IV THE PRAISE OF THE PEOPLE “LET the people praise thee, O God; yea, let all the people praise thee. O let the nations rejoice and be glad, for thou shalt judge the folk righteously, and govern the nations upon earth.”—Psalm lxvii. 3, 4. ON two former occasions I have tried to bring before you something of the force of the first two verses of this psalm: "God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and shew us the light of his countenance; that thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations." The prayer here turns to praise: "Let the people praise thee, O God; yea, let all the people praise thee." I said that this psalm was most plainly and strongly a national song, even more than most of the psalms are national songs. That character comes out distinctly in this third verse. prayer of the first verse was for the Jewish nation; "God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and shew us the light of his countenance." In the second verse it stretched itself out to take in the other nations of the earth, "That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations." Here in the The third verse we return to the same point on which we stood. It is again praise on the part of the Jewish nation: "Let the people praise thee, O God; yea, let all the people praise thee." It is quite a different word from what we have in the second verse for "all nations," that is, the Gentile nations who were outside the Jewish government. The people of the third verse should rather be the peoples, that is, the tribes. "Let the tribes praise thee, O God; yea, let all the tribes praise thee." It is not easy for us to enter thoroughly into the meaning which would have been conveyed to the mind of an ancient Jew by this simple phrase, the tribes.' Those of you who have ever looked at a map of the Holy Land must have seen it marked out into a number of divisions like our English counties. And yet if we put the word counties here instead of tribes, we should not get a very full or distinct meaning. In the very next psalm, the 68th, at the twenty-seventh verse, we have four of the tribes mentioned in connection with a solemn worship and praise of God. "Bless ye God in the congregations, even the Lord, from the fountain. of Israel. There is little Benjamin their ruler, the princes of Juda their council, the princes of Zebulun, and the princes of Naphtali." If the names of four English counties, such as Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk, were put into a hymn to God, we should all think it very odd. Not, I hope, merely because we do not often see modern names put into prayers or praises; for there would be nothing really strange, much less wrong, in saying, "Let England praise thee, O God." But we do not join any distinct notions to our different counties, so that to bring in their names would be strange, simply because it would be unmeaning. But it was quite different with the Jewish tribes. They were not merely certain pieces of land like counties, or the inhabitants of certain pieces of land, but enormous families, the members of each being descended from one common ancestor. The book of Genesis tells us about the twelve sons of Jacob, and we find from the following books that their families were kept quite distinct when they came up out of Egypt and wandered through the wilderness into the land of Canaan; and, when they reached Canaan, they were divided all over the country, all except the priestly tribe of Levi, each tribe having its own piece of land allotted to it. In the 33rd chapter of Deuteronomy we have the blessing which Moses pronounced before his death upon all the twelve tribes of Israel, and its language shows how completely the blessing upon the whole people was felt to be bound up with the special blessings upon each tribe. "The Lord came from Sinai," it begins, "and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from Mount Paran, and he came with ten thousands of his saints: from his right hand went a fiery law for them. Yea, he loved the people (or rather, the tribes); all his saints are in thy hand, and they sat down at thy feet; every one shall receive of thy words. Moses commanded us a law, even the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob and he was king in Jeshurun" (that is, the Jewish nation), "when the heads of the people and the tribes of Israel were gathered together." Then begin the blessings on each tribe. "Let Reuben live, and not die, and let not his men be few., And this is the blessing of Judah: and he said, 'Hear, Lord, the voice of Judah, and bring him unto his people: let his hands be sufficient for him, and be thou an help to him from his enemies.'' And so on with the other tribes. And a similar blessing on the whole people comes back at the end. "There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky. The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee, and shall say, 'Destroy them.' Israel then shall dwell in safety alone: the fountain of Jacob shall be upon a land of corn and wine; also his heavens shall drop down dew. Happy art thou, O Israel who is like unto thee, a people saved by the Lord, the shield of thy help, and who is the sword of thy excellency! and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places." Such was the blessing of Moses upon the tribes, and the spirit of it runs through all the following history. The greatest pains were taken to prevent one tribe from mixing freely with another, and equal pains were taken to bind them all together into one people. Nay, strange as it may seem at first sight, the very separation of the tribes helped to bind them together. Each single Jew was obliged to keep always in mind that he belonged to one particular tribe, and that not so much because he lived in one particular part of the country, as because that was his father's and his : grandfather's tribe, and so on upwards till he came to the son of Jacob who had given his name to the tribe; and that first father of his tribe was, he well knew, own brother to the first fathers of the other tribes. Thus he was always reminded that they all were children of Jacob or Israel, and therefore were in fact all one great family. We can now understand better what the psalmist meant by the words, "Let the tribes praise thee, O God." Let the several branches or cousinhoods in the one great family of Israel all join their differing voices together as one united people to praise the God who blesses all and each, who has appointed to each its own place in the land with its special produce of corn or vines or pastures, and has given the whole people one holy law, one blessed worship in tabernacle or temple, and preserved them from the enemies without who have striven to destroy them. But the verse goes on, "Yea, let all the tribes praise thee." This is, I think, something more than the first part of the verse repeated more strongly. That little word 'all' is the echo of a sad long long tale which fills up a large part of the Old Testament. Although the twelve tribes made up together one people, they were always forgetting this; always doing something or other to break the holy bonds. by which God had purposed to unite them to each other. The different kinds of country occupied by different tribes helped to make them unlike each other, to join them together in groups of two or three, and at the same time sever such groups from the rest. But their own evil passions, jealousies, and |