Psalm 18:35 You have also given me the shield of your salvation: and your right hand has held me up, and your gentleness has made me great. When the coarse mind of sin makes up gods by its own natural light, those gods reveal the coarseness and the sin together. The God of revelation contrives to be a gentle being; hiding His power that He might put confidence and courage in the feelings of His children. I. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY GENTLENESS? God's gentleness lies in His consenting to the use of indirection, as a way of gaining His adversaries. Instead of coming down upon man in a manner of direct onset, to carry His submission by storm, He gently lays siege to him, waiting for his willing consent. It is the very genius of Christianity itself to bring men to obedience by a course of loving indirection from what is revealed in that wondrous indirection of grace, the incarnate life and death of Jesus. But where is the gentleness of God in those inexorable forces of the external world? Is it such a God that moves by indirection? Yes, and all the more properly, because these terrible forces permit Him to do it. He can hide His omnipotence — can set His will behind His love for a time, because He has these majestic inexorabilities for the rear guard of His mercies. II. THE END GOD HAS IN VIEW IN CONDESCENDING TO THESE GRACIOUS METHODS, — TO MAKE US GREAT. The Christian Gospel is a plan to bring down the loftiness of our pride and the wilfulness of our rebellion, but to make us loftier in capacity and power and personal majesty. This is true of our will and of our intellect. Then, how perverse are those who require God to convert them by force. Let us adjust our conceptions of the true scale of a Christian man by God's careful respect for our liberty, the detentions of His violated feeling, the sending of His Son, and the silent intercession of His Spirit. Be it ours to live with a sense of our high calling upon us. (Horace Bushnell, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation: and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness hath made me great. |
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