I came across these thought-provoking and inspiring words that so well address our troubled times from the comments on Psalm 119:126 in Spurgeon’s A Treasury of David:
Ps 119:126. It is time for thee, Lord, to work: For they have made void thy law.”
EXPLANATORY NOTES AND QUAINT SAYINGS
“Was ever vessel more hopelessly becalmed in mid-ocean, or did crew ever cry with more frenzy for some favoring breeze than those should cry who man the church of the living God? If God work not, it is certain there is nothing before the church but the prospect of utter discomfiture and overthrow. Greater is the world than the church if God be not in her. But if God be in her, she shall not be moved. May He help her, and that right early!
When society has become drugged with the cup of worldliness, and the voices that come from eternity are unheeded, if not unheard, even terror has its merciful mission. The frivolous and superficial hearts of men have to be made serious, their idols have to be broken, their nests have to be stoned or tossed from the trees where they had been made with so much care, and they have to be taught that if this life be all, it is but a phantom and a mockery.
Does the church believe its creed? It writes it, sets it forth, defends it; but does it believe it, at least with a faith which begets either enthusiasm in itself or respect from the world? Have not the truths which form the methodized symbols of the church become propositions instead of living powers? Do they not lie embalmed with superstitious reverence in the ark of tradition, tenderly cherished for what they have been and done?
But is it not forgotten that if they be truths, they are not dead and cannot die? They are true now, or they were never true; living now, or they never lived. Time cannot touch them, nor human opinion, nor the church’s sluggishness or unbelief, for they are emanations from the Divine essence, instinct with His own undecaying life. They are not machinery which may become antiquated and obsolete and displaced by better inventions; they are not methods of policy framed for conditions which are transient, and vanishing with them; they are not scaffolding within which other and higher truth is to be reared from age to age.
They are like Him Who is the end of our conversation, “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” There is not one of them which, if the faith it awakens were but commensurate with its intrinsic worth, would not clothe the Church with a new and wondrous power. But what would be that power if that faith were to grasp them all? It would be life from the dead.
–Enoch Mellor
