“Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”—Psalm cxliv. 1.
The passage: Blessed be the Lord my strength, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle.
On the last Sundays I have gone over the lessons we teach children, trying to show they suit grown men too. I spoke of the adversaries we face if we live on this earth, and can face if we are, as the old formulary says, members of Christ, children of God, heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven. I reversed the Catechism’s order: the lusts of the flesh first, the pomps and vanity of the world next, the devil last—but kept its careful ancient language. The flesh itself is not an enemy; we believe in the resurrection of the flesh. But the lusts of the flesh, its wish to be supreme, involve sin, the degradation of both body and spirit. The world itself is not our enemy; it is loved and redeemed by God—nature precious, humanity more precious still. But the pomps and vanity of the world—the outward show that dazzles us and hides nature’s real worth, the fashions that trap people in narrow circles and cut them off from what unites them to each other and to God—these mark a wicked world, one that shuts out the sun and chooses its own darkness. Because neither flesh nor world is evil in itself, only derivatively so, we had to speak of an evil spirit or will—the Accuser, Tempter, Destroyer, whose works fill the world’s disease and death and the heart’s suspicion and insincerity; who has no creative power, no rightful claim on anyone; whom it is our part to renounce utterly, proclaiming ourselves the property of Him who is wholly good and true.
If these are merely technical doctrines, parts of a theological system, I have no right to ask busy men to care about them. But if they describe an actual fight you are engaged in every hour, you may fairly ask: what do you have to tell us that we don’t know already? Are divines better acquainted with this warfare, in science or practice, than other men—are they not commonly more ignorant of both, occupied with study-room abstractions, pulpit harangues, and routine duties? Which of these fits them to know the real struggles of real men?
There may be much justice in that; no one knows it better than the clergyman himself—how he fails to appreciate others’ difficulties because he first fails to appreciate his own. If he tells his hearers how to behave in given circumstances, he is likely to find, once placed in those circumstances himself, how little he remembers his own rules, and how little they would help even if he did. Much of whatever experience he gains must come from just such humiliations—needed even more than the discovery that he has mistaken, and worsened, other men’s troubles. Well for him if either lesson drives him to meditate on this text; well for him if he learns that all the help he can give or receive lies in it.
I do not know what the “Book of the Wars of the Lord,” mentioned once or twice in the Old Testament, was; but I suppose the Book of Psalms was such a book to Israel, and has been to Christendom. Call it prayers, hymns, thanksgivings—it is certainly a record of fights. And this verse, from one of its latest parts, sums up its contents and draws its moral: “Blessed is the Lord God of Israel, who teaches my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”
I do not think this applies only to what we call spiritual conflicts. David, or whoever wrote it, likely thanked God for being able to fight Philistines and Ammonites—indeed thanked God he was obliged to fight them, not left to the ease he would have chosen. This matched all he had learned: Judges told him how the Lord sold Israel into enemies’ hands when they followed idols, then raised up a champion to break the yoke. Was this puzzling? Not to an Israelite who knew his people’s ways and had felt the same stirrings recorded of Gideon and Samson. He knew that the torpor of a people sunk in sensual worship is worse than any outward tyranny—that tyranny stirs old memories and shame, a cry, however faint, for deliverance—and that the man in whom this cry grows strong is the sign of a better day coming. So he traced the bondage, the bitterness of it, and the resolve to throw it off, all to the same source: the Lord had appointed the punishment, made it useful, taught the future leader’s hands to war, so the oppressors used as His scourges would fall once their work was done. This was the pattern of Jewish history because it is the pattern of all history. No one who had learned it by heart would try to separate national wars from spiritual wars artificially: the one implied the other—the visible enemy was allowed strength so that dormant spiritual strength might rise to meet him. Man is made for battle; his own inclination is toward ease, and it is God who will not let him sink into the sleep that seems so pleasant and ends in death. “Blessed be the Lord God who teaches the hands to war, and the fingers to fight!”
I. I have called this thanksgiving universal, yet there are cases we shrink from applying it to, though we would be better for daring. Some feel the power of that first enemy far more than others—by constitution, upbringing, or indulgence, resisting the lusts of the flesh costs them an effort their nearest friends know nothing of. How natural to complain of this, to envy those who seem spared it, to plead temperament as an excuse for giving way! To onlookers these may be legitimate excuses for caution; but to the man himself, who knows that yielding means sinking toward the animal and away from the spirit, such excuses are worthless—conscience rejects them, only the lower appetites accept them. Yet if the conflict is solitary, known to no soul but his own, how hard not to feel doomed by some accident of birth to serve impulses that luckier men can govern! What help then in “Blessed be the Lord God who has taught my hands to war”! There is One who knows exactly what I am and can bear; He ordained my constitution and circumstances, yet is not tempting me to fall but to rise—letting me enter this conflict to emerge humbler, sadder, stronger, not willing my fall, and if I trust Him, not permitting it. My past falls become reasons to trust Him rather than myself; every fleshly lust may become, in His hands, the means of rousing a stronger spiritual desire to conquer it; the temperament I have resented, left in His hands, may prove exactly fitted to His purposes for me—perhaps fierier, because He has work for me a colder nature could not do. At any rate, the battle that shows me my weakest point, my besetting sin, must be meant for my good. What kind it should be is His judgment, not mine; my part is only to go through it, certain He is on my side, certain I will know more of His mercy hereafter for having been forced to rely on it here.
- Violent desires announce themselves. But the fashion of the world hems us in and holds us down without our knowing it—an invisible web, not one distinct pressure but a mixed atmosphere hard to untangle. How natural to yield to it, and how mischievous—yes, and harmful—resisting it often seems and is! Many grow impatient with the society they were born into, imagine another’s habits must be better, throw themselves into it, and find the old chain now closer around them. If it galls them, that is something to be thankful for; too often it does not, and all moral energy dies. How often, too, we see men reject local customs merely because restraint irks them, wanting only their own way—struggling for independence, not freedom, and ending in a crueler bondage to a worse master. And how often a man sets aside the maxims around him only to publish a new code of his own, making himself tyrant over it, lord of a narrow little world with all the follies of the great one, and a worse pride of superiority besides!
Yet these erratic movements and failed experiments show that men cannot rest easy in a world of shows and surfaces—that they belong to another order and must find it, even at the cost of ruin. Blessed be the Lord God who stirs hands to war for this divine order which He, not man, has established! Blessed for not letting His child lie crushed beneath the weight of opinions and traditions, for giving him visions of a city with foundations, whose builder He is, and the assurance that he must beat down whatever bars him from its glories! The other side of the riddle is answered too: we do not want to be free of government, but under a stricter, more righteous government than accident and convention and floating opinion give us; we want less, not more, subjection to our own fancies; self-will and vanity have destroyed freedom and manliness in us, building the false world that imprisons us. Blessed be God for this—since to such awakenings of conscience we owe every great reformation, every victory over abuses that private interests upheld. Not the restless men who wanted their own way and chafed at every ordinance won those hard triumphs, but those to whom order had become a passion, to whom disorder—however sanctioned by centuries and authority—was intolerable, who fought it in the name of the Lord of Hosts. Their fiercest opponents were probably those who called themselves not of the world but of the Church—but they knew that claim was false: whoever worships Custom and Tradition instead of God is of the world, and the Church exists to draw men from that worship to the true one. Blessed be the Lord who does not leave that conviction to preachers or reformers to plant, but writes His law Himself in men’s hearts, and then gives them hands to war and fingers to fight for it.
- Least of all is there natural strength in us against that enemy who goes about seeking whom he may devour. As I said last Sunday, there is a natural, widespread sense of his existence, a feeling that he is not far off. Among rude peoples the impulse is to conciliate this adversary who has ruled over them, to treat him as a god worth appeasing with rites and sacrifices—and left unchecked, he becomes the god, demanding all worship. Among civilized people it is different: they treat the devil as a nursery fiction, a name lingering in speech but meaning nothing. Yet something steals over these refined people they cannot quite name—apathy, loss of power, despondency are labels invented for it. Physicians of body and soul catalogue the symptoms carefully; the patient only suffers, unable to explain them. Such symptoms spread over whole periods; we call ours one with less gigantic crime and heroism than others had. Then our confidence in that flatters us is shaken—dark crimes do surface, the poisoner and the assassin are as much with us as with any generation, only their acts are calmer, more calculated, more concerned with safety than passion. Greed for gold, not vengeance, is the motive—meaning, in old terms, that our temptations are less of the flesh and more of the spirit. It is the spirit’s energy that is undermined; some inward wickedness, not outward force, produces the deeds that darken our history. Is it not true, then, that the age which boasts of having outgrown the evil spirit is most directly exposed to his assaults? May our progress—real, and to be thankful for—have brought us into closer conflict with spiritual wickedness in high places than our forefathers ever knew?
Our progress!—cause for thanks, if this is its result! Yes, blessed be the Lord God who teaches our hands to war, for bringing us into direct encounter with His own enemies, that we may know His presence more directly than others did! It is terrible to have the spirits of indolence, indifference, and vanity about us and think them mere abstractions—but glorious to know them as real enemies from whom only a real Friend, an actual Captain of the Lord’s host, can deliver us. It is frightful to read of crimes in a newspaper with only a lazy, self-satisfied surprise that our own kind could commit them, a secret triumph that we are not like them—but blessed to know we are like the worst of them, that the evil assaulting them may assault us any day, so that no victory over sin and death we can lay hold of is not equally theirs. May this be our progress, and no other! Not a lazy drift into a prosperity demanding no effort while we lie inert, but a quick perception of the evils around us, bracing our hearts to overcome them. Not a fond dream that things will somehow become what they should be, but the inward conviction that God means them to be so and calls us His fellow-workers in removing what makes them otherwise. This is the progress we need; without it, only continual retrogression. If our young men grow listless, heartless, merely critical, thinking manly energy belonged to other days, not ours, a death must come over us that no lucky accidents can arrest—only hasten.
But we are not sentenced to this death. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness”—the riddle the Israelite warrior set before the Philistines. It is still the great riddle set before us on our pilgrimage, and we too may use it to perplex our enemies, turning them into our ministers, stirring us to life and hope. I know this torpor of soul that assails our time; I understand the cry for the sterner conflicts of another age. But is not wrestling with that torpor work enough for us? Could we wish a more terrible death-grip than it demands? Yes—all seven devils are in it. We cannot cast them out ourselves. But may they not have been permitted to torment and possess us so that we learn who can cast them out? Is not this torpor the clearest proof of our utter weakness, and so the revelation of a God of strength? If a host of visible angels with drawn swords came to such a battle, what would they do for us? But if the seven Spirits before God’s throne come to help our spirits against the seven devils—if the Spirit of power, love, and a sound mind fights the spirit of indifference, coldness, and restlessness—is that nothing? Is it not exactly what we need? So the riddle is solved: the carcase of the Lion, the very foe that seemed ready to devour, supplies nourishment for each future assault. Our deadliest foes become our teachers about the eternal life we may share. In struggling with powers unknown to us in childhood, we learn to say “Our Father” with the same faith as when we first said it. And since lack of earnestness, coldness, indifference, threaten our nation and all nations with ruin, every victory over them in our own private lives is a victory for England and for mankind. The other half of the riddle is equally clear: there is sweetness as well as strength for one who gives up ease and seeks hands to war against the enemies of earth and God. The worth of the Sabbath is known through the toil of the week. It is in war with the world, the flesh, and the devil that we may hope to learn the Peace of God that passes all understanding.