Psalm 104:30 You send forth your spirit, they are created: and you renew the face of the earth. There is a deep religious undertone in all the descriptions of nature which we owe to the Hebrew poets; there is little dwelling on the beauty of nature as it appeals to the imagination. With our modern poets the scenery is everything; the manifestation of the power, or presence, or goodness of God is nothing, or next to nothing. The Hebrew nature was too moral, too possessed with the idea of duty; of a great power overshadowing the life of man, putting His voice and mandate in the conscience within, aiding and abetting the good and destroying the evil, to give itself over wholly to the power of the beauty of the material world, to the enjoyment of purely scenic effects, to the indulgence of the imaginative or artistic faculties. It made imagination subordinate to conscience, a handmaid to wait upon and describe its intuitions, feelings, and voices; not a power that exists for its own ends or for its own self-indulgence. It is in harmony with this great characteristic of Hebrew poetry that the psalmist carries up the thought of the fertility and beauty of the spring season to the thought of God. There is no brooding on the singing birds, the bursting buds, the opening blossoms, the returning grass, the intermittent sunshine, the vernal showers, as if they had any satisfying charm in themselves. He sees them all in God, and prefers rather to look at them in and through the medium of the religious emotion, than as objects to be gazed at directly. The thought is not one of quiet resting upon the smiles in which the face of nature is wreathed, which is certainly that on which the genius of a modern poet would trove lingered; but rather that He who is the joy of the soul, the restorer of righteousness, the strength and stay of the upright, has been the great cause of this wonderful transformation from desolation to loveliness; and, therefore, that He and not it should be rejoiced in and thought of. And so we find that after a description of God's wonderful doings in the world the poet concludes, — as if that was what his review should lead up to (vers. 33, 34). (James Forfar.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.WEB: You send forth your Spirit: they are created. You renew the face of the ground. |
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