Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: April 2nd

A DARK FEAR

If Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? - Psalms 130:3

To "mark iniquities" is to impute them to us. The word in the original means to watch - that is to say, to remember in order to punish. If a man be regarded by God’s eye through the mist of his own sins, they turn the bright sun of God’s own light into a red-hot flaming ball of fire. Like a man having to yield ground to an eager enemy, or to bend before the blast, every man has to bow before that flashing brightness, and to own that retribution would be destruction.

Do we not all know that our characters and our lives have been, as it were, distorted; that our moral nature has been marred with animal lusts, and that ambitions and worldly desires have come in and prevented us from following the law of conscience? Is not that very conscience, more or less distorted, drugged and dormant? And is not all this largely voluntary? Do we not feel, in spite of all pleas about circumstances and "heredity," that we could have helped being what we are? And do we not feel that, after all, if there be such a thing as God’s judgment and retribution, it must come on us with terrible force? That is what the Psalmist means when he says that if God be strict to mark iniquities there is not one of us that can stand before Him; and we know it is true. You may be a very respectable man; that is not the question. You may have kept your hands clear from anything that would bring you within the sweep of the law; that has nothing to do with it. You may have subdued animal passions, been sober, temperate, chaste, generous - a hundred other things. Granted, of course! Ah! gross, palpable sin slays its thousands; and that clean, white, respectable, ghastly purity of a godless, self-complacent morality, I do believe, slays its tens of thousands. And you, not because your goodness is not goodness of a sort, but because you are building upon it, and think that such words as those of the Psalmist, go clean over your heads - you are in this perilous position.

Oh, dear friend! will you take ten minutes quietly to think over that verse, "If Thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? " Can I? Can I?

Is it not true that, deep below the surface, contentment with the world and the things of the world, a dormant, but lightly slumbering, sense of want and unsatisfied need, lies in your souls? Is it not true that it wakes sometimes at a touch; that the tender, dying light of sunset, or the calm abysses of the mighty heavens, or some strain of music, or a line in a book, or a sorrow in your heart, or the solemnity of a great joy, or close contact with sickness and death, or the more direct appeals of Scripture and of Christ, stir a wistful yearning and a painful sense of emptiness in your hearts, and of insufficiency in all the ordinary pursuits of your lives?