the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee.’  His gladness is in His children when they let Him love them, and do not throw back His love on itself.  As in man’s physical frame it is pain to have secretions dammed up, so when God’s love is forced back upon itself and prevented from flowing out in blessing, some shadow of suffering cannot but pass across that calm sky.  He is glad when His face is mirrored in ours, and the rays from Him are reflected from us.

But there is another wonderfully bold and beautiful thought in this representation of the gladness of God.  Note the double form which it assumes:  ’He will rest’—­literally, be silent—­’in His love; He will joy over thee with singing.’  As to the former, loving hearts on earth know that the deepest love knows no utterance, and can find none.  A heart full of love rests as having attained its desire and accomplished its purpose.  It keeps a perpetual Sabbath, and is content to be silent.

But side by side with this picture of the repose of God’s joy is set with great poetic insight the precisely opposite image of a love which delights in expression, and rejoices over its object with singing.  The combination of the two helps to express the depth and intensity of the one love, which like a song-bird rises with quivering delight and pours out as it rises an ever louder and more joyous note, and then drops, composed and still, to its nest upon the dewy ground.

II.  Zion’s joy in God.

To the Prophet, the fact that ‘the Lord is in the midst of thee’ was the guarantee for the confident assurance ‘Thou shalt not fear any more’; and this assurance was to be the occasion of exuberant gladness, which ripples over in the very words of our first text.  That great thought of ‘God dwelling in the midst’ is rightly a pain and a terror to rebellious wills and alienated hearts.  It needs some preparation of mind and spirit to be glad because God is near; and they who find their satisfaction in earthly sources, and those who seek for it in these, see no word of good news, but rather a ‘fearful looking for of judgment’ in the thought that God is in their midst.  The word rendered ‘rejoices’ in the first verse of our text is not the same as that so translated in the second.  The latter means literally, to move in a circle; while the former literally means, to leap for joy.  Thus the gladness of God is thought of as expressing itself in dignified, calm movements, whilst Zion’s joy is likened in its expression to the more violent movements of the dance.  True human joy is like God’s, in that He delights in us and we in Him, and in that both He and we delight in the exercise of love.  But we are never to forget that the differences are real as the resemblances, and that it is reserved for the higher form of our experiences in a future life to ‘enter into the joy of the Lord.’