PSALM CXXI

THE MINISTRY OF THE HILLS AND ALL GREAT THINGS

We catch the key-note of this Psalm if we read the words whence cometh my help not as a statement but as a question.  Our older version takes them as a statement; it makes the Psalmist look to the hills, as if his help broke and shouted from them all like waterfalls.  But with the Revised Version we ought to read:  I will lift mine eyes unto the mountains—­from whence cometh my help? The Psalmist looks up, not because his help is stored there, but because the sight of the hills stirs within him an intense hope.  His heart is immediately full of the prayer, Whence cometh my help? and of the answer, My help is from the Lord, that made heaven and earth.

We need not wish to fix a locality or a date to this Psalm.  It is enough that the singer had a mountain skyline in view, and that below in the shadows, so dark that we cannot make out their features, lay God’s church and people.  They were threatened, and there was neither help nor hope of help among themselves.

Perhaps it was one of those frequent periods in the life of Israel, in which the religious institutions of the people were so abased that the Psalmist could see in them no pledge nor provocation of hope.  Indeed, these institutions may have been altogether overthrown.  There was no leader on whom God had set His seal, and the national life had nothing to raise the heart, but was full of base thoughts and paltry issues that dissipate faith, and render the interference of God an improbable thing.  So the Psalmist lifted his thoughts to the sacraments which God has fixed in the framework of His world.  He did not identify his help with the hills—­no true Israelite could have done that,—­but the sight of them started his hope and filled his heart with the desire to pray.  This may have happened at sunrise, when, even more than at other hours, mountains fulfil the ministry of hope.  Below them all was in darkness; it was still night, but the peaks saw the morning, and the signal of its coming fell swiftly down their flanks.  In this case the Psalm is a matin-song, a character which the rest of the verses carry out.  Or at any other hour of the day, it may simply have been the high, clear outline of the hills which inspired the Psalm—­that firm step between heaven and earth, that margin of a world of possibility beyond.  A prophet has said, How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of them that bring good tidings! But to our Psalmist the mountains spread a threshold for a Divine arrival.  Up there God Himself may be felt to be afoot.