Homilist Psalm 18:20-27 The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands has he recompensed me.… I. AS A VINDICATION OF HIS OWN CHARACTER. 1. He — David — regarded his character as very excellent. Of that excellency he speaks in terms emphatic and strong. Can his language be justified? Not in an absolute sense. Morally, in the sight of God, David was very far from a perfect man. It can be justified in an average sense, and in an official sense. 2. David regarded his character as divinely influential. Was he right in supposing that God came to his deliverance on account of what he was in himself, or on account of what he had done to serve Him? 1. Individual character is known to God. 2. Individual character is interesting to God. Nothing in the universe touches the heart of the Great Father so much as the moral character of His children. II. AS AN ILLUSTRATION OF GOD'S MANIFESTATION. He rises to a view of the great principle with which God deals with all His moral creatures. As man is, so is God to him. This is true in two respects. 1. As a personal power. God treats man according to his character. 2. As a mental conception. Man's idea of God is his God, it is the deity, he worships. Man worships the God he has imaged to himself; and men have different images, according to the state of their own hearts. The revengeful man has a God of vengeance, the sectarian man has a God of sects, the capricious man has a capricious God, the selfish man has a greedy God, the despotic man has an arbitrary God, and the loving man has a loving God. Our moral nature rises and falls with our conception of God, for "man must need assimilate himself to what he worships." "Every man copies the God in whom he believes." (Homilist.) Parallel Verses KJV: The LORD rewarded me according to my righteousness; according to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me. |
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