 20 we have the same thought again and again.
The desolation of Zion here contemplated is either that by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, of the Romans, or of the Wilful King in the latter day. Indeed, in the judgment of God, Judea is one scene of desolation, from the days of the Chaldean till the enemy fall on the glorious holy mountain, and the kingdoms become the Lord's.
NOTE.--Verse 7 may remind us of the Chaldean invasion (2 Kings 25: 9); ver. 4 may call the idols on the battlements, or the abomination of desolation, to our thoughts. (Dan. 9: 27, Matt. 24: 15)
Psalm 75
This is a very striking little Psalm, and one of easy simple interpretation.
The first verse gives us the thanksgiving of the nation now, by anticipation, saved and avenged in answer to their cry in the previous Psalm. God's works in that salvation, and vengeance just executed, had shown Him to be near His people, as they here celebrate. His name had been for a long time distant from Israel. But now, as their faith anticipates, about to do His "wondrous works" for them, they know that He is returning and bringing His name near again.
The following verses, from the second to the end, are Messiah's utterance. He vows to rule in righteousness, when He receives the people as His inheritance (ver. 2; see 2 Sam. 23: 4; Ps. 101). He recognizes the apostasy of all kingdoms and systems till His own sceptre arise. (Ver. 3; see 1 Sam. 2: 8-10, Dan. 2: 44) He challenges the rebels or apostate powers of the world, who had erected themselves against the Lord, assuring them that God would soon visit them. (Ver. 4-8; see Ps. 82, Ps. 83; Haggai 2: 22; Heb. 12: 27) He then, in contrast with them, pledges Himself to hold His sceptre unto God's praise, and in the righteous dispensation of reward and punishment. (9, 10; see Matt. 25: 31, Rev. 3: 21)
What holy and glorious consciousness of Himself fills the soul of Messiah in all this utterance! He knows that when He receives the congregation He will judge uprightly. And He knows too that He alone sustains the pillars of the world.
Thus, the material of this Psalm clearly shows itself to us. The wine cup, the cup of trembling, the cup of His fury, the cup of the wine of the fierceness of His wrath, are various titles of the same cup, which is the emblem of divine judgments, like the vials of Rev. 16. The cup of salvation, on the other hand, expresses the joy of the kingdom. (See Psalm 116; Luke 22: 18) Oh what a morning without clouds will the rise and waving of this righteous sceptre, here anticipated by the Lord Himself. spread over this groaning and thorny creation! And it is a striking and beautiful point in this Psalm, that the cup here drunk by the people of the earth does not pass on to Messiah. He takes instead of it the other cup) and at once calls on the name of the Lord. (See ver. 8, 9, and Ps. 116: 3) The cup of anger is for their hand, the cup of salvation for His. He once took, indeed, the cup of sorrows, the cup of Gethsemane, for us poor sinners; but it is the cup of praise, the joy of the kingdom, that remains for Him now, while the apostate powers of the earth are wringing out the dregs of the cup of fury.
Psalm 76
This Psalm is still in connection. For as Psalm 74 was the cry of the Remnant over the desolation of Zion, and as Ps. 75 presented Messiah challenging the enemy and taking the kingdom as in answer to that cry, so this Psalm shows Him seated in Zion, no longer therefore a desolation, but saluted as the throne and sanctuary of the Lord, made more excellent than all the mountains of prey, or the preceding kingdoms of the Gentiles. God's name is "great in Israel" now, as it has previously been brought "near" by His works of judgment. (Ps. 75: 1, 76: 1)
Though the Spirit has larger thoughts in it, yet the occasion of this Psalm was, probably, the overthrow of Sennacherib's army. For this signal deliverance was achieved eminently on behalf of Zion. (See 2 Kings 19: 20-35) So that it was said to the King of Assyria, "The virgin, the daughter of Zion, hath despised thee and laughed thee to scorn." As here, the Psalmist says, that in Zion God broke the arrows of the bow, the shield, the sword, and the battle. Verse 7 may remind us of Ps. 2: 12.
In a fine strain the people publish this mighty achievement. And at the close, the Prophet of God, who had been anticipating all this, draws the moral, that the Lord acquires glory out of the violence and iniquity of man, (Ex. 9: 14, 16, 29); then overrules it all, and finally spreads around Himself a happy and a worshipping people, keeping the whole earth in godly subjection to His sceptre as King of kings.
The Gentile kingdoms are fitly called "mountains of prey." Daniel says, speaking of them, "these great beasts." (Dan. 7: 17) They were in God's esteem the haunts of wild beasts.
We may more particularly observe, that verse 10 reveals a very glorious truth. It intimates that all things, even the most unpromising--such as "the wrath of man"--shall end in God's praise; and all that cannot aid that happy result shall be cleared off the scene, forestalled, as it were, by the divine sovereign power. How truly should our souls triumph in this thought! Things may appear evil and confused, but there is not a circumstance in the "mighty maze" that shall not swell the hallelujah around the throne and in the presence of the Lord, and aid in giving them their harmony and power for ever and ever.
Psalm 77
There is something very touching, and at the same time very instructive, in the path of the soul in this Psalm. It may remind us of Ps. 73. It may be read as an utterance of the Jew under his discipline in the latter day, but the soul of any saint may use it.
The first verse gives us the result, or the end of the path, as is common in the Psalms. The soul's path is then traced back to its beginning.
It was a time of trouble, and the suppliant religiously seeks the Lord. But this was not properly faith. It was the working of religious sentiment awakened in the day of trouble. It did not lead to strength or liberty. Recollections arise to aggravate the grief. The soul sees God rather in its own sorrows and exercises than in His doings and ways. It was God, but God as in connection with present griefs; and murmurings are cast up by all this working. The Spirit of God at length, however, introduces His power and light, and at once the current of the soul is changed. He leads the suppliant to see that all this was but nature. "This is my infirmity." It had a religious character in it, but it was merely man, or the infirmity of nature, not the strength and repose of faith. And the Spirit then takes the soul off from God thus seen in the light of its own sorrows, to God seen and understood by the light of His own ways. Old things are again remembered; but they are the old things of God's salvation, and not of the suppliant's griefs (v. 5, 11); days of old when His people had to go through trackless deeps and untrod paths, and yet proved Him to be their leader and shepherd. And the doings of God display Himself, tell what He is, and thus they form a "sanctuary," as the Psalmist here speaks (v. 13).
And is it not the true Gospel comfort, to know our God in His doings for us? There we learn a simple tale that needs no interpreter--we get an undistracted witness of devoted everlasting love. We read a "glory" that gladdens us "in the face of Jesus Christ." But His dealings with us are in discipline, and wait to be interpreted. Job was troubled when he thought of God's dealing with him; but for a happy moment the Spirit led him to God's dealings and acts for him, and all was triumph. (Job 19: 23-27) So the Psalmist here.
