Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Psalms 119:18

Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.

18. Open ] Lit. uncover. Natural sight is unable to discern the mysteries (cp. Psa 119:27) of Divine revelation; hence this prayer for the removal of the veil from his eyes. Cp. 2Ki 6:17 (a different word); Eph 1:17-18.

Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

Open thou mine eyes – Margin, Reveal. So the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate. The Hebrew word means to be naked; then to make naked, to uncover, to disclose, to reveal. Here it is the same as uncover; that is, take away from the eyes what is before them to prevent clear vision. Compare Num 22:31; Num 24:4, Num 24:16.

That I may behold wondrous things – Things which are suited to excite wonder and amazement: that is, things which are secret or hidden from the common view; the deep, spiritual meaning of the word of God. By natural vision he might see the surface – the letter; to see the deep, hidden, real, meaning, he needed the special influence of God. Compare 1Co 2:12, 1Co 2:14-15. He believed that there were such things in the law of God; he desired to see them.

Out of thy law – Out of the written word; out of the Scriptures. The word law here is used to denote all that God had revealed to mankind; all that is contained in the volume of inspiration. The truths taught here are

(1) That there are deep, hidden, secret things in the word of God, which are not perceived by the natural man;

(2) That those things, when understood, are suited to excite wonder, or to fill the mind with admiring views of God;

(3) That a special illumination of God is necessary that man may perceive these things; and

(4) That the proper understanding of these things is connected with prayer, and can be hoped for only in answer to prayer.

No one has a proper appreciation of divine truth – of the beauty, the spiritual meaning, the grandeur, the sublimity of the Bible – until he is a renewed – a praying – man. Compare the notes at 1Co 2:6-15.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

Psa 119:18

Open Thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of Thy law.

Moral blindness

Moral blindness is the worst kind of blindness.

I. Physical blindness has its compensations. Other faculties and organs generally become so keen and active as to make up for the loss of the eye. The imagination also, as in the case of Milton, Homer, etc., gets power to create sunny worlds.

II. Physical blindness is not criminal. It is a calamity. All blindness arises from one of three causes, the want of the visual faculty, the want of light, or the non-employment of the visual faculty. Man is morally blind not from the first cause, for he has conscience, that is, the eye of the soul; not from the second, for he has a moral revelation outside and inside of him. It is the last; he closes his eyes.

III. Physical blindness conceals the hideous. To look upon the hideous is painful. The blind man sees them not. But the man who is morally blind has often terrible visions of the most horrible things, his conscience scares and scathes him. (Homilist.)

Spiritual illumination

I. Man by nature is spiritually blind. Open thou mine eyes.

1. This spiritual blindness is the effect of sin.

2. It is universal.

3. It deprives man of his prerogatives.

4. It exposes man to danger. The refuge is before him, but he travels the path that leads to ruin. Who so blind as the sinner?

II. The removal of this spiritual blindness will enable man to perceive the truth of gods law. He is brought into a new sphere and new world.

1. The Bible is replete with realities.

2. The realities of the Bible are wonderful.

3. They are inexhaustible.

4. Mankind stands in need of perceiving these wonderful realities.

III. The removal of this spiritual blindness is Gods work.

1. By the agency of His Word.

2. By the agency of His Holy Spirit, who applies the Word to the conscience.

IV. Application.

1. The necessity of applying to God for the removal of this spiritual darkness.

2. The impossibility of being happy without Divine light and life.

3. The obligation of the Christian to God for being possessed with light to perceive the truths of the Bible. (J. O. Griffiths.)

Gods Word suited to mans sense of wonder

I. The sense of wonder in man, and what generally excites it. It is a great thing not to lose the sense of wonder, and yet to keep it for right objects.

2. The feeling may be excited by different objects.

(1) The new and unexpected.

(2) Things beautiful and grand.

(3) The mysterious.

II. God has made provision for this sense of wonder in his revealed Word.

1. The Bible addresses our sense of wonder by constantly presenting the new and unexpected to us.

(1) As to its form, it has gone on from first to last to add something new and fresh to all it had said before, and, if its circle has now closed, it is because it is already wide enough never to become old.

(2) As to the spirit of the Bible, we know how it exhorts us to search, to meditate, to dig for wisdom as for hid treasures, which must mean that we should bring out the fresh and unexplored.

2. While the Bible makes provision for constantly new views of truth, it sets before us also things beautiful and grand, without which the new would be a matter of idle curiosity.

3. And then, if we come to the third source of wonder, that which raises it to awe, it is the peculiar province of the Bible to deal with this. Its aim is, all through, to lead us to such subjects as the soul, and God, and the eternal world, and sin, the great mystery and root of mysteries, and the marvellous remedy which has been provided for it in the descent of the Divine nature to the human, that great mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh.

III. The means we are to use in order to have Gods Word thus unfolded.

The prayer of the psalmist may be our guide–Open Thou mine eyes that I may see.

1. He asks for no new revelation. It was in Gods hand to give this, and He did it in His own time to those ancient believers; but to all of them at every time there was enough given for the purposes of life. The request is not for more, but that he may employ well that which he possesses. Still better does such a form of request suit us, to whom life and immortality have been brought to light in Christ.

2. He asks for no new faculty. The eyes are there already, and they need only to be opened. It is not the bestowal of a new and supernatural power which enables a man to read the Bible to profit, but the quickening of a power he already possesses. In one view it is supernatural, as God is the Author of the illumination by a direct act of His Spirit; in another it is natural, as it operates through the faculties existing in mans soul. (John Ker, D. D.)

A necessary prayer

There are two classes of persons who may learn something from this prayer of the psalmist.

I. There are those-and many of them good Christians–who do not take so large a view of the Bible as they ought. They confine themselves to some doctrines and precepts, central and needful, and they read the Bible to find these in constantly recurring forms, just as some men look on flowers chiefly as verifying some botanical theory. This reduces the Book of God to a set of doctrinal moulds, and often makes what should be the most interesting of all books, one to which they have to urge themselves by a constraint of conscience, when they might be drawn to it by the attraction of constant freshness and growing beauty. For our own sakes, and for the sake of presenting it in its true light to the world, let us seek to study it in all the vividness of life and variety of colour with which God has set it forth. The special want of our time is to make the Bible more human without making it less Divine.

2. There is another class who may have given much thought to the Bible, and obtained from it fresh views of man and nature and God, but they have not yet lifted up the heart with this petition, Open Thou mine eyes, etc. They have not felt their need of any such enlightenment, because they have not felt the presence of sin, nor realized the darkness that it pours over the spiritual vision. Let them ask of its Author the Divine eye-salve with which He anoints the eyes. Its first revelations may be unwelcome, and men may be startled to see how fancied wealth and fulness sink into spiritual poverty and misery. But continued vision will open up Divine remedies, gold tried in the fire, and white raiment, the value of which will only be enhanced by growing insight. (John Ker, D. D.)

The Bible as containing the wonderful

The Bible contains Wondrous things. Wonderful in their nature, wonderful in their number, and wonderful in their influence. As containing the wonderful–

I. It agrees with the constitution of the human mind.

1. Man has a craving for the wonderful.

2. Man has a need for the wonderful to excite his faculties, to stimulate his inquiries, to challenge his powers.

II. It accords with the character of nature. All nature is crowded with the wonderful. We need not take the microscope to search the myriad worlds invisible to the naked eye, or the telescope innumerable worlds and systems rolling through infinite space to discover the wonderful. The wonderful comes under our eye, sounds in our ear, and beats in our pulse every moment. If the Bible did not contain the wonderful it would not be in harmony with nature, not in harmony with the works of God, either in this planet or in any parts of immensity.

III. It reproves the dogmatism of religionists. (Homilist.)

Spiritual discernment

Two forms of Divine teaching are implied in these words–revelation and spiritual apprehension to receive that which is revealed; truth in the written Word, and the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit; the one therefore universal, common to all men–the open Bible, the Gospel preached to every creature under heaven; the other personal, private, incommunicable by man to man; the one the noonday sunshine flooding the whole world with light from the hills on the horizon to the grass and pebbles at your feet; the other the eye in which a clouded lens or a palsied nerve leaves you dark in the midst of the blaze of noon.

1. The distinction which is here implied is in perfect harmony and analogy with all the conditions of human knowledge. Every branch of human knowledge has what in the philosophical language of the day is called its objective and subjective side. In every art, every science, every pursuit, there are these two things; there are general laws, rules, theories, principles, illustrations, examples, which can be committed to writing, stored up in books, taught in words by the teacher to the scholar; and there is the personal aptitude, which may be developed by culture if it be latent, but which can never be bestowed when it is wanting. In the very same family one child has a talent for drawing and painting, and no ear whatever for music; another, if he were to drudge with the pencil or brush for years would never make anything of it, but music speaks a language that seems like his native tongue, and, with moderate teaching and moderate opportunities, yields up its secret to his ear and his finger. So it is familiarly in business as well as in art and in science, in everything that man can teach man; one succeeds where another fails, and the best and ablest, and most skilful teacher has often to say in despair, If you cannot see it, I cannot make you see it. Now, if we find something exactly corresponding to this in regard to spiritual truth; if this book is one book to one man and quite another book to another; if doctrines which to some minds shine by their own light need no proof but what is in them, are to others dark, mysterious, difficult, and to others totally incredible or utterly uninteresting–this, you observe, is no more than you might expect; it is merely the repetition within the sphere or region of spiritual truth of what is abundantly familiar to us in all other directions. But it does not follow that the difference between the Christian and the unbeliever, between the earnest inquirer after Divine truth, and the careless, unintelligent, irreligious hearer, is to be accounted for on the same principles, and is simply of the same kind, as the difference between the musician and the painter, between the linguist and the mathematician, between the keen successful man of business and the blunderer who is always failing. Thank God, no; but surely this follows, that the prevalence of scepticism or of irreligion, were these a hundred times more prevalent than they are, does not produce the shadow of a presumption that the Christian is wrong in his faith, or that he is deluded in his experience.

2. The Bible amply recognizes and abundantly teaches this double character of Divine knowledge, this analogy between Divine knowledge and every other kind of knowledge, but at the same time with a broad and vital difference. The Bible knows nothing, either in the Old Testament or in the New, of any doctrine of reserve. Where it speaks it speaks to all; its voice is to the sons of men; its sound is gone out through all the earth, and its word is to the end of the world; but at the same time nothing is more emphatically and plainly taught in the Bible itself than that these open pages, open to the whole world, and even to be pressed upon the eyes of all men who can be persuaded to look into them, are all the while a sealed book except to those who have eyes to see. So far as it is possible for truth to be put into words, so far the Holy Scriptures are able to make us wise unto salvation. But the Scriptures themselves tell us that there is a learning that cannot be put into words, that cannot be written, or printed, or spoken, and that, therefore, cannot be communicated by man to his fellow-man; that there must be the eye to see and the ear to hear.

3. It is an unspeakably consoling and delightful reflection that this impossibility of attaining spiritual truth apart from Divine teaching which Gods Word so plainly sets forth, puts no hindrance in any mans way, no hindrance in the way of the simplest learner, no hindrance in the way of the unbeliever any more than of the believer, if only the unbeliever is desirous of knowing what is truth. Our Saviours words, when He says, No man can come to Me, except the Father who hath sent Me, draw him, are not building up a barrier between Himself and any human soul; they are throwing down all barriers; they are assuring us that so far as is possible, God has put all men upon one spiritual level of privilege and opportunity. It is not that a hindrance and a barrier has been built up; it is that human nature, as it exists, needs the Divine light, the Divine grace, the Divine help, as it needs the Divine atonement and the Divine Saviour, and that as man cannot lift himself, even a single foot or inch from his mother earth by his own power, so much less can he lift himself one step towards God, unless not only the light shine down and shows him what he is, and what God is, but the saving hand lays hold of him and inspires within his heart the assurance that the hand that has once taken hold upon him shall never loose its hold. (E. R. Conder, D. D.)

Divine illumination

I. Some things in which it does not consist.

1. It does not consist in any degree of knowledge acquired in the ordinary manner.

2. It does not consist in revelations of new truths.

3. It does not consist merely in lively and affecting views of the truths already revealed in the Word of God.

4. It does not consist in any conceptions, or creations of the imagination, respecting God, Christ, heaven, or hell.

II. In what, then, does it consist? It is a sense Of Divine things. In its results it differs entirely from a mere opinion or judgment of the mind. There may be an opinion founded on the testimony of others, that light is pleasant; but of this pleasantness the blind man has no just conception. If sight is granted to him, he will find light to be widely different from anything which he had ever conceived. So of Divine things. The natural man may believe them to be excellent and glorious, but of this excellency and glory he has no just conception. The natural man discerneth not the things of the Spirit. A sense of their superlative excellency and glory in the mind is as certainly the work of God as sight in the natural eye, or hearing in the natural ear, or tasting in its appropriate organ.

III. The production of this spiritual understanding His people is everywhere in the Scriptures literally and immediately ascribed to the Almighty.

IV. Conclusion. This subject suggests,

1. The reason why those who have been newly born into the kingdom of Christ seem to regard everything as new, and feel themselves to be in a new world.

2. That persons of very limited capacities may have spiritual understanding.

3. The importance of inquiring concerning the nature of our understanding in a spiritual respect.

4. No other knowledge is so pure and elevated as that which is thus acquired.

5. No other knowledge is so capable of producing sacred joy.

6. No other knowledge is so purifying in its influence. A spiritual understanding of the character of God, a holy sense of His presence, a sacred view of the character of Christ, a holy sense of the presence and work of the Spirit, a spiritual appreciation of the extent and spirituality of the law–all these things are pre-eminently calculated to excite the renovated heart to walk in the statutes and commandments of the Lord. (J. Foot, D. D.)

Divine revelation

I. It contains wonders. The Bible has many wonders, but the great wonder is the Incarnation of Christ. It is that into which angels desire to look, that which will be the study of eternity.

II. Man should discover these wonders. To know Christ is of paramount importance to him. It is his life eternal.

III. To discover these wonders god must open mans eyes. Man has spiritual eyes, eyes to see moral truth and God. These eyes are closed. No one can open them but the Divine Ophthalmist. Oh that men saw things as they really are! (Homilist.)

Spiritual vision

I. We are all born spiritually blind. Think of Samson when the Philistines put out his eyes. What a picture of misery l and further, what a picture of man l a mirror where unconverted men, had they eyes to see, might behold themselves. Was he taken captive of the Philistines?–so are they of their vices. Did he pass his days in the service of his enemies?–slaves of Satan, they serve one who hates them with cruel hatred. Was he bound in fetters of brass?–what are fetters of brass or iron to the chains of the drunkard, of the licentious, of the miser, of the lover of this world? Was he blinded as well as bound?–so are they. Eyes have they, but they see not; the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not; they are insensible to their state. But here fails the parallel. Samson felt his degradation keenly; longed for liberty; groped about to find a door of escape. How different the poor sinner! He hugs his chain, and delights in the vices that enslave him.

II. Consider some of the characteristics of this blindness.

1. Blindness deprives its subjects of many pleasures which Gods goodness lavishes on us, and, through our eyes, pours into our hearts.

2. Blindness makes the condition of its subjects one of painful dependence.

3. Blindness exposes its subjects to deception. Satan makes thousands believe that all is right, that the path they tread is one of safety, when all the while, step by step down, but gently down, he conducts his blind, deluded, singing, dancing joyous victims on to the brink of ruin, and to that last, fatal step which plunges them into hell.

4. Again, blindness exposes us to danger. A blind man will starve with bread within his reach; parched and perishing with thirst, he will pass the well that invited his lips to drink; drowning, with a rope thrown within his grasp, and the cries of eager voices in his ear, Lay hold of life! he will sink into a watery grave–lost, when he might have been saved. Such is the case of the unconverted.

III. The eyes of the blind being opened, they behold wondrous things out of the law of God. There was an eminent philosopher who had devoted a lifetime to the pursuits of science, and not, as he thought, in vain. She had crowned his brow with laurels, and inscribed his name in the temple of fame. In the evening of his days, at the eleventh hour, God was pleased to call him, open his eyes, convert him; and now, he who was deeply read in science and conversant with its loftiest speculations, as he bent his grey head over the Bible, declared that, if he had his life to live over again, he would spend it in the study of the Word of God. He felt like a miner, who, after toiling long and to little purpose in search of gold, with one stroke of his pick-axe lays open a vein of the precious metal and becomes rich at once–the owner of a vein that grows the richer the deeper the mine is driven. Such a treasure the Bible offers to those whose eyes God has opened to its wonders of grace and glory. It is inexhaustible.

IV. God only can open our eyes. Hence to Him David directs the prayer of my text; and also this–Lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death. Men use instruments to restore sight, and nowhere does surgery achieve a nobler triumph, or bestow greater blessings on mankind, than in yonder theatre, where skill and a steady hand cut into the sightless balls; and man, opening a way for the light of heaven, imitates Christ in His divine works of might and mercy–pouring light into the blind mans eyes, and joy into the blind mans heart. God also uses instruments–His instrument the Word, His agent the Holy Spirit. By these, working faith in men, and renewing them in the spirit of their minds, He has often answered, and is now ready to answer the prayer, Open Thou mine eyes. (T. Guthrie, D. D.)

The lifted veil

It was an ancient custom for the reader of the Law in a Jewish synagogue to put a veil upon his face. Originally designed as an act of reverence, as if the glory of this law was too dazzling for the human eye to behold, the veil upon the countenance has become an awful type of the veil that is Upon the heart. Century after century has passed away, and still in every Jewish synagogue Moses is read. But so blinded are the minds of those who read, and of those who listen, that they do not perceive the beauty, or understand the meaning of their own Scriptures–an affecting proof of the necessity of the Spirits teaching, for the right understanding of the Word of God.

I. Gods law contains wondrous things. All the Divine works are wonderful. There is not a leaf which God has moulded, or an insect He has formed, or an atom He has made, which does not demand, and will not repay, our thoughtful study. But Revelation contains a brighter display of His wisdom and love than nature with all its sublime and glorious discoveries.

II. The enlightened mind can alone understand it.

1. There is ignorance. Having the understanding darkened, is the brief but solemn description which the apostle gives of the Gentiles, and it is a true representation of unregenerate nature.

2. Then there is prejudice. We cannot understand a truth, if we dislike that truth.

3. Unbelief prompts men to misinterpret Scripture, and renders them ingenious in their objections against it.

4. Worldliness is another veil which hides from our view the wonders of Gods Word.

III. That God only can communicate the light we need.

1. The Spirit humbles us, and humility enables us to understand the Scriptures.

2. The Spirit purifies the heart, and purity enables us to understand the Scriptures.

3. The Spirit fills our hearts with love, and love enables us to understand the Scriptures. (H. J. Gamble.)

Longing for spiritual sight

I. The involved acknowledgment of spiritual ignorance.

II. The reasons upon which the plea rests.

1. Spiritual sight or knowledge is of itself a great blessing

2. Such a petition honours and acknowledges the work of the Holy Ghost.

3. There are wonders in the system of revealed truth which have yet to be explored and known.

4. The opening of our eyes is a work of Divine grace and power, and stands intimately connected with our pardon and regeneration.

5. This prayer stands before us as a spiritual and heaven-inspired petition, because of its opposition to the spirit and desires of the carnal mind.

6. Unless this prayer, or its equivalent, be uttered in an earnest and believing spirit, a blinding process will go on, which can only terminate in the darkness of death eternal. (A. Barrett.)

The need of spiritual

vision:–In the Old Testament what do we see? A great many Christian people see very little in the Old Testament, and they are always ready to criticize. I know men in the Church who go into raptures over the poetry of Homer, or the eloquence of Demosthenes, or the philosophy of Plato, about the artistry of Greece or about the jurisprudence of Rome; but they have no enthusiasm whatever for these great, noble teachers who declare the simple everlasting laws which are the very light and fire. In this great Book of Righteousness, this Old Testament, a good many of us see but little into the gleam here and there; our eyes have not been opened to its breadth and depth and significance. I remember once looking over a magnificent piece of scenery–mountains, rocks, and sea–and all of it bathed in the splendours of the setting sun. And I heard a lady close to me complain that she did not think much about it because it was all land and water. Exactly. But, I say, what if Claude had been there? What if Turner had been there? What would they have seen in that panorama of splendour and delight? What did your Master see in the Old Testament? How Christ appealed to these prophets, minstrels, and seers, and how He brought out of that Old Testament all the wondrous things of the Sermon on the Mount! The Church wants its eyes opening to the full noon of the Old Testament, where God has given to us such grand histories, and statutes, and suggestions. You may well pray, Open Thou mine eyes that I may understand these great teachings, that I may appreciate these great parables of truth and of righteousness. What do a great many of us see in the New Testament? Do you think, to-day, that we see all the glory of the incarnate Christ? Do you think that we have seen with open eyes the crucified Christ–the Christ of the Resurrection? My soul has feelers, not eyes; I grope, I do not see. Oh, that I might get eyes, that I could see, that I could see the glory of God, that I could see the beauty of Christ, that I could see the majesty of His higher law, that I could see a door opening into heaven t Open Thou mine eyes, that I may see the wonderful things out of Thy law. There is another thing. Here you consider the special appeal: that I may see wonderful things out of Thy law. What wonderful things? I tell you one is this: We ought all to pray to God that He would open our eyes to the reality of the law of righteousness. Oh, what you want God to do with this generation is to work into its understanding and soul the truth, the reality, the inviolability of the moral commandment. One French writer says he does not like Christianity because it condemns a man if he does not believe in it. And the law of gravitation condemns you if you do not believe in it. I wish we could for once believe that the law, the higher law, is as true as the law of gravitation, and that it will as certainly inflict upon the transgressor a penalty, only infinitely more disastrous. But there is another thing which we want to have our eyes opened to about the law of righteousness, and that is its universal application; that it is like the sky shutting us all down. Oh, that society might feel the obligation universally, the absolute obligation, rich and poor, intellectual and vulgar; clergy and laity; public virtue and private virtue all under one great commandments–thou shalt, thou shalt not! We want our eyes opening to the broad, solid, imperative commandment, as we shall all one day stand before one throne and each and all give an account of themselves. (W. L. Watkinson.)

The wonders of Gods law

There is nothing so wonderful as Gods law; nay, it may justly be said to include in itself all that is most wonderful, all that truly merits our admiration, all that will really reward our curiosity. For what is it? The psalmist here was not thinking merely of the law given to Moses, or of the words written in any book, however sacred; he was not thinking of spoken words or written characters, but of Gods eternal realities. He was an earnest man, and his mind sought to be in contact with truth itself; he was a pious man, and his heart longed for nothing less or lower than communion with the living God. He felt himself in the Divine presence, and he felt that the Divine law was within and around him. The wonders of physical nature, and the human soul and human history, and of redeeming love and grace, are all wonders of that law of God which the psalmist longed and prayed to behold, that law which ruleth alike in what is least and greatest, to which all things in heaven and earth do homage, the seat of which is the bosom of the Eternal, the voice of which is the harmony of the universe. There is no science cultivated among us which can ever have anything else for its highest aim than simply to discover and exhibit some part of the Divine law, since the end of every kind of study worthy of our engaging in is directly or indirectly to extend our knowledge of laws which we distinguish from one another by calling laws of astronomy or chemistry, laws of language or history, physical, morn], or spiritual laws, but which all agree in being laws of God, the operations of His will, the expressions of His character, the rules which He has implanted in His creatures, and assigned to them as the conditions and limits of their workings. But the most important of Gods laws are those which He has given us for the regulation of our own lives. In reality, whether we see it or not, there is far more that is wonderful in these laws than in any other. They are, for example, the laws of God in a far higher sense than other laws; the laws of the physical world might have been quite different from what they are. God made them to be what they are by making the physical world itself what it is; if He had made quite a different material world, with quite other laws, He would have been none the less God, the true object of our worship. But He did not make by any forth-putting of His will the fundamental laws of moral life to be what they are; they are eternal and unchangeable. That God should alter them would be for Him to cease to be wise and righteous and holy and loving, it would be for Him to cease to be good. The wonders of these laws are thus the wonders of the Divine nature, and far greater, therefore, than any wonders of created nature; at the same time these laws are the laws of our natures, of our spirits, of what is much higher and much more wonderful than anything else to be beheld in nature. On earth, it has been said, there is nothing great but man, and in man there is nothing great but mind; and certainly a soul is a far more wonderful thing than even a star, a spiritual being than a material world, and its laws far more wonderful. It is spiritual law which determines mens relations to their God and one another, and it is on obedience or disobedience to it that the weal or woe of individuals or societies chiefly depends, so that all the marvels and mysteries of human life and destiny gather around. If we would see, however, the wonders in the most impressive light, we must turn to Revelation. Every miracle, every prophecy, every striking dispensation recorded in Scripture, whatever else it may have meant, was always a proclamation of God to men that they should reverence this His law. If we can see no wonders in the law which Christ died to satisfy and glorify, if we do not see it to be unspeakably more wonderful than all other law, assuredly our blindness is great indeed, and we cannot too earnestly cry to a merciful God, open Thou mine eyes. (R. Flint, D. D.)

The wonders of Gods law

The psalmists delight in Gods law, and intense desire to know Gods judgments, may thus be read as an expression of a feeling which we may cherish towards everything that is going on in our world and among the stars. There are wondrous things for us to behold in the processes of nature and human life. The more our eyes are open to the ordering and the law of God in all existences and events the more fascinating will our view of the universe become to us; and as our brief sojourning here draws toward its close, the more intensely interesting will all our experience of life and the vistas of promise beyond become to us. Consider, first, why it is that we take pleasure in watching the course of events. What deeper motive is there which leads men with increasing civilization to ask daily, What is the news? Why is it that we wish to live where we can keep in quick touch with everything that is transpiring throughout the whole world? Not simply because they are current events, but because they are events in history; because they are things happening in the life and progress of the world; because these facts are parts and moments of some vast half-discovered whole of human history; because they are not mere happenings, but they are orderings of events; because they are not mere blows of events struck over and over again upon the hollow round of the world, sounding ever the same dull tone; but because they are events beaten out to some single purpose; because they are successive notes in the worlds marching music. What beyond our passing sympathy interests us so much is not merely the event, or the fact in itself, but something to which the fact belongs, the movement, the order, the problem, the on-reaching history, the providential purpose to which it belongs. Oh, the charm of the seen is the unseen, and the perpetual fascination of history is the revealing of its Messianic law and order l Consider as another instance our interest in common human life. What is that ultimately, in the last analysis of our comradeships or our friendships? Some of you can remember for many years past. But in what, as one whole, lies to you the real human interest of all this which you have been seeing, and knowing in your sojourning here? The persons, the events, the friends, the faces? Yes, they shall always Be of concern, some of dear memory and hope to you; but the supreme interest of your life as a whole, in all its human contacts and experiences, lies after all not in what you have seen and known, but in something that you have half seen, or dimly grasped after, or at times without seeing have become inwardly, deeply sure of; it has been the leading of God through it all; something more than human felt through all human love and sorrow; the Infinite surrounding the finiteness of it all; the eternal giving and taking the lives of men back into itself; the larger hope, the ever forward movement, the eventful Providence; the mystery of some higher purpose, measureless, unknown, let with moments of bright revealings; oh, this is something vaster and diviner, which as you sit and think over the long past, seems to take it all up, events, persons, sorrows, joys, all that you have been and seen, and felt, into one indistinguishable memory and dream and hope of glory, and to leave your heart, like the psalmist of old, saying. I have seen wondrous things, etc. (Newman Smyth, D. D.)

Spiritual sight

The spiritual eyesight must be opened in order that the spiritual beauty and wisdom and glory of the Divine Word may be discovered. When the great philosopher, Sir David Brewster, was dying, he said to Sir James Simpson, I have had the light for many years, and oh, how bright it is! I feel so perfectly sure, so perfectly happy. Come and see. That is the short, simple, earnest common-sense appeal which is made to every honest seeker after truth, every soul troubled with a sense of sin and guilt. Come and see. (Christian Age.)

Removing obstruction to sight

The other day (writes Mr. Reader Harris, K.C.) I had the privilege Of witnessing one of our great surgeons remove the cataract from a womans eye. It is a beautiful illustration of Gods work of deliverance from sin. It was done almost instantaneously. The cataract was taken out of the eye. The surgeon took it right out, and then, very soon afterwards, he put glasses on that womans eye, and he said: Mr. Harris, take out your watch, and to the woman he said: How long have you been blind? She said: I have been blind for six years. Now, he said, look through this glass, and tell what his watch says. She read it at once, hour hand and minute hand. Why? Because the surgeon had taken out of the eye that which obscured the vision; and because that operator had not only taken out what hindered the vision but he had given her, in the lens, that which could take the place of it. May God clarify our spiritual vision by purifying our hearts, and filling them with the Holy Ghost! (Sunday Circle.)

Spiritual Vision

The naked eye can see only about 3,500 stars, but the man who looks and sees through the telescope the star dust of eighty-five million worlds grows more interested through deeper views into the skies. So with the Bible, when the eyes of our understanding are opened on the vast firmament of Bible truth by the aid of the telescope of spiritual discernment. (J. Crafts.)

Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell

Verse 18. Open thou mine eyes] gal eynai, reveal my eyes, illuminate my understanding, take away the veil that is on my heart, and then shall I see wonders in thy law. The Holy Scriptures are plain enough; but the heart of man is darkened by sin. The Bible does not so much need a comment, as the soul does the light of the Holy Spirit. Were it not for the darkness of the human intellect, the things relative to salvation would be easily apprehended.

Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible

Open thou mine eyes; enlighten my mind by the light of thy Holy Spirit, and dispel all ignorance and error.

Wondrous things out of thy law; those great and marvellous depths of Divine wisdom and goodness, and those profound mysteries of Christ and of Gods grace to mankind, and of that future and everlasting state, which are contained in Gods law, and which were not to be known but by divine illumination, Mat 16:17; 1Co 2:11,14; 2Co 3:14; 4:4,6; Eph 1:17, especially in the times of the Old Testament.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

Open thou mine eyes,…. The eyes of my heart or understanding, as Kimchi; or, “reveal mine eyes” t; take off the veil from them: there is a veil of darkness and ignorance on the hearts of all men, with respect to divine and spiritual things; their understandings are darkened, yea, darkness itself. This veil must be removed; the scales must drop from their eyes; their eyes must be opened and enlightened, before they can discern spiritual things contained in the word of God; and even good men need to have the eyes of their understandings more and more enlightened into these things, as the psalmist here petitions, and the apostle prays for his Ephesians, Eph 1:17;

that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law; the law strictly taken, which had great and excellent things in it; and was wonderful for the compendiousness of it; for the justice, holiness, and equity of its precepts; especially for its spirituality, and above all for Christ, being the end of it; the two last more particularly could only be discerned by a spiritual man: or rather the five books of Moses, the almost only Scriptures extant in David’s time, in which there were many wonderful things concerning Christ; some delivered by way of promise and prophecy of him, under the characters of the seed of the woman, the seed of Abraham, the Shiloh, and the great Prophet; and many others in dark figures, types, and shadows, which required a spiritual sight to look into; of which the rock and manna, the brasen serpent, passover, c. are instances: but rather, as the word “law” signifies “doctrine”, the doctrine of the Gospel may be meant which contains mysteries in it, respecting the trinity of Persons in the Godhead, the person of Christ, his incarnation, sufferings and death; the blessings of grace through him; the doctrines of peace, pardon, righteousness, eternal life, and the resurrection of the dead; with many others.

t “revela oculos meos”, Pagninus, Montanus, Musculus, Cocceius, Gejerus, Michaelis; “velamen detrahe oculis meis”, Tigurine version.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

      18 Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.

      Observe here, 1. That there are wondrous things in God’s law, which we are all concerned, and should covet, to behold, not only strange things, which are very surprising and unexpected, but excellent things, which are to be highly esteemed and valued, and things which were long hidden from the wise and prudent, but are now revealed unto babes. If there were wonders in the law, much more in the gospel, where Christ is all in all, whose name is Wonderful. Well may we, who are so nearly interested, desire to behold these wondrous things, when the angels themselves reach to look into them, 1 Pet. i. 12. Those that would see the wondrous things of God’s law and gospel must beg of him to open their eyes and to give them an understanding. We are by nature blind to the things of God, till his grace cause the scales to fall from our eyes; and even those in whose hearts God has said, Let there be light, have yet need to be further enlightened, and must still pray to God to open their eyes yet more and more, that those who at first saw men as trees walking may come to see all things clearly; and the more God opens our eyes the more wonders we see in the word of God, which we saw not before.

Fuente: Matthew Henry’s Whole Bible Commentary

(18) Open.Literally, uncover (see margin), as if without Divine grace the eyes were veiled to the wonder and beauty of the moral law. (Comp. 2Co. 4:18.)

Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)

Psa 119:18. Open thou mine eyes That is, “Illuminate the eyes of my mind by thy grace, that I may clearly discern the admirable wisdom hidden in thy law;” for the Hebrew word niphlaoth, rendered wondrous things, signifies hidden wonders. The distressed circumstances of the Psalmist, when compared with the magnificent promises made in the law to the righteous, might fill him with perplexity; and as he was unable to reconcile his condition with the letter of the law, he might possibly address God for illumination in this point, which was to him otherwise inexplicable, and, what he elegantly stiles it, a hidden wonder. See Mr. Boyle on the Stile of the Sacred Scripture. I am a stranger in the earth, in the next verse, would be better rendered, I am a stranger in the land, as being forced to wander from place to place. See 1Sa 23:13.

Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke

DISCOURSE: 697
HOW TO ATTAIN DIVINE KNOWLEDGE

Psa 119:18. Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law!

THE necessity of Divine teaching, in order to a spiritual acquaintance with the truth of God, is by many denied; and all expectation of the Holy Spirits influence for that end is derided as enthusiasm. But, however the profane ungodly world may scoff at the idea, it is by the Spirit of God alone that we can know the things which are freely given to us of God [Note: 1Co 2:12.]: and the wisest of men, as much as the most ignorant, has reason to adopt the petition in our text, Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law!

From these words we shall take occasion to shew,

I.

What wondrous things are contained in Gods law

If we understand the law here spoken of, as importing the Law of Moses, it certainly is full of wonders: the moral law, being a perfect transcript of the mind of God; and the ceremonial law, being a shadow of all those good things which are revealed to us in the Gospel. But we apprehend that David is speaking rather of the Gospel, even of that law which is come forth from Zion, and that word which has proceeded from Jerusalem. No one of the prophets, scarcely excepting even Isaiah himself, had clearer or richer views of Christ than David; and as he speaks of Christ in almost all his psalms, we may justly suppose, that in this place he refers to the wonders that are contained in the Gospel of Christ.
Consider the Gospel generally
[In it is revealed salvation, salvation purchased by the blood and righteousness of Gods only-begotten Son. What a mystery is this! The God of heaven and earth assuming our nature, that in that nature he may expiate the guilt of a ruined world! We are accustomed to hear of this, and therefore listen to it without emotion: but what should we think of it, if it now reached our ears for the first time? Truly great is this mystery of godliness! We, through unbelief and indifference, think little of it: but the angels, though infinitely less interested in it than we, desire day and night to look into it, and to comprehend, if it were possible, the heights and depths of love that are contained in it [Note: 1Pe 1:12.].]

Consider it more particularly
[Mark well the character of this salvation; its freeness, its fulness, its suitableness! It is as free as the light we see, or the air we breathe. It has come to us unsolicited, unsought: and it is given to us without money and without price [Note: Isa 55:1.]. The whole world are invited to come to Christ as to an overflowing fountain, and to take of the water of life freely [Note: Rev 22:17.]. So full is it, that it neither wants, nor is capable of, any addition. Nothing is left to be supplied by man: he gives nothing, but receives all. All is treasured up for us in Christ [Note: Col 1:19.], who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and complete redemption [Note: 1Co 1:30.]. If only we are content to receive out of his fulness, we shall never lack any thing that is necessary either for our present or eternal happiness [Note: Joh 1:16. Gal 2:20.]. And this is exactly such a salvation as is suitable to fallen man. If we were required to add any thing to what Christ has done and suffered for us, in order to render it sufficient for our salvation, what could we add? What have we of our own, but sin? The more any one knows of himself, the more he would despair, if any thing were required of him, as a price whereby to purchase an interest in Christ. Doubtless we must repent, and believe, and obey the Gospel, before we can be saved: but repentance, faith, and obedience, though necessary as means to an end, merit nothing at the hands of God; nor have we of ourselves any sufficiency for those things: even those graces are wrought in us by the Spirit of God, who gives us both to will and to do of his own good pleasure. Salvation, from first to last, is altogether of grace; and therefore it is equally suitable to all; to the thief when dying on the cross, as to Nicodemus, or Nathanael, whose whole life and conduct had been so exemplary, and who lived to adorn the doctrine they professed.

Contemplate these things, and say whether they contain not wonders that surpass the comprehension, both of men and angels? ]

From the text however we may learn,

II.

How we are to attain the knowledge of them

Doubtless we must search the Scriptures, and that with all diligence [Note: Joh 5:39.]. But, if we search them in dependence on our own wisdom, we shall never succeed. We must look up to God for the teachings of his good Spirit, even as David did, and pray, Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.

This is the way prescribed by God

[God regards all men as blind [Note: Rev 3:17.], and incapable of comprehending spiritual things, till he himself has opened their eyes, and given them a spiritual discernment [Note: 1Co 2:14. Eph 4:18.] Hence he counsels all to come to the Lord Jesus Christ for eye-salve, that they muy see [Note: Rev 3:18.]; and to look to him as the only Author of true wisdom [Note: Jam 1:5.]. He represents it as the Holy Spirits office to take of the things that are Christs, and to shew them unto us [Note: Joh 16:8; Joh 16:11; Joh 16:13-14.]; and to bring home to the minds of men a clear perception of those various truths which are most of all interesting to their souls. He considers all men as equally under the necessity of submitting to the teachings of his Spirit [Note: Joh 6:45.]. The efforts of those who lean to their own understanding, he derides [Note: 1Co 1:19-20.], and will communicate to babes the things which he conceals from the wise and prudent [Note: Mat 11:25.]. True it is, that God uses both the written and preached word as the means of conveying instruction: but the due reception of that instruction he ascribes to the operation of his own almighty power [Note: 1Co 3:5-7.]. Even the disciples whom Jesus himself had instructed for three or four years, were not able rightly to apprehend his word, till he opened their understandings to understand the Scriptures [Note: Luk 24:45.]: and, when Peter confessed his Lord to be the Christ, he was expressly told, that flesh and blood had not revealed it to him, but God himself [Note: Mat 16:17.]. Be it known then to all, that every child of man, whether learned or unlearned, must hear and learn of the Father, who is the Father of lights, and from whom cometh every good and perfect gift [Note: Jam 1:17.].]

This is the way pursued by the saints in all ages

[Who more instructed than David? yet he was not ashamed to seek from God a spiritual illumination. The saints at Ephesus were inferior to no Church whatever, in a comprehension of divine truth: yet did St. Paul pray for them, that they might yet further be enlightened by the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, through whose gracious influences alone they could grow either in knowledge or in grace [Note: Eph 1:17-18.]. If we look to those of later times, we find this truth acknowledged by all, excepting those infidels who deny the Lord that bought them. The Reformers of our Church have most unequivocally sanctioned the use of these means, and encouraged us to look up to God for the inspiration of his Spirit, that we may both perceive and know what things we ought to do, and also have grace and power faithfully to fulfil the same [Note: See Collects for First Sunday after Epiphany; and for Whitsunday.]. Let us not be contented with any efforts of our own, or any instructions from man; but let us cry after knowledge, and lift up our voice for understanding, knowing that it is the Lord alone who giveth wisdom, and that out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding [Note: Pro 2:1-6.].]

Address
1.

To those who are studying the Holy Scriptures

[It is surprising what pains many take to acquire a critical knowledge of the Bible, whilst yet they remain contentedly ignorant of those deep things which none but God can teach. But let me entreat you to seek above all things to behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, even that glory which He only who commanded light to shine out of darkness can make known unto you [Note: 2Co 4:6.] ]

2.

To those who, though incapable of entering critically into the letter of the Scriptures, have yet, through grace, a knowledge of the spiritual truths contained in them

[Blessed be God, there are some amongst us, of whom, though unskilled in human knowledge, it may be said, To you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. They were once blind; but now they see: They were once darkness; but are now light in the Lord. Be thankful to him who has so highly favoured and distinguished you [Note: 1Co 1:27-28.]; and endeavour to walk worthy of him who has vouchsafed unto you this invaluable blessing [Note: 1Pe 2:9.]. If ye be light in the Lord, then walk as children of the light and of the day [Note: Eph 5:8.].]

Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)

Psa 119:18 Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.

Ver. 18. Open thou mine eyes ] Heb. unveil them, velamen amove, volumen evolve, give sight and light; irradiate both organ and object. In spirituals we are not only dim sighted, but blind as beetles, 1Co 2:14 . Oh pray for that precious eye salve, Rev 3:17 , for that supernal light, 2Co 4:6 , and whensoever we open the Bible to read, say, as here, “Open thou mine eyes,” &c., as when we close it up again say, “I have seen an end of all perfection: but thy commandment is exceeding broad,” Psa 119:96 .

Wondrous things ] Mirabilia magnalia, mysteria; such as none can understand and unriddle but such as plough with God’s own heifer, 1Co 2:11 .

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

Open = Unveil. behold = discern, or see clearly.

Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics

The Wondrous Law

Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold

Wondrous things out of thy law.Psa 119:18.

This is a very uncommon ideathat wonder should be the result of intellectual development or the opening of the eyes. The prevailing notion is the reversethat wonder belongs to the primitive age alike of the individual and of the race. We say colloquially, I opened my eyes in astonishment; the Psalmists expression is the converse, I became astonished by opening my eyes. What the Psalmist says is that the marvels of life escape us by reason of our ignorance. His prayer is just the contrary of the common prayer. The common prayer is, Make me a simple child again that I may feel the mystery of all things and bow with reverence before them. But the Psalmist says, Emancipate me from the ignorance of childhood, for it is only when I shall see with the eyes of a man that I shall behold the mystery, the marvel, the unfathomable depth, of that ocean on whose bosom I live and move and have my being.

Do we find that the sense of wonder belongs to children? Not so. The sense of mystery is precisely what a child does not feel. He asks many questions; but he will accept the crudest answers as quite adequate explanations. He has not a consciousness of limitation. He has a feeling of power beyond his strength; he will put out his hand to catch the moon. He does not at an early date inquire where he came from. He does not ask who made a watch or who made the sun. To him the watch and the sun are both alivemoving by their own strength, upheld by their own power. His eyes are not opened, and therefore his wonder is not awake. To wake his wonder you must unbar the door of his mind. The mystery comes with his experiencenot with the want of it. I do not read that man marvelled in Eden; I do that they marvelled in Galilee. Eden was as wonderful as Galilee; but the eyes were not opened. Knowledge is the parent of mystery. Experience is the forerunner of reverence. Only they who have let down the pitcher can utter the cry, The well is deep.1 [Note: G. Matheson, Messages of Hope, 242.]

Mr. Morley, in his Life of Gladstone, speaking of his entrance into college life at Oxford, says: It was from Gladstones introduction into this enchanted and inspiring world that we recognize the beginning of the wonderful course which was to show how great a thing the life of a man may be made. So with Christian. Here, in the Interpreters House, his spiritual experiences really begin. He is no longer in the outer circle of the worlds empty life; he has come within the circle of Gods direct purposes and protecting power. Dangers he will have to meet, trials of faith and courage; the Hill of Difficulty, the Valley of Humiliation, the Castle of Giant Despair, the struggle with Apollyonall this is before him. But he is on the pilgrim-road to Zion. There is the sweet companionship; there are the wonders by the waythe Interpreters House, the Cross where the burden is removed, the Palace Beautiful, the sight of the Delectable Mountains, the River of the Water of Life. So whatever might be the difficulties, Christian was on enchanted ground. He was near to God. He was on the path whose end was heaven. The wicket gate admits him to the rich field of Christian experience: the only experience that has any lasting value.2 [Note: D. W. Whincup, The Training of Life, 21.]

I

1. The sense of wonder is one of our most useful emotions. The mind cannot remain long in a state of monotony without something like pain, or if it does, it is a sign of the low level to which it has sunk. It has a craving after what is fresh, and God has provided for this in the form of the world. He has made the works of nature pass before us with a perpetually diversified face. He has created summer and winter, and so ordered the sun that it has probably never set with the same look since man first saw it. Those works of nature are constantly turning up new subjects of thought and study, and will do so, during the worlds existence; while, at the same time, the world itself is weaving an ever-shifting and many-coloured web of history. In all this there is a stimulus to man to lead him to look and think.

Not by mathesis, not by deduction, or construction, not by measuring, or searching, canst thou find out God, but only by the faithful cry from the roadside of the world as He passesOpen thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. In that prayer you have literally expressed to you, not in any wise as we too carelessly assume metaphorically, the two functions of the exercised senses, of which you have so often, I fear incredulously, heard me affirm the necessary connexionthe discerning of what is beautiful and of what is right. Wondrous things out of thy law. Wondrous, not as to the uneducated senses they are in terror, but wondrous to the educated senses in gentleness and delight; so that while to the modern demonstrator of the laws of Nature they become mysterious as dreadful in their tyranny, to the ancient perceiver of the laws of Heaven they became lovely no less than wondrous: in the tenderness and the voice of the Borgo Allegri, at the feet of the Mother of Christ, was joy no less of allegiance than wonderOh, how love I thy law.1 [Note: Ruskin, Schools of Art in Florence, 90 (Works, xxiii. 250).]

2. Wonder rises into admiration as we contemplate things that are grand and beautiful. There is a chord in the human heart to which the beautiful and sublime respond, whether these appear in the material or in the spiritual world. If we could only take men away for a little out of the dull, dead round, and from the corroding and often debasing things that draw them down in their common life, there are objects such as these appealing to them daily and hourly, and asking them if they have not a soul. Rich sunsets and moonlit skies are there, only requiring eyes to see them, and acts of self-devotion and heroism are being performed, and lives of patient suffering led, under our sight, which are as capable of thrilling us as anything recorded in history.

At a later time the Marchale delivered addresses in other cities of Francesuch as Nmes, Marseilles, Havre, Rouen, Lyonsand she was everywhere astonished to find that the French, who seem the most thoughtless, are yet among the most thoughtful people in the world. The result of such Confrences as these cannot be tabulated. For one thing, they made the Marchale more than ever a mother-confessor and spiritual director. The thoughts of many hearts were revealed to her at private interviews of which no record was kept, and in letters, one of which may be given:

Your marvellous faith, your simple and powerful eloquence so deeply moved me that I cannot but thank you. I thank you as an artist, as a sincere admirer of beautiful work, of great characters; I thank you as a man blas, sceptical, benumbed and deadened. As a child I adored Jesus, and now, after having thought much and suffered infinite pains which you cannot understand, I have said adieu to faith and also adieu to hope! I have become one of those you call sceptics. Ah! do not say terrible sceptic, but unfortunate, pitiable, unhappy sceptic. You are, Madame, a great, beautiful, generous heart, and if ever earnest good wishes have been worth anything, I have cherished them for you, your work, and those who fight by your side. You will believe me, an unbeliever, who envies you, admires you, and ideally loves you.1 [Note: James Strahan, The Marchale (1913), 123.]

3. Wonder and admiration deepen into awe as we realize the mystery of life. A reflective mind can take but a very few steps in thinking till it comes upon this. It is not so much that there are things unknown around us as that there are things unknowable, that there is an infinite and a mystery in the universe which we cannot now penetrate, and which may for ever stretch beyond us. The tokens of mans highest nature lie not in his being able to comprehend but in his ability to feel that there are things which he cannot comprehend, and which he yet feels to be true and real, before which he is compelled to fall down in reverent awe. It is here, above all, that man comes into contact with religion, with a God, with an eternity; and he in whom there is little sense of wonder, or in whom it has been blunted and degraded, will have a proportionately feeble impression of these grand subjects which the soul can feel to be real but can never fully grasp.

I can call my Father a brave man (ein Tapferer). Mans face he did not fear; God he always feared: his Reverence, I think, was considerably mixed with Fear. Yet not slavish Fear; rather Awe, as of unutterable Depths of Silence, through which flickered a trembling Hope. How he used to speak of Death (especially in late years) or rather to be silent, and look of it! There was no feeling in him here that he cared to hide: he trembled at the really terrible; the mock-terrible he cared nought for.That last act of his Life; when in the last agony, with the thick ghastly vapours of Death rising round him to choke him, he burst through and called with a mans voice on the great God to have mercy on him: that was like the epitome and concluding summary of his whole Life. God gave him strength to wrestle with the King of Terrors, as it were even then to prevail. All his strength came from God, and ever sought new nourishment there. God be thanked for it.1 [Note: Carlyle, Reminiscences, i. 10.]

II

1. There is nothing so wonderful as Gods law; indeed, it may justly be said to include in itself all that is most wonderfulall that truly merits our admirationall that will really reward our curiosity. For what is it? The Psalmist here was not thinking merely of the law given to Moses or of the words written in any book, however sacred. He was not thinking of spoken words or written characters, but of eternal realities. He was an earnest man, and his mind sought to be in contact with truth itself; he was a pious man, and his heart longed for nothing less or lower than communion with the living God. He felt himself in the Divine presence, and he felt that the Divine law was within and around him. The Bible tells us much about the law of God, but it is only by a figure of speech that we call it the law of God or even that it contains the law of God. In the Bible and other books we have the statements of Gods laws, but these laws themselves are far too real to be in any book.

2. It is the law of God that keeps the stars in their courses, regulates the movements of the seas and the revolutions of the earth, develops the plant and organizes the animal, works in our instincts and guides our reason, marks out the path of humanity and determines the rise and fall, the weal and woe, of nations, and measures out to virtue and vice their due rewards in time and eternity. It is not truly separable from God Himself, but is the whole of the modes in which He manifests His power, and wisdom, and goodness in the universe,the whole of the ways in which He operates through matter and spirit, in creation, providence, and redemption, as Father and King and Judge. Hence it is that we say it is not only most wonderful but includes in itself all that is wonderful. The wonders of physical nature, of the human soul and human history, and of redeeming love and grace, are all wonders of that law of God which the Psalmist longed and prayed to beholdthat law which ruleth alike in what is least and in what is greatest, to which all things in heaven and earth do homage, the seat of which is the bosom of the Eternal, the voice of which is the harmony of the universe.

I read in the Bible that God has set his glory in the heavens, but in merely reading this I do not see that glory; it is only to be seen by considering the heavens, which are the work of Gods fingers; the moon and the stars, which he has ordained. This terrible lawthe wages of sin is deathhas been published in the Bible, but it does not exist and work in the Bible; it exists and works in the lives of sinful beings like you and me, and if we do not see it in ourselves we shall never see it at all, although we read a thousand times the words which announce it. So with its gracious counterpartthe gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ. These blessed words point us to the most consoling law in all the universe, but they point us away from themselves; and only by our souls coming into communion with a living God through a living Saviour can they behold the wonders of mercy and truth which are in that law.1 [Note: Robert Flint.]

Really, so far as spiritual vision is concerned, the angels must look upon this earth as a big blind asylum. We see close to us, but not afar off; we see the surface, and miss the depths; we see not as wide awake, but as those who rub their eyes hardly knowing whether they wake or sleep. Have I seen the wondrous things out of Gods lawthe things which accompany salvation. Many feel the intellectual interest of Gods Word, enjoy its eloquence, extol its moral worth, or they appreciate its prudential wisdom, like Napoleon, who put it in the political section of his library; but they do not grasp its spiritual, saving message. They gather shining pebbles and painted shells, and overlook the pearl of great price. Oh! to see the wondrous depths of redeeming love! Whilst I study systems of theology and search the commentaries of exegetes do I sufficiently remember the promised Revealer and wait His illumination? Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and know all things.2 [Note: W. L. Watkinson.]

III

1. The most wonderful of all laws are Gods moral and spiritual laws. They are the laws of God in a far higher sense than other laws. The laws of the physical world might have been quite different from what they are. God made them to be what they are by making the physical world itself what it is. If He had made quite a different material world with quite other laws, He would have been none the less God, the true object of our worship. But He did not make the fundamental laws of moral life to be what they are by any mere forthputting of His will. They are eternal and unchangeable. That God should alter them would be for Him to cease to be wise and righteous and holy and loving. It would be for Him to cease to be God. The wonders of these laws are thus the wonders of the Divine nature, and far greater, therefore, than any wonders of created nature. At the same time, these laws are the laws of our natures, of our spirits, of what is much higher and much more wonderful than anything else to be beheld in nature. On earth, it has been said, there is nothing great but man, and in man there is nothing great but mind. And certainly a soul is a far more wonderful thing than even a star, a spiritual being than a material world, and its laws are far more wonderful. It is spiritual law that determines mens relations to their God and to one another, and it is on obedience or disobedience to it that the weal or woe of individuals or societies chiefly depends, so that all the marvels and mysteries of human nature and destiny gather round it.

I am not quite sure that the sole, or even chief, end of punishment is the reformation of the offender. I think a great deal of law. Law rules Deity; and its awful majesty is above individual happiness. That is what Kant calls the categorical imperative, that is, a sense of duty which commands categorically or absolutelynot saying it is better, but thou shalt. Why? Because thou shalt, that is all. It is not best to do rightthou must do right; and the conscience that feels that, and in that way, is the nearest to Divine humanity. Not that law was made, like the Sabbath, for man, but man was made for it. He is beneath it, a grain of dust before it; it moves on, and if he will not move before it, it crushes him; that is all, and that is punishment. I fancy that grand notion of law is what we have lost, what we require to get, before we are in a position to discuss the question of punishment at all, or to understand what it is.1 [Note: Life and Letters of the Rev. F. W. Robertson, 236.]

2. To behold fully how wonderful the law ishow sacred God regards it to behow terrible disobedience to it isit is to the cross we must look; to the cross, towering high above all other subjects, in the midst of the ages, in the presence of the nations, to show sin in all its hideousness and righteousness in all its perfections. If we can see no wonders in the law which Christ died to satisfy and glorify, if we do not see it to be unspeakably more wonderful than all the other laws, assuredly our blindness is great indeed, and we cannot too earnestly cry to a merciful God, Open Thou mine eyes.

In a letter to her father Miss Nightingale says:

What I dislike in Renan is not that it is fine writing, but that it is all fine writing. His Christ is the hero of a novel; he himself, a successful novel-writer. I am revolted by such expressions as charmant, delicieux, religion du pur sentiment, in such a subject. As for the religion of sentiment, I really dont know what he means. It is an expression of Balzacs. If he means the religion of love, I agree and do not agree. We must love something loveable. And a religion of love must certainly include the explaining of Gods character to be something loveableof Gods providence, which is the self-same thing as Gods Laws, as something loving and loveable. On the other hand I go along with Christ, not with Renans Christ, far more than most Christians do. I do not think that Christ on the Cross is the highest expression hitherto of Godnot in the vulgar meaning of the Atonementbut God does hang on the Cross every day in every one of us; the whole meaning of Gods providence, i.e. His laws, is the Cross. When Christ preaches the Cross, when all mystical theology preaches the Cross, I go along with them entirely. It is the self-same thing as what I mean when I say that God educates the world by His laws, i.e. by sinthat man must create mankindthat all this evil, i.e. the Cross, is the proof of Gods goodness, is the only way by which God could work out mans salvation without a contradiction. You say, but there is too much evil. I say, there is just enough (not a millionth part of a grain more than is necessary) to teach man by his own mistakes,by his sins, if you willto show man the way to perfection in eternityto perfection which is the only happiness.1 [Note: Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 486.]

IV

Mans eyes are veiled, so that he sees but a little way into Gods law. Our intellectual perception of law is one thing and I our spiritual perception of God in law is a very different thing. To see law itself we need only a clear and disciplined understanding. To see God in law we need spiritual discernment. The eye sees only what it brings with it the power of seeing. And neither mere bodily vision nor mere intellectual vision will enable us to behold spiritual reality. The things of the spirit must be spiritually discerned.

When on a serene night millions of stars sparkle in the depths of the sky, any man who has bodily eyes, although he may have no talent and culture, has only to raise them upwards to embrace at a glance all the splendours of the firmament, and thereby to receive into his soul, at least in some measure, the impressions which so sublime a spectacle is fitted to produce. But there may stand beside him one whose intellectual ability is far greater, and who has improved that ability to the utmost by diligent and carefully directed exercise, yet if Providence have denied to him the blessing of sight, in vain for him will there be all magnificence. There is another sky, and one far grander than the azure vault which is stretched over our heads, and this mystic sky is filled with the stars of Divine truth, the wonders of creative power, the mysteries of infinite wisdom, the bounties of Divine beneficence, the beauties of absolute holiness, the marvels of redeeming love, the riches of the Godhead, the glories of Father, Son, and Spirit, shining far more bright and pure than the sun at noonday. And yet to great men, to the wise of this world, to the most scholarly and the most scientific of men, they may be quite invisible, although they are lighting up with their Divine radiance the path of the simple peasant and causing his heart to leap and sing with joy as he beholds them.1 [Note: Robert Flint.]

remember very well when Sir Redvers Buller came home from South Africa, in almost the first speech he made after landing at Southampton, he drew attention to the immense superiority of the Boer over the Briton in the matter of vision. Accustomed to the clear atmosphere and vast distances of South Africa, the Boer had brought his sight faculty to such a pitch of perfection that he could see a moving object a mile or two farther off than the average Englishman could, with the result that he was aware of the approach of the English soldier long before the Englishman became aware of his nearness. And Sir Redvers did not hesitate to set down some of our calamities and disasters and defeats to this cause.2 [Note: J. D. Jones, Elims of Life, 126.]

1. One cause of this blindness is a hereditary defect in the unbelieving heart, a natural congenital blindness, which the lapse of years has not cured. We are all born blind, and remain blind to moral and spiritual truth long after birth. Discernment between right and wrong, a sense of duty, a sense of failure and secret shame in consequence, is a state or faculty into which we can grow only after we have lived as mere animals about four or five years. It takes some years longer before we grow into knowledge of the ideas of character, of trustworthiness in parents, of their unselfish love, and of the intense kindness of that discipline which at first we resisted and resented. Before that development we were blind, we could not discern spiritual things; we, could not know what true love is, for love is the most spiritual of all human faculties. It crowns the climax of all strictly human qualities. But, though it seems incredible, it is true that some men and women have grown up without any moral sense being developed, and also without any knowledge or sense of true love.

I came across a man well advanced in years who confided to me that he believed neither in God nor in a future life. I at once asked him: Did you ever really love any one in the world? After some days reflection, he replied to me: No, I dont think I ever did love anybodyat least, not as you define true love. Now, if you cannot get as far as love in human development, you must, of course, be blind to God. You cannot see Him, cannot take any pleasure in the thought of Him, but must be practically dead towards Him.1 [Note: Charles Voysey.]

2. Another cause of blindness is to be found in the conditions of life which are either forced upon us or have been chosen by ourselves. The worst and most widespread of these conditions is absorption in the concerns and pleasures of this life. Rich and poor alike suffer from this absorption, yet the rich suffer from it far more than the poor. Want and distress may open our eyes to God, fulness and luxury never. So long as our hearts are fixed wholly on worldly good and animal indulgence, our souls are utterly blind to God and to all spiritual things.

Christian saw in Interpreters House two boys, Passion and Patience. Passion had a bag of gold in his hand, but Patience was willing to take his Governors advice and wait for his good things till the next year. And these two boys, says John Bunyan, are typical of the worldly man and the true Christian. The worldly man, with his favourite proverb of A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, wants his good things at once; he wants his bag of gold in the hand, not seeming to realize that his money must perish with him; but the Christian is willing to do without this worlds wealth, because he looks not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Elims of Life, 134.]

A scientist delivered a lecture a little time ago in which he maintained, on the basis of studies started by the observation of the eye of a wounded bird, that all diseases of the body register themselves in the eye, that it was even possible to judge the location of the disease by the part of the pupil affected. Whether this can be demonstrated or not, there is no doubt that the eye has its connexion with organs of the body that are less honourably placed, and is affected by their accidents and disquietudes. Diseases of the blood and of the digestive functions cloud and vex the sight. You shall not be careless of your eating and drinking and maintain clear vision. The mists and the filmy globes which float before the eye are the indices of things wrong in parts of the system that are remote from the eye itself, and to be remedied by neither eye-lotions nor glasses. So neglect of the spiritual life results in blurred spiritual vision.2 [Note: W. C. Piggott, The Imperishable Word, 68.]

3. Above and beyond these things which naturally darken our souls, there lie the conditions which we may create for ourselves. Not knowing anything about the soul and the spiritual life, some steep themselves in studies and occupations which prevent all entrance of light into their minds concerning God and His ways. They keep the company of irreligious and unbelieving men like themselves. They pore over essays and volumes which not only throw not a gleam of light upon the spiritual world, but are purposely written to shut it out, to make it more and more difficult to see God, to deepen the darkness in which they started on their search for what they call Truth. Thus, blind at the beginning, they take for their guides men and books still more blind than themselves, and flounder on with ever less and less power to recover their sight. And all the while they studiously neglect those means by which their eyes may be opened. They never lift up their hearts to God. They avoid all thoughts of religion unless only to sneer at it, or to look down upon it with supercilious curiosity. They never attend public worship or put themselves in the way of hearing what they never have heard. What is the use, cry the more intelligent among themwhat is the use of praying to a God who is absolutely unknowable? But they forget that God is unknowable only to those who think Him to be so, to those who never pray. If they did but confer with those who have lifted up their hearts to God and have found Him, they might be brought to go down upon their knees to pray, Lord, open Thou mine eyes that I may see.

A little steam vessel in which I was sailing round the coast of Arran, emitted such a thick pall of smoke as to blot out the vision of Goat Fell. And sometimes our souls create those obscuring clouds and hide the glory of God. It may be the vapour of pride. It may be the steam of unclean passion. It may be the smoke of timidity and fear.

O may no earth-born cloud arise

To hide Thee from Thy servants eyes.1 [Note: J. H. Jowett.]

Night comes; soon alone shall fancy follow sadly in her flight

Where the fiery dust of evening, shaken from the feet of light,

Thrusts its monstrous barriers between the pure, the good, the true,

That our weeping eyes may strain for, but shall never after view.

Only yester eve I watched with heart at rest the nebul

Looming far within the shadowy shining of the Milky Way;

Finding in the stillness joy and hope for all the sons of men;

Now what silent anguish fills a night more beautiful than then:

For earths age of pain has come, and all her sister planets weep,

Thinking of her fires of morning passing into dreamless sleep.

In this cycle of great sorrow for the moments that we last

We too shall be linked by weeping to the greatness of her past:

But the coming race shall know not, and the fount of tears shall dry,

And the arid heart of man shall be arid as the desert sky.

So within my mind the darkness dawned, and round me everywhere

Hope departed with the twilight, leaving only dumb despair.2 [Note: A. E., Collected Poems (1913), 25.]

V

The Psalmist does not ask for a new faculty, but for clearer vision. The eyes are there already; they need only to be opened. It is not the bestowal of a new and supernatural power that enables a man to read the Bible to profit, but the quickening of a power he already possesses. A man will never grow into the knowledge of Gods Word by idly waiting for some new gift of discernment, but by diligently using that which God has already bestowed upon him, and using at the same time all other helps that lie within his reach. There are men and books that seem, beyond others, to have the power of aiding insight. All of us have felt it in the contact of some affinity of nature which makes them our best helpers; the kindred clay upon the eyes by which the great Enlightener removes our blindness (Joh 9:6). Let us seek for such, and if we find them let us employ them without leaning on them. Above all, let us give our whole mind in patient, loving study to the book itself, and where we fail, at any essential part, God will either send His evangelist Philip to our aid (Acts 8) or instruct us Himself. But it is only to patient, loving study that help is given. God could have poured all knowledge into us by easy inspiration, but it is by earnest search alone that it can become the treasure of the soul.

1. If we are to get spiritual sight our prayer must be sincere. The old Hebrew poet, speaking with a true insight confirmed by experience, says: If thou seek him, he will be found of thee; yea, if thou seek him diligently with thy whole heart. That is the secret. It will not do to be seeking God with a heart looking back to the idol which had taken His place. It will not do to be wanting to have God and the idol at one and the same time. God has made that to be impossible for the soul of man. One God or idol at a time, or not God at all. And while any lingering love for the idol remains, there is no room for God to enter in. It is not His fault, or His unwillingness, or His jealousy. But it is our own Divine incapacity to trifle or dissemble with Him; it is our own Divine necessity for wholeness, for uprightness and sincerity, that makes any attempt at double-mindedness futile.

An old colleague and friend of Denholm Brash writes:

Chief among my impressions of his excellences is that of his utter sincerity. It was so invariable that it bewildered the average man. He never troubled about maintaining any position he might have taken up yesterday. He told you what he thought to-day; every passing mood was faithfully reflected in his words; the fleeting opinion or feeling was not concealed. You were allowed to trace processes in his thought which most men hide from view. I have seen him confound an old fox of a man by sheer candour. He left the enemy breathless with surprise at a simplicity he had thought faded out of the world with Eden. The mans arts would have been a match for any arts they encountered, but artlessness dumbfounded him. The armour of light not only defended the wearer, but dismayed the assailant. Never was this servant of truth off duty, and with the audacious simplicity of love he would attack an apparently impregnable fortress, and with one well-planted shot would bring a whole pile of hypocrisies toppling down. He had a short method with some of these Goliaths which worked wonders.1 [Note: Love and Life: The Story of J. Denholm Brash, 163.]

2. We must bring our hearts into harmony with the law. At South Kensington there is a clock made above 500 years ago under the hammer of a Glastonbury monk. It has measured out the moments of fifteen generations of men. That piece of mechanism has done and is still doing its makers will. It has served its makers purpose. It fulfils his praiseworthy intention and so praises him. Every stroke of its pendulum is to the glory of the Glastonbury smith. The thing has done good and done right. It keeps (so to say) its makers commandment. What he meant it to do it has done well and truly. Perhaps it may seem a little strained to apply such phraseology to a piece of inanimate mechanism, but it will surely aid us in seeing what the moralist means by telling men to live as they were meant to live. Think of this clockwork of the brain, this delicate mechanism of thought and feeling. Year in, year out, the restless wheels of desire and feeling, of thought and passion, play into one another and mark results on the solemn dial of life. Matters may be so mismanaged as to put the machinery into a whirl of wild confusion. It is, on the other hand, possible to secure such inward adjustment, such balance, such regulative control, such true impulse, as to make the soul a splendid harmony and the life a utility which men acknowledge with reverence and benediction. With Gods works as with mans the essential thing is to be true to the Makers purpose. There is a commandment, a Divine intention, to which every one must be true. Thy hands have made me, and fashioned me; give me understanding that I may learn thy commandment.

The Lord will draw us and securely lead us to Himself, in a way contrary to all our natural will, until He have divested us thereof, and consumed it and made it thoroughly subject unto the Divine will. For this is His will: that we should cease to regard our own wishes or dislikes; that it should become a light matter to us whether He give or take away, whether we have abundance or suffer want, and let all things go, if only we may receive and apprehend God Himself; that, whether things please or displease us, we may leave all things to take their course and cleave to Him alone. Then first do we attain to the fulness of Gods love as His children, when it is no longer happiness or misery, prosperity or adversity, that draws us to Him, or keeps us back from Him. What we should then experience none can utter; but it would be something far better than when we were burning with the first flame of love, and had great emotion but less true submission; for here, though there may be less show of zeal, and less vehemence of feeling, there is more true faithfulness to God. That we may attain thereunto, may God help us with His grace. Amen!1 [Note: Tatulers Life and Sermons (trans. by Susanna Winkworth), 297.]

3. In proportion as we love and obey the law, its wonders unfold themselves to our cleansed vision. Emerson says in his essay on Nature, The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired so long as we can see far enough. It is quite true that wide vision is refreshing. We have all been more depressingly tired in our own houses than on the broad upland and under the open sky. The mountaineer in his loftiest adventure knows no such oppressive weariness as the woman who sits in unwomanly rags plying her needle and thread. The man with the widest and furthest vision is the man with the most exuberant energy. Jesus, even with Gethsemane and Calvary before Him, is not so weary of life as Judas. St. Paul in labours more abundant is never so jaded as Nero. The early Christian martyrs, with their vision of the Name, amid all the unspeakable horror of their torture, were not so weary of their sufferings as their persecutors were weary of their persecution. They might still sing, as Chesterton splendidly puts it in the Ballad of the White Horse,

That on you is fallen the shadow,

And not upon the Name;

That though we scatter and though we fly

And you hang over us like the sky,

You are more tired of victory

Than we are tired of shame.

That though you hunt the Christian man

Like a hare on the hill side,

The hare has still more heart to run

Than you have heart to ride.

That though all lances split on you,

All swords be heaved in vain,

We have more lust again to lose

Than you to win again.

Literature

Flint (R.), Sermons and Addresses, 133.

Harper (F.), Nine Sermons, 31.

Ker (J.), Sermons, i. 29.

Matheson (G.), Messages of Hope, 241.

Salmond (C. A.), For Days of Youth, 346.

Voysey (C.), Sermons, vi. (1883), No. 44; xix. (1896), No. 16; xxvi. (1903), No. 22.

Whincup (D. W.), The Training of Life, 21.

British Weekly Pulpit, iii. 401 (W. Sanday).

Treasury (New York), xx. 722.

Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible

Open: Heb. Reveal, Isa 29:10-12, Isa 29:18, Isa 32:3, Isa 35:5, Mat 13:13, Mat 16:17, Joh 9:39, Act 26:18, 2Co 3:14-18, 2Co 4:4-6, Eph 1:17, Eph 1:18, Rev 3:18

wondrous: Psa 119:96, Hos 8:12, 2Co 3:13, Heb 8:5, Heb 10:1

Reciprocal: 2Ki 6:17 – open his eyes Psa 119:7 – when Psa 119:125 – that I Psa 119:129 – testimonies Pro 14:6 – knowledge Pro 20:12 – General Dan 9:13 – that we Mat 20:33 – Lord Luk 11:34 – light of Luk 24:45 – General Joh 9:30 – and yet

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

WONDROUS THINGS

Wondrous things out of Thy law.

Psa 119:18

The life of the soul has its wonders as well as the life of the body and the life of nature. It is a complex and mysterious thing. None but opened eyes can discern its marvellous treasures; and with them the further we see the greater is the wonder. Gods discipline, Gods patience, Gods adjustment of mens powers and defects, Gods method of answering prayer or seeming to be deaf to itin these and similar dealings we can, if we will, find ever-fresh food for wonder, if only He grant us the gift of a teachable heart and an open eye.

I. Think of the phenomenon, so well known to all Christians, Gods strength made perfect in weakness.Sometimes it is in spite of mens weakness; sometimes it is actually in consequence of it. The wonderful thing is to see how Gods strength often takes hold of a weak character, and works upon it His miracles of purification. Where the worldly critic despairs, the instructed Christian hopes.

II. Consider another phenomenon in Gods discipline: the use which He makes of disappointment.Is there no room for wonder here? To a very young boy disappointment is crushing and blinding. Everything and everybody seem set against him. But when growing years or a riper Christian experience has at last opened his eyes, he begins to discern wondrous things in the Divine law of disappointment. He sees, and others perhaps see still more plainly, that that was the rock on which his character was built.

III. Notice another wondrous thing of Gods law: His permission of sin.Sin is overruled into a trainer of righteousness. There are few more wondrous things in the moral world than to trace how a good man has been trained by his own sins, or rather trained by the Holy Spirit of God through the permitted instrumentality of his own personal sins.

IV. Once more, if we look at the method by which God works His plans of improvement, may we not find abundant cause for reverent wonder?Think of His patience; His choice of feeble instruments; His choice, too, of unexpected and, as we should have thought, inappropriate means to work out His own ends; His discouragement sometimes of the higher agencies, and apparent preference for the lower. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments, and His ways past finding out!

Rev. Dr. H. M. Butler.

Fuente: Church Pulpit Commentary