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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadWilliam Kelly Major Works Commentary - Psalms 49:1 - 49:20
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This too is "To the chief musician, for the sons of Korah, a psalm." It is a grave word of exhortation founded on the moral truth of the crisis just surveyed. The Jews understood not God's ways more than the Gentiles, and hence the abominable compact at the end of the age which is fast approaching. Both idolise present wealth and power, ease and honour: God will be in the thoughts of neither. But as a vapour all passes away that is not of God and in God and with God, for no good is apart from Christ. Only God can and does raise from the dust of death; and as we know this now for heaven, so the godly Jews at the close will learn and preach as here for the earth, the honoured ones to welcome Him when He comes to take Zion and all the earth.
A new series appropriately follows in this cluster of psalms, which opens with God's summons of His people to judgment (Ps. 50); and this calls forth the remnant's confession of corruption and blood-guilt (Ps. 51): in both acknowledging the insufficiency of legal sacrifice and offering without brokenness of spirit and confidence in divine grace. In Ps. 52 we have an instruction which takes the shape of a plaint against their violent and deceitful oppressor with the assurance of his destruction on God's part, Who will deliver and bless His godly ones in His loving-kindness for ever. Then In Ps. 53 comes the moral exposure of the lawless one, but in terms which the apostle in Rom. 3 applies to those under the law. For indeed the Jews as a mass will be first as their chief, the son of perdition; and the heart of a sinner, where not law only but Christ in grace is abandoned, is no better than in antichrist; and this is morally true since the cross and the rejection of the gospel. The sense of this in the remnant turns by the Spirit into desire for Israel's salvation, when God has scattered the bones of the foes who beleaguered the object of His choice. In Ps. 54 the Spirit of Christ identifies the godly with Himself in resting every expectation on the name of "God" when covenant mercies are gone; but the end is thanksgiving to "Jehovah" when He has delivered the godly Jew out of all trouble in the displayed judgment of his enemies.