Psalms 19:11

Psalms 19:11

St. Paul says, "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." Where then is the reward, the great present reward, in keeping God's commandments? If an uninspired writer had affirmed that the most miserable being in creation would be a Christian supposing him without hopes for the future, there would have been uttered on all hands a vehement contradiction; the disciples of Christ would have pressed eagerly forward, attesting the possession of such a measure of gladness and peace that if deceived for hereafter, the advantage was on the side of the deception.

I. It were nothing to prove to the lukewarm professor that there should be no resurrection; he has never known the ecstasies of piety, and therefore he feels not the appalling declaration. But it is different with a man whose whole soul is in his religion, who upholds himself in every trial by the consolation which he draws from the future, and who finds a refuge from every grief and a deep fountain to cleanse in the conviction that Christ has abolished death and opened an eternal kingdom to His followers. It must be the extreme point of misery at which a righteous man would be placed who, having taken up Christianity as a charter of the future, should find it altogether limited to the present, and we can contend for it therefore as a literal truth that by bringing home to the true Christian a proof that there is no resurrection you would instantly make him "of all men most miserable." But since you can find no such proof, there is nothing in the saying of St. Paul to invalidate this saying of the Psalmist in our text. U. Whilst we maintain that there are present enjoyments in religion which vastly more than counterpoise the disquietude it may cause, we are certain that if Christian hope were suddenly bounded by the horizon of time, then all this present enjoyment would be virtually destroyed. Each present enjoyment in religion anticipates the future. What would you leave the believer if you intercepted those flashings from the far-off country which struggle through the mist and cloud of this region of eclipse, and shed lustre round the path by which he toils on to glory? Who then shall rival the Christian in misery if, after setting out in the expectation of a blessed immortality, he discovers that only in this life is there hope in Christ? He loses the enjoyments of religion, he cannot relish the enjoyments of irreligion, stripped of the acquired, unfitted for the natural, knowing that he is doomed to be an outcast hereafter, and unable to cheat himself with forgetfulness here. It is nothing against the truth of our text that St. Paul applies the epithet "most miserable" to Christians if Christ had not opened to them eternity. Christ has opened to them eternity; and therefore we can confidently say, with the Psalmist, of the commandments of God, "Moreover by them is Thy servant warned, and in keeping of them there is great reward."

H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2625.