Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Psalms 103:13
Like as a father pitieth [his] children, [so] the LORD pitieth them that fear him.
13. Cp. Psa 27:10; Isa 49:15; Luk 15:20.
pitieth ] Hath compassion on. The A.V. misses the connexion with “full of compassion” in Psa 103:8.
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
Like as a father pitieth his children – Hebrew, Like the compassion of a father for his children. See the notes at Mat 7:7-11. God often compares himself with a father, and it is by carrying out our ideas of what enters into the parental character that we get our best conceptions of the character of God. See the notes at Mat 6:9. That which is referred to here, is the natural affection of the parent for the child; the tender love which is borne by the parent for his offspring; the disposition to care for its needs; the readiness to forgive when an offence has been committed. Compare Luk 15:22-24. Such, in an infinitely higher degree, is the compassion – the kindness – which God has for those that love him.
So the Lord pitieth them that fear him – He has compassion on them. He exercises toward them the paternal feeling.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Psa 103:13-14
Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him.
The tender pity of the Lord
With a text from the Old Testament, I purpose to take you straight away to the New, and the tenderness and pitifulness of the Father shall be illustrated by the meekness and lowliness of the Son towards His immediate disciples, the apostles. While the Holy Spirit shows you thus the pity of Jesus Christ towards His own personal attendants, you will see as in a glass His pity towards you.
I. The Divine patience of our Lord Jesus towards the apostles. He kept no register of their faults, He never rehearsed the list of their shortcomings, but, on the contrary, His main rebuke was His own perfect example, and He ever treated them as His friends and brethren. Think of this, and you will see in Christ Jesus that like as a father pitieth his children, etc. Much forbearance He had with their lack of understanding. The apostles, before Pentecost, were very gross and unspiritual in judgment. Their eyes were holden in more senses than one. Many a master would have grown weary of such pupils, but infinite love brought to its succour infinite patience, and He continued still to teach them though they were so slow to learn. Like as a father pitieth, etc. He taught them humility by His humility; He taught them gentleness by His gentleness; He did not point out their defects in words, He did not dwell upon their errors, but He rather let them see their own spots by His purity, their own defects by His perfection. Oh, the marvellous tenderness of Christ, who so paternally pitied them that feared Him!
II. The reasons of this Divine patience in the case of our Lord. Doubtless we must find the first reason in what He is. Our Lord was so greatly good that He could bear with poor frail humanity. When you and I cannot bear with other people it is because we are so weak ourselves. I would to God we could copy His love and borrow His meekness so divine. He bore with them and pitied them because of His relationship to them. He had loved them as He has loved many of us, from before the foundation of the world. He was their Shepherd, and He pitied the diseases of His flock; He was their brother born for adversity, and He stooped to be familiar with their frailties. Another reason for His patience was His intention to become perfect as the Captain of our salvation, through suffering. In order that He might be a complete High Priest, and know all the temptations of all His servants, He bears with the infirmities and sins of His disciples whom He could have perfected at once if He had willed, but whom He did not choose to perfect because He desired to reveal His tender pity towards them, and to obtain by experience complete likeness to His brethren. Did He not also do this that He might honour the Holy Spirit? If Jesus had perfected the apostles, they would not have seen so manifestly the glory of the Holy Ghost. Until the Holy Ghost was come, what poor creatures the eleven were! but when the Holy Ghost was given, what brave men, what heroes, how deeply instructed, how powerful in speech, how eminent in every virtue they became! It is the object of Jesus Christ to glorify the Spirit, even as it is the design of the Holy Spirit to glorify Christ in our hearts.
III. The teaching to de derived from this patience.
1. If the Lord had thus had pity upon you as He had on His apostles, do ye even so to others. Look at the bright side of your brother, and the black side of yourself, instead of reversing the order as many do. Remember there are points about every Christian from which you may learn a lesson. Look to their excellences, and initiate them. Think, too, that small as the faith of some of your brethren is, it will grow, and you do not know what it will grow to. Though they be now so sadly imperfect, yet if they are the Lords people, think of what they will be one day.
2. In your own case, have firm faith in the gentleness and forbearance of Christ. Think of how gentle He was with the apostles, and remember He is the same still. Change of place has not changed His character. The exaltations of heaven have not removed from Him the tenderness of His heart; He will accept you still. (C H. Spurgeon.)
The Divine pity
No word better brings home the truth of Divine lovingkindness than pity–the pity of the Lord. There is love and mercy shown in passing by our sin, and forgiving us; but it is the love shown in the pity of the Lord that touches us most directly, and at once reaches the quick of our nature. And the reasons for this are not difficult to understand.
I. The pity of God is condescending love. It is the love of one who is infinitely our superior. Abject penitence on the one hand, and reliance upon the Divine compassion on the other–that is the truest and best relation in which the sinner and God can stand.
II. The pity of God is understandable. The pity of God is most welcome to us, because it is that which best corresponds to our own thoughts concerning ourselves. It is true, we are unworthy; and so unworthy, the very thought of it often repels us from God and makes us ashamed to seek His forgiveness and help; but we can say very sincerely that, however great our sins may be, there is need so great, weakness and helplessness so great, that, apart from our deserts, we ought to be the objects of the pity of a compassionate and loving God.
III. Gods interest in humanity. The wounds of the patriot who has bled for his country become eloquent appeals to his countrymen if he come to be in want; the distresses of the poor become appeals to our hearts, even when they are brought about by their own sin. In the hour of distress we fail to be judges. There is only one feeling of compassion to a fellow-creature in distress. Shall not God be as much moved by the sight of human need as we are? (James Ross.)
Our heavenly Fathers pity
I. The displays of this pity.
1. God pities His children, in all their ignorance; He is not angry with them, nor doth He speak sharply to them; but He leadeth them on by His Spirit, until they understand His truth, and receive His Word.
2. What pity has the Lord had upon you and me, in all our wanderings.
3. In actual transgressions and downright sin.
4. In sickness.
5. In all our manifold trials, of whatever kind they are, and from whatever quarter they proceed
6. Sometimes Gods people have wrongs; and a father pities his children, if they have wrongs that are unrevenged. There never was a wrong done to one of Gods people that God did not avenge; there has never been an ill deed done towards them yet but He hath punished the doer of it.
II. The spirit of Gods pity.
1. There is no contempt in it.
2. It is not the pity of inaction.
3. It is not the pity of mere sensitiveness. Go to Him now if you are poor; tell Him all your care, and see if He will not help you. Go and try Him, for His pity is a heavenly pity; it is the very nard of Paradise, that healeth sores effectually.
III. The people whom God pities. The Lord pitieth them that fear Him. Oh, that ye would tremble at His presence; and, then, oh, that ye could know yourselves to be His children, and fear Him as children do their parents! Oh, that ye did reverence His name, and keep His Sabbaths! Oh, that ye did obey His commandments, and have His fear ever before your eyes! Then should your peace be like a river, and your righteousness like the waves of the sea. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
Gods pity
I. It is like that of a tender and merciful father. 1 He forbears summary punishment.
2. He encourages us when we try to serve Him.
3. He ceases to chastise when chastisement has accomplished the purpose for which it was sent.
II. Why God shows such pity to His children.
1. It is His character to be pitiful.
2. He feels to us as a Father. (W. Handcock.)
The best need the pity of God
It is like tolling the death-knell of all our pride to talk about God pitying us. Why, we shed our pity profusely upon the ungodly; we are often pitying the wicked, the profane, the blasphemer, the Sabbath-breaker; but here we find a God pitying us. Even David, the mighty psalmist, is pitied; a prophet, a priest, a king, each of these shall have pity from God, for He pitieth them that fear Him, and finds good reasons for pitying them, however high their station, however holy their character, or however happy their position. We are pitiable beings. (C. H. Spurgeon.)
A fathers great love
How much a father loves his son is shown in the story of the nobleman who went all the way from Capernaum to Cana for the sake of his boy. The other day an American father gave the great Austrian, Dr. Lorenz, 6,000 to make his crippled daughter able to walk. Many other fathers and mothers brought their children to this great doctor, and he treated as many of them as he had time to do. We never know how much our parents love us until we are sick or in danger. Then it is mother who sits by our bed and never goes to sleep until the danger is over. Then it is father who thinks no toil or sacrifice too great for his darling boy or girl. (Freeman.)
Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell
Verse 13. Like as a father pitieth his children] This is a very emphatic verse, and may be thus translated: “As the tender compassions of a father towards his children; so the tender compassions of Jehovah towards them that fear him.” Nothing can place the tenderness and concern of God for his creatures in a stronger light than this. What yearnings of bowels does a father feel toward the disobedient child, who, sensible of his ingratitude and disobedience, falls at his parent’s feet, covered with confusion and melted into tears, with, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am not worthy to be called thy son!” The same in kind, but infinitely more exquisite, does God feel when the penitent falls at his feet, and implores his mercy through Christ crucified.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
13. pitiethliterally, “hascompassion on.”
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
Like as a father pitieth his children,…. When in any affliction, disorder, or distress: the Lord stands in the relation of a Father to his people; they are his children by adopting grace, through the covenant of grace with them; by a sovereign act of his own will he puts them among the children, predestinates them to the adoption of children; and sends his Son to redeem them, that they might receive it, and his Spirit to bear witness to their spirits, that they are his children; and towards these he has all the affections of a tender parent.
So the Lord pitieth them that fear him; not with a servile fear, which is unsuitable to the relation of children; but with reverence and godly fear, with a fear of him and his goodness, and on account of that; a filial fear, such a reverence as children should have of a father: and this character belongs to all the saints of all nations, Jews or Gentiles; and seems to be here given an purpose to include all; and that the divine pity and compassion might not be thought to be restrained to any particular nation. And, as the fruit of his tender mercy, he looks upon his children in their lost estate, and brings them out of it; he succours them under all their temptations; he sympathizes with them under all their afflictions: being full of compassion, he forgives their iniquities; and in the most tender manner receives them when they have backslidden, and heals their backslidings. The Targum in the king of Spain’s Bible is,
“so the Word of the Lord pities,”
&c. See Heb 4:15.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
13. As a father is compassionate towards his children, The Psalmist not only explains by a comparison what he has already stated, but he at the same time assigns the cause why God so graciously forgives us, which is, because he is a father It is then in consequence of God’s having freely and sovereignly adopted us as his children that he continually pardons our sins, and accordingly we are to draw from that fountain the hope of forgiveness. And as no man has been adopted on the ground of his own merit, it follows that sins are freely pardoned. God is compared to earthly fathers, not because he is in every respect like them, but because there is no earthly image by which his unparalleled love towards us can be better expressed. That God’s fatherly goodness may not be perverted as an encouragement to sin, David again repeats that God is thus favorable only to those who are his sincere worshippers. It is indeed a proof of no ordinary forbearance for God to “make his sun to rise on the evil and on the good,” (Mat 5:45😉 but the subject here treated is the free imputation of the righteousness by which we are accounted the children of God. Now this righteousness is offered only to those who entirely devote themselves to so bountiful a Father, and reverently submit to his word. But as our attainments in godliness in this world, whatever they may be, come far short of perfection, there remains only one pillar on which our salvation can securely rest, and that is the goodness of God.
Fuente: Calvin’s Complete Commentary
(13) Father.This anticipation of Christs revelation of the paternal heart of God, is found also in the prophets.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
Psa 103:13 Like as a father pitieth [his] children, [so] the LORD pitieth them that fear him.
Ver. 13. Like as a father pitieth ] There is an ocean of love in a father’s heart. See Luk 15:20 Gen 33:2 ; Gen 33:13-14 ; Gen 34:3 , how hardly and with what caution Jacob parted with Benjamin. Sozomen maketh mention of a certain merchant, who offering himself to be put to death for his two sons who were sentenced to die, and it being granted that one of the two (whom he should choose) should be upon that condition delivered; the miserable father, aequali utriusque amore victus, equally affected to them both, could not yield that either, of them should die, but remained hovering about both, till both were put to death.
So the Lord pitieth, &c.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
Everlasting Loving-Kindness
Psa 103:13-22
The psalmist comes from the far-reaching sky to the homely image of a fathers pity. God is a great King, the mighty Creator, but the Spirit witnesses that we are His children and teaches us to say, Abba, Father. The idea of dust is that of frailty. Made of dust and fragile as an earthen vessel, man by his weakness appeals to Jehovahs compassion. The thought of frailty and helplessness is still further impressed by the figure of the fading flower, scorched by the hot desert wind. But, by force of contrast, the psalmist passes from mans brief span of life to Gods eternal years. And Gods love is as His life. Because God is eternal, His love is eternal. When once He loves, He loves always; He never wearies, never cools, and never lets go. A parent who fears God may leave a legacy of priceless worth to his childrens children. See Psa 103:17.
From Psa 103:19 to the end, the psalmist pulls out all the stops in the great organ of existence. Angels and hosts of other intelligent beings who perform the Lords will, all his works animate and inanimate, all saints, all souls, stars and suns, oceans, and mountains-all must join the Hallelujah Chorus.
Fuente: F.B. Meyer’s Through the Bible Commentary
fear
Also Psa 103:13, (See Scofield “Psa 19:9”).
Fuente: Scofield Reference Bible Notes
The Fathers Pity
Like as a father pitieth his children,
So the Lord pitieth them that fear him.
For he knoweth our frame;
He remembereth that we are dust.Psa 103:13-14.
1. Like as a father. The history of religion shows that it has not been easy for men to think of God in that extremely simple and human fashion; and yet, to Christians, no other way of thinking appears so obvious or so natural. It met us in our childhood, grew into the thinking of our youth, and has swayed the conceptions we have formed of that august and invincible power that works for righteousness and peace for evermore. We lisped it in our earliest hymns. It had a place in the first prayers we offered at our mothers knee. It was set out in many winsome forms in the Sunday school; and when we realized something of the joy of the Divine pardon, we felt more deeply than ever the entire appropriateness and unsurpassed charm of the poets words. God is like a father. It saturates the Christian atmosphere. It is shaping the thought and the life of the world.
And yet it is a matter of historic fact that men were thinking and inquiring for ages before they were able to interpret God in the terms of human fatherhood. Groping after God, if haply they might find Him, they sought their symbols first of all in the many-leaved picture book of nature, and said, God is like the sun, shining in its strength, and filling the world with its radiance. The moon is His symbol as it casts its light on the path of the pilgrim in the night. God is like the rock, they exclaimed; His work is perfect. He abides amid the storms and stress of life, stable as the everlasting hills.
Quite late in history did men come to the human in their quest for the terms in which they might express God; and when they reached this point, they seized at first only upon the more arresting qualities of the animal in man, and said, God is like Hercules in the invincible strength with which He crushes the evils in the world, and makes an end of them. Later still, Plato advanced to the suggestion that God was like a geometer, a thinker and fashioner, full of ideas and ideals; and, latest of all, in one of the youngest portions of the Old Testament, not in Genesis, not in any part of the Pentateuch, but in this wonderful and most gracious lyric, the 103rd Psalm, possibly one of the last contributions of Hebrew Psalmody, the seer surpasses all the great historical religions, and pictures God to us as a pitiful, compassionate, sin-forgiving, and soul-healing Father, and thus supplies the basis for the most true, most worthy, and most inspiring conception of God.
There was once a group of friends standing at the house door, gazing in wonder at an eclipse. It was a cloudless night; and, as they saw the shadow of the earth gliding so punctually over the face of the brilliant moon, a solemn emotion of awe fell upon every mind, and in absolute silence they watched the magnificent phenomenon. Everything connected with their daily lives seemed for a season to be forgotten; they were citizens of infinitude; all their thoughts were swept into the regions of immensity. But suddenly the silence was broken by a cry from the nursery where a child had been laid to sleep. In that company, how soon you could tell who was the mother; in a moment she had left the scene, had rushed upstairs, and was clasping the baby in her embrace! What were the wonders of nature compared to the needs of a suffering child? More sacred than the music of the spheres was that feeble appeal for pity; more powerful than the sweet influence of the Pleiades was the attraction of love which at once absorbed that womans soul. Then was she most like God, not when she was exalted into amazement at the marvels of the sky, but when she was soothing pain and chasing fear by tenderness and pity.1 [Note: F. Walters.]
2. In depicting the milder and kindlier aspect of Gods character the Old Testament writers make pity the ground quality on which everything is based. With the Psalm writers it is a standing description of God on this side of His nature that He is gracious and full of compassion. His compassion for the perishable life and oppressed state of Israel is expressly assigned by the prophets as His reason for redeeming His people and forgiving their rebellions with long-suffering mercy. When He withdraws locusts from the wasted fields of Palestine, it is because He pities His peoples sufferings. The repentant city of Nineveh is spared because its helpless myriads touched in Gods great heart such ruth as Jonah had for his withering gourd. And after Jerusalems fall, the patriot-poet who mourned so exquisitely over its ruin finds the explanation of all disaster in these plaintive, half-reproachful words, Thou hast not pitied. It reads as if the Almightys long-suffering patience with men, His gracious kindness to His people, His relenting, even His mercy in pardoning sin, were all felt by these old Hebrews to root themselves in that beautiful sentiment of compassion with which a Being so immense and self-contained in blessedness must look down on the fragile and sorrowful creatures whose origin, whose habitation, and whose end are all of them in the dust.
Pity lies at the core of all the great religions. The chapters of the Koran, all of them, begin with these words: In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. The vast religion of Buddha numbers five hundred million votaries, and pity is the keynote to it all.1 [Note: M. J. McLeod, Heavenly Harmonics for Earthly Living, 99.]
3. The sense of Gods fatherly compassion grows out of mans deepest experience. The Psalmist is face to face with his own life, and with the life of Israel. He looks back in his history, and counts up the benefits he has received from the Lord: forgiveness and healing, solace and renewal, quickening and uplift. He is swayed by the spirit of praise and adoration and love; and out of his own growing affection there leaps up irresistibly this thought of God. It must be so. The God who meets his sin with such pity and pardon, bears with his errors and guilty ignorance so patiently, must have the heart of a father. These are the gifts of love. They reveal wisdom, intelligence, adaptation of means to an end, but chiefly they show the same sort of care for the soul of man as a loving father shows for his child; they disclose the Divine heart. God forgives as a father does the mistakes and follies and sins of his son. He delivers from peril, He crowns with loving-kindness and tenderness. He satisfies the soaring desires of the spirit; He renews the springs of life. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.
But the most vital element in the Psalmists experience is the forgiveness of his sins. It is to that he recurs again and again. God forgives as only a father-heart in its fullest flow of pity and compassion can forgive. For it is not easy to forgive. Brothers have been known to pursue one another in a spirit of retaliation for years, and some fathers and mothers have shown hardness of heart towards their own offspring; but God forgives with a generosity and completeness which show that no father has a love so large as His.
Who is a pardoning God like Thee,
Or who has grace so rich and free!
It seems impossible to exaggerate in describing it. Listen to the singer as, with soul bursting with thankfulness, he says, God does chidebut not always; nor does He keep His anger for ever. Take your measuring-glass and look up into the heavens. Let your gaze reach out to the farthest depths of the infinite blue, soar and still soar, and still you do not reach the boundaries of His forgiving love: He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him.
Years ago when death came to me first and took a child, the anguish was great. Watching her while she lay dying, I learnt for the first time what is meant by the words, Like as a father pitieth his children. Only so could I be taught the pity of God. And I learnt too, at the same time, what God must feel at the loss of His children. What are all these passionate affections but parables of Divine things? Shall God suffer and not we?1 [Note: Life of R. W. Dale of Birmingham, 21.]
My little Son, who lookd from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quiet grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyd,
I struck him, and dismissd
With hard words and unkissd,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep,
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkend eyelids, and their lashes yet
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his tears, left others of my own;
For on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters, and a red-veind stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I prayd
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rernemberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood,
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thoult leave Thy wrath, and say,
I will be sorry for their childishness.1 [Note: Coventry Patmore, The Unknown Eros.]
4. The New Testament discloses the fact that the pity of God is the sympathy of One who associates Himself with us and undertakes for us. When we speak of the Incarnation we think of the Divine in the human. But there is another side to that great truth. There is the human in the Divinewhat Robertson of Brighton used to call the humanity of Deity, and what the late Principal Edwards of Bala called the humanity of God. That is something which makes Him one with us, so that He identifies Himself with us, and, in a word, pities us. Now nobody resents that kind of pity, the pity of a genuine sympathy, which makes a man suffer because you suffer and compels him so to identify himself with you as to enter into your experience. That comes to you like balm; there is healing in it. It stands by your side; it puts its arms around you, so to speak, and in quivering tones says: My brother, my sister, my child, this misfortune touches us both, for you are bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. Because you suffer I must suffer. In the name of our common humanity, in the name of God, let us try to help each other. That is pity. That is the pity of God; for that is the pity of love.
What is the meaning of Gethsemane and the cross but this, that the Son of God by virtue of His identification with us in His humanity entered sympathetically into the sin and suffering of the world? Not that He shared our sin by actual transgression, for He knew no sin; but as a father shares the sin and shame and suffering of his child, so the Lord Jesus shared our sin and shame and suffering. Himself bare our sins in his own body on the tree. He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. He who knew no sin was made sin for us. How otherwise could He have made atonement for us? And what is the teaching of the parable of the Prodigal Son in this regard? How did the father pity his wandering boy? He yearned for him when he was away in the far country; he knew well what it all meantthe degradation, the undying stain, the suffering. And for every pang in the heart of the son there was an answering pang in the heart of the father. And how did the pity express itself? While the son was yet a great way off the father saw him, and had compassion on him, and ran to meet him. Ah! pity does not think of its dignity. The pity of some people could never get beyond a walk; it is too often on stilts. The fathers pity made him run; he ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. And that is the pity of God; that is how it is unfolded in the story of redemption.
A chord which has been once set in unison with another vibrates (they say) when its fellow is sharply struck. God has set His heart through human suffering into perpetual concord with human hearts. Strike them, and the heart of God quivers for fellowship. If this is compassion, it is so in a more literal sense than when we use the word as a mere synonym for pity. It is sympathy, in the Greek and New Testament sense; it is, as our version has it, being touched with the same feeling. It is the remembrance of His own human past which stirs within the soul of Christ, when, now, from His high seat, He sees what mortal men endure.1 [Note: J. O. Dykes.]
5. The Psalmist says that mans weakness makes a sure appeal to the Fathers heart. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. Dust is a synonym for frailty. While the mountains stand fast for generations, the dust into which they are slowly worn has no abiding place. The winds toss it, carrying its unresisting particles whithersoever they will. And the stuff out of which we are fashioned is just as unstable and never at one stay. Our lives are of slenderer fibre than unspun silk, brittle as threads of fine-drawn glass, breath-breakable as the texture that holds together only in a vacuum. The Psalmist goes on to speak of death, reminding us that man is like a flower of the field which, untended by human care, unscreened by human device, unwarmed by human art, shrivels at the first sign of change and the first moan of desert wind, and dies neglected and forlorn. Through the entire round of his days he is ever matching and measuring his puny capacities against the strong. Death, which draws the curtain over his cold, inert, baffled clay, is but the last phase in that ever-recurring spectacle of impotence. And yet man draws the Almighty God down to his help; and, marvellous to say, man draws God by reason of his very frailty. Of the sum of that human life over which He bends I am but a thousand-millionth part, and yet the Lord thinketh upon me, who am poor and needythinketh of me the more closely for that very reason.
In his essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, Burke points out the fact that we always associate physical smallness with the idea of beauty, and he supports his rule by reminding us that in every known language terms of endearment are diminutives. Is not the reason for this common note in the taste and speech of mankind that the hearts of the strong and the chivalrous are captured by the very weakness which solicits defence? When we are called upon to play the part of providence to the helpless we experience a mysterious satisfaction which influences our sthetic judgment, and the helpless grow beautiful in our eyes. And does not this peculiarity in human nature give us the clue to a mystery in the heart of God? When He made man He put Divine qualities into a slender framework, filled up with delicate clay, because to such beings the deepest secret of His tenderness could be spoken.1 [Note: T. G. Selby.]
Will you say to a mother, Why do you waste such love on that poor child? Do you not see that he is a cripple, has curvature of the spine, always will be a cripple? See the little fellow creeping on his hands and knees! The doctor says that he can never be strong; always will be a source of anxiety to you; most likely never will be able to walk. Why worry so over him? What good will he ever be? Ah, if you spoke thus, she would give you a look that would shrivel you.
My silent boy, I hold thee to my breast,
Just as I did when thou wast newly born.
It may be sinful, but I love thee best,
And kiss thy lips the longest night and morn.
Oh, thou art dear to me beyond all others,
And when I breathe my trust and bend my knee
For blessing on thy sisters and thy brothers,
God seems the nighest when I pray for thee.1 [Note: M. J. McLeod, Heavenly Harmonies for Earthly Living, 110.]
6. Gods intimate knowledge of our weakness is the sure pledge of tender parental treatment. It is certain that a very great part of the harshness of judgment which passes among men is the result of imperfect knowledge. You do not know the man you are speaking about; you do not know the natural infirmities, the bodily hindrances, the constitutional causes which affect the person whom you are blaming. You cannot take into your calculation all the circumstances, all the pressure, all the temptation. You cannot read his motives, you cannot dip into the secret processes going on in that mans mind. If you could see all this, your feelings would be very different, and your sentiments would be reversed.
Now, of all upon earth, a parent can best estimate these things in his own child. Has he not watched him from the first passages of his dawning life? Has he not seen the moulding of his frame? Has he not become intimate with the secret framework of his being? Can he not take a more comprehensive view of him than any other man can? And this pity flowing from parental knowledge is the shadow of that love of God. He sees what no other eye sees, and His calculations include all the extenuating circumstancesthe health, the position, the conflict, the effort, the struggle, the sorrow, the penitence. He knows andblessed be God for the kind word, a word very rarely known to us He remembers. And so pity is the child of knowledge. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.
Not as one blind and deaf to our beseeching,
Neither forgetful that we are but dust,
Not as from heavens too high for our upreaching.
Coldly sublime, intolerably just:
Nay but Thou knewest us, Lord Christ Thou knowest,
Well Thou rememberest our feeble frame,
Thou canst conceive our highest and our lowest,
Pulses of nobleness and aches of shame.
Therefore have pity!not that we accuse Thee,
Curse Thee and die and charge Thee with our woe;
Not thro Thy fault, O Holy One, we lose Thee,
Nay, but our own,yet hast Thou made us so!
Then tho our foul and limitless transgression
Grows with our growing, with our breath began,
Raise Thou the arms of endless intercession.
Jesus, divinest when Thou most art man!1 [Note: F. W. H. Myers, Saint Paul.]
7. The Psalmist based the pity of our Heavenly Father on His special knowledge of our framesuch knowledge as only the Framer of it can possess. But to know mans frame, to know what is in man, even to search and try with Divine inspection the heart and spirit of a man, is after all something less intimate and perfect than to be a man. To learn a childs lessons, feel a youths passions, think a mans thoughts; to be actually tempted to evil as men are tempted, and find out by trial how hard it is for them to be good; to undergo the moral probation and discipline peculiar to a human creature, impossible to the Creator; this must giveor, if we are to think about the subject at all, it must be supposed by us to have givento the Son of God a fresh acquaintance with human experience, of quite another sort from the omniscience of the creating Father. At all events, who can help feeling this, that, if it is possible for any one to know us, understand us, and do us justice, Jesus Christ is that One; since, as our Maker, He both knows what He made us fit to be and to do and, as our Fellow-Man, has learned through what hindrances and temptations we have become what we are?
An obelisk, originally brought from Egypt, stands in the piazza of St. Peters at Rome. It was put into its present position in the sixteenth century. It weighs a little short of a million pounds, and required the strength of eight hundred men, one hundred and fifty horses, and forty-six cranes, to lift it on to its pedestal. The crowds who witnessed the feat were forbidden to speak under pain of death. As the ropes were tugged by hosts of workmen, and the huge obelisk slowly reared itself like a waking giant, the movement suddenly stopped and the ropes threatened to give way. The huge mass was about to fall crashing upon the pavement. An old sailor in the crowd, familiar with the humours of ropes and the methods of treating them, broke the silence and cried, Pour water on the ropes! The advice was quickly followed, the ropes tightened, and the obelisk slowly rose again and settled securely upon its base. In our past life how often have strain, tension, and peril come to us! The ties by which we were knit to goodness, to truth, to purity, to faith, were sorely tested, and seemed ready to snap and plunge us into ruin. Some temptation arose out of all proportion to the staying power of our trust in God, some shock fraught with impending disaster to the character, some partial alienation from right paths threatening to strand our lives in uselessness. But the eye of infinite wisdom was watching, and God remembered the weakness of the flesh. From within the unseen there came a voice that saved us, and the peril was overpast. The strain eased off, character strengthened itself to the emergency, and we were kept in the plane of our providential lot. And through this wise, watchful pity of our infirmities we come to find ourselves with a place in the living temple, monuments of the gentleness, the sympathy, and the upholding power of the God who pities the frail. In the moments which show most our weakness the Lord remembers that we are but dust, and fortifies us against the strains and hazards which belong to our earthly course.1 [Note: T. G. Selby, The God of the Frail, 14.]
8. Who are they that experience this pity of God? What does the text say? Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. The same expression occurs in the eleventh verse: As the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. And again in the seventeenth verse: The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him. Now, let us not imagine for a moment that God does not yearn with compassion over men who are utterly reckless, men who are breaking through Gods law, and treading the path that leadeth to destruction. God pities them; but, then, observe, they are indifferent to Him; and if we are indifferent to any one, we do not care for that ones pity, we have no wish for his compassion. Gods compassion goes forth upon all men, but all men cannot receive it, and do not receive it. It is not the idea of terror that is conveyed by this word fear. We do not crave mercy from a tyrant; we demand justice from him. If one might translate this word fear one should do so by two wordsreverential love. We can receive real sympathy only from those we love with reverence. When we are bearing a great trial, when we are going through our testing time, when we are bowing under a heavy sorrow, who are the men and women from whom we seek sympathy or pity? It may be we seek for the companionship of but oneonly onefor whom our love is deep and reverent.
Bunyan in his long treatise On the Fear of God deals with the matter of right fear very fully. Take heed, he says in that treatise, of hardening thy heart at any time against convictions of judgments. I bid you before to beware of a hard heart, now I bid you beware of hardening your soft heart. The fear of the Lord is the pulse of the soul. Pulses that beat are the best sighs of life; but the worst show that life is present. Intermitting pulses are dangerous. David and Peter had an intermitting pulse in reference to this fear. Christian is no coward, and the adjective right is emphatic when he speaks of right fear. The word fear has two senses, according as it relates to dangerous or to sublime things. In the one connexion it is a sense of danger; in the other it is the faculty of reverence, the habit of wonder, the continued power of awe and admiration. Christians analysis of it includes both these senses. (1) It rises in the conviction of sinnot (it will be observed) in the approach of punishment, but in the horror of sin itself, as a thing to be abhorred apart from its consequences. (2) It leads to a laying hold on Christ for salvationin which the sense of danger and the faculty of reverence are combined. (3) It begets in the soul a great reverence for God.1 [Note: John Kelman, The Road, ii. 162.]
Among the children of God, while there is always that fearful and bowed apprehension of His majesty, and that sacred dread of all offence to Him, which is called the Fear of God, yet of real and essential fear there is not any, but clinging of confidence to Him as their Rock, Fortress, and Deliverer; and perfect love, and casting out of fear; so that it is not possible that, while the mind is rightly bent on Him, there should be dread of anything either earthly or supernatural; and the more dreadful seems the height of His majesty, the less fear they feel that dwell in the shadow of it (Of whom shall I be afraid), so that they are as David was, devoted to His fear; whereas, on the other hand, those who, if they may help it, never conceive of God, but thrust away all thought and memory of Him, and in His real terribleness and omnipresence fear Him not nor know Him, yet are by real, acute, piercing, and ignoble fear, haunted for evermore.2 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters, ii. ch. xiv. (Works, iv. 199).]
Literature
Buckland (A. R.), Text Studies for a Year, 143.
Clifford (J.), The Gospel of Gladness, 17.
Conn (J.), The Fulness of Time, 1.
Dykea (J. O.), Sermons, 138.
Fleming (A. G.), Silver Wings, 26.
McLeod (M. J.), Heavenly Harmonies, 99.
Murray (W. H.), The Fruits of the Spirit, 397.
Pierce (C. C.), The Hunger of the Heart for Faith, 59.
Selby (T. G.), The God of the Frail, 2.
Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xvi. (1870), No. 941.
Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), vii. (1868), No. 678.
Walters (F.), in Sermons by Unitarian Ministers, 53.
Christian World Pulpit, xxx. 230 (J. Baillie); xxxii. 376 (F. Ferguson); xxxviii. 188 (D. Hobbs); lx. 376 (E. Griffith-Jones); lxi. 251 (J. Ritson).
Church Pulpit Year Book, 1909, p. 153.
Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible
Like: Num 11:12, Deu 3:5, Pro 3:12, Isa 63:15, Isa 63:16, Jer 31:9, Jer 31:20, Mat 6:9, Mat 6:32, Luk 11:11, Luk 11:12, Luk 15:21, Luk 15:22, Joh 20:17, Heb 12:5-11
them: Psa 103:11, Psa 103:17, Psa 147:11, Mal 3:16, Mal 3:17, Mal 4:2, Act 13:26
Reciprocal: Gen 19:16 – the Lord Deu 28:54 – his children Jdg 6:36 – If thou wilt 2Sa 18:5 – Deal gently 2Sa 18:33 – would God 1Ki 19:7 – because the journey Psa 6:2 – for I Psa 119:38 – who is devoted Psa 128:1 – every one Isa 42:3 – bruised Isa 49:15 – a woman Joe 2:18 – and pity Mar 2:21 – seweth Mar 8:2 – compassion Luk 7:13 – he Joh 20:27 – Reach hither thy finger Col 3:21 – General Jam 5:11 – the Lord is 1Pe 3:8 – pitiful
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
God’s compassion is father-like in that He is mindful of our finite creaturely limitations.
"He knows us even better than we know ourselves." [Note: Kidner, Psalms 73-150, p. 366.]
Psa 103:15-16 beautifully describe the transitory nature of human life. It is both frail and short-lived. In contrast, God’s loyal love to those who fear Him abides strong forever. It transcends generations and continues on to the descendants of those who obey His law (Psa 103:17-18; cf. Exo 20:5-6).