Psalm 118:17 I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD. These words were inscribed upon the walls of Martin Luthers study. They were the incarnation of his courage and his faith. Luther lived his strenuous life in the midst of dangers. Hour by hour as the years sped on he looked death in the face. Such a life of conflict and hazard irresistibly drives a godly man nearer to God. It is not under the impulse of some coward terror that he crawls to the feet of the Strong One. It is not the pitiful appeal of fear for deliverance from the ever-during dark. It is a sixth sense which has been developed in the soul of man. It is the sense of the Infinite, which demands its satisfaction in tones so imperious that the cries of all other senses are stilled. In the common experiences of life we need God, oh, need Him so deeply! But in these uncommon experiences we have God. No normal mind deliberately chooses the life of daily and nightly nearness to death; yet all men would choose it if the normal mind could see realities in their true proportion. For in the life which is lived in the presence of death, the man of God knows that he lives and moves and has his being in God. Any man who is called upon to lead a life in which day by day there is but a step between him and death becomes either a better man or a worse under the pressure of it. He becomes a worse man — reckless, dissipated, abandoned — as we see often in the life of miners, sailors, soldiers, and a hundred others whoso disdain of moral restraint appals us. You know how true this is of times of war, epidemic, or plague. Yes; he becomes a worse man, or he becomes a better. For life is never the same again. He has looked upon the heights and depths of things. He has endured as seeing Him who is invisible. That which he thought realest in the universe has crumbled at the breath of a new emotion, and the Unseen has become the one Reality. Henceforth, there is a deeper note in his thinking; in his feeling a fuller tenderness Psalm 118, from which I take this text, was written for some great national festival, and was chanted in the Temple thanksgiving service. Its praises and its prayers are alike the expression of national aspiration and gratitude. It is of Israel protected, ransomed, restored, Israel Divinely reinforced, Divinely saved, that the poet sings. It is united Israel which declares that His mercy endureth for ever. Each worshipper may say for himself what he sings for the nation, "I shall not die, but live." Each devout soul may promise for himself what he desires for his Church and for his country, that in this restored life the first purpose shall be to "declare the works of the Lord." If I were to read our poet's feelings by the light of my own, I should be ready to say that all other considerations are lost in the overwhelming solemnity of the experience through which he has passed. He has emerged upon a new and different world. In that world he finds himself at first a stranger. Sky and sea, meadow and mountain, the grass on the hillside, and the flowers beneath his feet, have a new meaning for him. While that strange, unspeakable thing which we call life — life one and indivisible in its myriad manifestations — is so wonderful, so wonderful that he feels that he has never lived before. You never feel the awfulness of life till death has held you. It is through the darkness of death that we walk in the light of life. A baffled wonder is one of the elements of this deep solemnity. The foundations of life have been shaken. Earth's base is built on stubble. The realization that one is mortal like his neighbours is the strangest revelation which comes to the heart of man. Almost too painful for analysis is the sense of humiliation which such an experience brings, the shrinking from the physical accompaniments of sickness and death. The pride of life has vanished in the twinkling of an eye. And of one other aspect of such an experience I do not trust myself to speak — the parting from those whose love has given us the purest joy which we have known on earth. Then, after all this, comes to our poet, has come, thank God, to millions of the sons of men who have passed through his experience and been the better for it, the exquisite realization of life again, the knowledge that all is yet possessed, the life of the flesh and the life of the soul, the desire of the eyes and the pride of life, the joy of thought, the power of aspiration, the delight of action and of service, the passion of labour, the potency of love! Surely this is the most solemn experience of human life, this in which the new-born man in a new-made world says to himself in amazement, "I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord!" You do not marvel that this vague wonder passes into fervour, into exultation, rapture, into consecration? "I shall ... declare the works of the Lord!" Learn the lesson! There comes a time when all else fails you. The good that you have done alone abides. Learn that lesson well, for immortality is there. On the day when John Wycliffe died, while yet breath remained in the old man's body, the friars crowded round his bed, and demanded of him that he should make confession of the evil deeds that he had done to them and to their craft. He raised himself upon his pillows, and gathering together the last remnants of his expiring strength, exclaimed, "I shall not die, but live, and declare the evil deeds of the friars." That day the great reformer died. But the great reformer never dies! Wycliffe lives, like many another son of the Highest, mightier dead than when he lived indeed. (C. F. Aked, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the LORD. |
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