Psalm 139:8 If I ascend up into heaven, you are there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there. : — We are told that the Jew had no knowledge of a heaven for the soul, that the only future he knew was that of a mysterious under-world where the spirits of the dead reposed. It is this under-world which the psalmist here designates by the word translated "hell"; it is the universal Old Testament name for the place of the dead. But, in the hands of this writer, the under-world becomes well-nigh as fair as the upper; it receives the very glory of heaven. What is the glory of heaven? Is it not the fact that to depart is to be with God? The heaven of Christianity is not beautiful to its votaries by reason of its pearly streets and golden gates; it is beautiful because it is conceived to be the home of God. Now, this is the thought which the psalmist makes his own. He, too, recognizes that the joy of heaven is the joy of being with God; but, to him, God is everywhere. To say that at death the soul does not ascend is not necessarily to say that it is banished from heaven. God is in the under as well as in the upper world; and the pure soul will find Him there as in all places. Death cannot rob a good man of his God; whither can he flee from His presence? That presence will follow him equally whether he ascend up into heaven or whether he make his bed in the unknown under-world. However unknown it may be, it is not outside of Him; and whatever is not outside of Him may be the heaven of the soul. Such is the thought of the psalmist, a thought which flashes a ray of glory around the Jewish vision of death and throws back its light on the Jewish doctrine of immortality. We see that the Judaic faith in God had enclosed within itself a hope of eternal life. The Jew did not, like the Greek, conjure up the images of a locality which the disembodied soul would inhabit after death; he had no figure in his imagination wherewith to body forth his conception of the dark vale. But he knew of a Presence that belonged alike to his own world and the under-world, the Being of the Eternal God; and, in that knowledge, death itself ceased to be a foreign land. It lost much of its strangeness. It held something which the earth held, and that the source of all that is in earth or heaven, the very life of the universe. (G. Matheson, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.WEB: If I ascend up into heaven, you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, you are there! |
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