MASCHIL OF ETHAN, A MAJESTIC SONG – Charles Spurgeon
Maschil of Ethan, A Majestic Song
“I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever: with my mouth will I make known Your faithfulness to all generations. For I have said, Mercy shall be built up forever: Your faithfulness shall You establish in the very heavens.” — Psalm 89:1-2
This Psalm is one of the very choicest songs in the night. Amidst a stream of troubled thoughts, there stands a fair island of rescue and redemption, which supplies standing room for wonder and worship, while the music of the words, like the murmuring of a river, sounds sweetly in our ears! Read the Psalm carefully and it will awaken your sympathy, for he who wrote it was bearing bitter reproach and was almost broken-hearted by the grievous calamities of his nation. Yet his faith was strong in the faithfulness of God, and so he sang of the stability of the Divine Covenant when the outlook of circumstances was dark and cheerless. Nor did he ever sing more sweetly than he sang in that night of his sorrow. Greatly does it glorify God for us to sing His high praises in storms of adversity and on beds of affliction. It magnifies His mercy if we can bless and adore Him when He takes, as well as when He gives. It is good that out of the very mouth of the burning furnace there should come a yet more burning note of grateful praise!
I am told that there is a great deal of relief to sorrow in complaining—that the utterance of our murmurs may, sometimes, tend to relieve our pain or sorrow. I suppose it is so. Certainly, it is a good thing to weep, for I have heard it from the mouth of many witnesses. Most of us have felt that there are griefs too deep for tears and that a flood of tears proves that the sorrow has begun to abate. But, I think, the best relief for sorrow is to sing—this man tried it, at any rate. When mercy seems to have departed, it is well to sing of departed mercy! When no present blessing appears, it is a present blessing to remember the blessing of the years gone by and to rehearse the praises of God for all His former mercies towards us. Two sorts of songs we ought to keep up even if the present appears to yield us no theme for sonnets—the song of the past for what God has done and the song of the future for the Grace we have not yet tasted—the Covenant blessings held in the pierced hand, safe and sure against the time to come!
Brothers and Sisters, I want you, at this time, to feel the spirit of gratitude within your hearts. Though your mind should be heavy, your countenance sad, and your circumstances gloomy—still let the generous impulse kindle and glow. Oh, come, let us sing unto the Lord! It does not seem to me to be much for us to sing God’s praises in fair weather. The shouts of, “Harvest home,” over the loaded wagons are proper, but they are only natural. Who would not sing, then? What bird in all the country is silent when the sun is rising and the dews of spring are sparkling? But the choicest choir charms the stars of night and no note is sweeter, even to the human ear, than that which comes from the bare bough amidst the abundant snows of dark winter! O sons of sorrow, your hearts are tuned to notes which the joyful cannot reach! Yours is the full compass and swell. You are harps upon which the Chief Player on stringed instruments can display His matchless skill to a larger degree than upon the less afflicted. I pray He may do so now, by leading you to be first in the song. We must, all of us, follow, but some of us will not readily yield to be outstripped in this holy exercise. Like Elijah, we will try to run before the king’s chariot in this matter of praise! Accounting ourselves the greatest debtors of all to the Grace and mercy of God, we must and will sing loudest of the crowd and make even— “Heaven’s resounding arches ring With shouts of Sovereign Grace.”
I. The Eternal Builder and His Wonderful Work
I invite your attention to two things. First, we shall look at the work of the Eternal Builder—“Mercy shall be built up forever.” Then, secondly, we shall listen to the resolve of an everlasting singer—“I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever.” I take the second verse first—it is necessary for the handling of our subject. You know, in the book of Common Prayer, the rubric prescribes concerning a certain form of words that it is, “to be said or sung.” We will do both. The first part we will have is the verse which begins, “I have said.” And then the second part shall be the verse which begins, “I will sing.” It shall be said and sung, too! God grant we may say it in the depth of our heart and afterward that our mouth may sing it and make it known unto all generations! May the Spirit of all Grace fill us with His own power!
The Eternal Builder’s Vision
First, then, let us contemplate the Eternal Builder and His wonderful work. “I have said, Mercy shall be built up forever: Your faithfulness shall You establish in the very heavens.” I can see a vast mass of ruins. Heaps upon heaps they lie around me. A stately edifice has tottered to the ground! Some terrible disaster has occurred. There it lies—cornice, pillar, pinnacle—everything of ornament and of utility broken, scattered, dislocated. The world is strewn with the debris. Journey where you will, the desolation is before your eyes. Who has done this? Who has cast down this temple? What hand has ruined this magnificent structure? Manhood! Manhood it is which has been destroyed, and Sin was the agent that effected the Fall. It is man broken by his sin—iniquity has done it! O you Devastator, what destructions have you worked in the earth! What desolation you have made unto the ends of the world! Everywhere is ruin! Everywhere is ruin! Futile attempts are made to rebuild this temple upon its own heap and the Babel towers arise out of the rubbish and abide, for a season, but they are soon broken down, and the mountain of decay and corruption becomes even more hopeless of restoration! All that man has done with his greatest effort is but to make a huge display of his total failure to recover his position, to realize his pretentious plans, or to restore his own fleeting memories of better things.
The Work of Mercy
They may build and they may pile up stone upon stone and cement them together with untempered mortar, but their rude structure shall all crumble to the dust, again, for the first ruin will be perpetuated even to the last! So must it be, for sin destroys all. I am vexed in my spirit and sorely troubled as I look at these ruins—fit habitations for owls and the dragon, the mole, and the bat. Alas for manhood, that it should be thus fallen and destroyed! But what else do I see? I behold the great original Builder coming forth from the ivory palaces to undo this mischief.
He comes not with implements of destruction, that He may cast down and destroy every vestige, but I see Him advancing with plummet and line, that He may raise, set up, and establish, on the sure Foundation, a noble pile that shall not crumble with time, but endure throughout all ages! He comes forth with mercy. So “I said” as I saw the vision, “Mercy shall be built up forever.” There was no material but mercy with which a temple could be constructed among men. What can meet the guilt of human crimes but mercy? What can redress the misery occasioned by wanton transgression but mercy? Mere kindness could not do it. Power alone— even Omnipotence—could not accomplish it. Wisdom could not even commence until Mercy stood at her right hand. But when I saw Mercy interpose, I understood the meaning. Something was to be done that would change the dreary picture that made my heart groan, for at the advent of Mercy the walls would soon rise until the roof ascended high and the palace received within its renovated glory the sublime Architect who built it!
The Building Process
I knew that now there would be songs instead of sighs since God had come and come in mercy! Beloved Brothers and Sisters, blessed was that day when Mercy, the Benjamin of God, His last-born attribute, appeared! Surely it was the son of our sorrow, but it was the son of His right hand. There had been no need of mercy if it had not been for our sin—thus from direst evil the Lord took occasion to display the greatest good! When Mercy came—God’s darling, for He says He delights in mercy—then was there hope that the ruins of the Fall would no longer be the perpetual misery of men! I said, “Mercy shall be built up.”
II. An Everlasting Singer
Now, we come back to the first verse. There are first that shall be last and last that shall be first, so is it with our text. We have looked at the Eternal Builder, let us now listen to an everlasting singer. “I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever: with my mouth will I make known Your faithfulness to all generations.”
Here is a good and godly resolution—“I will sing.” The singing of the heart is intended and the singing of the voice is expressed, for he mentions his mouth. And equally true is it that the singing of his pen is implied, since the Psalms that he wrote were for others to sing in generations that should follow. He says, “I will sing.” I do not know what else he could do. There is God building in mercy. We cannot assist Him in that! We have no mercy to contribute and what is built is to be all of mercy. We cannot impart anything to the great temple which He is building.
But we can sit down and sing. It seems delightful that there should be no sound of hammer or noise of axe—that there should be no other sound than the voice of song as when they fabled of the ancient player upon the instruments that he built temples by the force of song! So shall God build up His Church and so shall He build us as living stones into the sacred structure and so shall we sit and muse on His mercy till the music breaks from our tongue and we rise to our feet and stand and sing about it! I will sing of the mercy while the mercy is being built up. “I will sing of the mercies of the Lord.”
The Joy of Praise
But will he not soon sink these sweet notes and relapse into silence? No. He says, “I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever.” Will he not grow weary and wish for some other occupation? No, for true praise is a thirsty thing and when it drinks from a golden chalice, it soon empties it and yearns for deeper draughts with strong desire. It could drink up Jordan at a draught! This singing praise to God is a spiritual passion. The saved soul delights itself in the Lord and sings on and on and on unwearily. “I will sing forever,” he says. Not, “I will get others to perform and then I will retire from the service,” but rather, “I will, myself, sing. My own tongue shall take the solo, whoever may refuse to join in the chorus. I will sing and with my mouth will I make known Your faithfulness.”
Conclusion
Oh, that is blessed—that singing personally and individually! It is a blessed thing to be one of a choir in the praise of God and we like to have others with us in this happy employment. Still, for all that, the 103rd Psalm is a most beautiful solo. It begins, “Bless the Lord, O my Soul,” and it finishes up with, “Bless the Lord, O my Soul.” There must be personal, singular praise, for we have received personal and singular mercies! I will sing, I will sing, I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever!
Now note his subject. “I will sing of the mercies of the Lord.” What, not of anything else? Are the mercies of the Lord his exclusive theme? “Arma virumque cano”— “Arms and the man, I sing,” says the Latin poet. “Mercies and my God, I sing,” says the Hebrew Seer. “I will sing of mercies,” says the devout Christian. This is the fountain of mercy where, if a man drinks, he will sing far better than he that drinks of the Castalian fountain and on Parnassus begins to tune His harp— “Praise the mount, oh, fix me on it, Mount of God’s unchanging love.”
Here we are taught a melodious sonnet, “sung by flaming tongues above.” “I will sing of mercies, I will sing of mercies forever,” he says and, I suppose, the reason is because God’s mercies would be built up forever. The morning stars sang together when God’s work of Creation was completed. Suppose God created a world every day? Surely the morning stars would sing every day. Ah, but God gives us a world of mercies every day and, therefore, let us sing of His mercies forever! Any one day that you live, my Brothers and Sisters, there is enough mercy packed away into it to make you sing not only through that day but through the rest of your life!