"My soul!" Here is a man communing with his own soul! He is deliberately addressing himself, and calling himself to attention. He is of set purpose breaking up his own drowsiness and indifference, and calling himself to a fruitful vigilance. There is nothing like the deliberate exercise of a power for making it spontaneously active. We must challenge our own souls, and rouse them to the contemplation of the things of God. "My soul! look upon this, and look long!" But let us see to it that when we do incite the attention of our spirits we give them something worthy to contemplate. Here the psalmist calls upon his soul to contemplate the manifold glory of God. Let us gaze at one or two aspects of the inspiring vision. "He only is my rock." Here is one of the figures in which the psalmist expresses his conception of the ministry of his God. "My rock!" The figure is literally suggestive of an enclosure of rock, a cave, a hiding-place. Perhaps there is no experience in human life which more perfectly develops the thought of the psalmist than the guardianship offered by a mother to her baby-child when the little one is just learning to walk. The mother literally encircles the child with protection, spreading out her arms into almost a complete ring, so that in whatever way the child may happen to stumble she falls into the waiting ministry of love. Such is the idea of "besetment" which lies in this familiar word "rock." It is a strong enclosure, an invincible ring, a grand besetment within which we move in restful security. "He is my salvation." Then He not only shields me, but strengthens me! Salvation implies more than convalescence, it denotes health. It is vastly more than redemption from sin; it is redemption from infirmity. It offers no mediocrity; its goal is spiritual prosperity and abundance. This promise of health we have in God too. He accepts us in our disease; He pledges His name to absolute health. "Having loved His own, He loved them unto the end." "He is my defence." The psalmist is multiplying his figures that he may the better bring out the riches of his conception. "Defence is suggestive of loftiness, of inaccessibility. It denotes the summit of some stupendous, outjutting, precipitous crag! It signifies such a place as where the eagle makes its nest, far beyond the prowlings of the marauders, away in the dizzy heights which mischief cannot scale. God is my defence! He lifts me away into the security of inaccessible heights. My safety is in my salvation. Purity is found in the altitudes. In these three words the psalmist expresses something of his thought of the all-enveloping anal protecting presence of God. He is "my rock," "my salvation," "my defence." What then shall be the attitude of the soul towards this God? "My soul, wait — be thou silent unto God." The spirit of patience is to be hushed and subdued. Our own clamorous wills are to be checked. The perilous heat is to be cooled. We are to linger before God in composure, in tranquillity. We are to be unruffled. "One evening," says Frances Ridley Havergal, "after a relapse, I longed so much to be able to pray, but found I was too weak for the least effort of thought, and I only looked up and said, 'Lord Jesus, I am so tired,' and then He brought to my mind 'Rest in the Lord,' and its lovely marginal rendering, 'Be silent to the Lord,' and so I was just silent to Him, and He seemed to overflow me with perfect peace in the sense of His own perfect love." "My expectation is from Him." The word translated "expectation" might also be translated "line" or "cord." "The line of scarlet thread." The line of all my hope stretches away to Him, and from Him back to me! The psalmist declares that however circumstances may vary, the cord of his hope binds him to the Lord. Ever and every. where there is the outstretched line! "My line is from Him." Whether he was in trouble or in joy, in prosperity or adversity, on whatever part of the varying shoreline he stood, there was the golden track between him and his God. "Thine expectation shall not be cut off;" the line shall never be broken. "I shall not be moved." Of course not! A man whose conception of God is that of "Rock," "Salvation," and "Defence," and who is "silent unto Him," and is bound to Him by the golden "cord" of hope, cannot be moved. But mark how the psalmist's confidence has grown by the exercise of contemplation. In the outset of the psalm his spirit was a little tremulous and uncertain. "I shall not be greatly moved." But now the qualifying adverb is gone, the tremulousness has vanished, and he speaks in unshaken confidence and trust, "I shall not be moved."

(J. H. Jowett, M. A.)