Psalms 145:16

Thou openest Thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.

The Creator ministering to the wants of His creation

How does the Almighty provide for His creatures?

I. Personally. “Thou.” The pseudosage ascribes the fruits of the earth to the elements and laws of Nature. But the Bible, which is true science, ascribes them to God. God has not left Nature, He is in it, the great Spirit in all the wheels of its machinery. There is a Personal God in personal action, in all Nature.

II. Easily. He has only to open His hand. There is no labour, no effort; simply “Thou openest Thine hand.” How easily God rolls ponderous globes and massive systems through immensity! To communicate good to His creatures is easy work to Him.

1. It is agreeable to His heart. He has not to struggle as we often do against inner propensions and habit in order to show kindness. It is a gratification to His benevolence.

2. It is nothing to His power. It costs Him no effort; the whole universe arose at first by His word.

III. Abundantly. “And satisfiest the desire of every living thing”--from the minutest to the largest, from the microscopic insect to the mighty archangel. (Homilist.)

Thanksgiving for harvest

I. The one great benefactor. He is named by David (verse 1) as his God and King; and such is Jehovah unto all His saints. Their Proprietor and Preserver, their Ruler and Portion in a gracious and peculiar sense. But in the text God is adored as good to all, the one great Benefactor of every living thing. We do not forget that the support which God vouchsafes unto all, and the supplies which He grants to every living thing are not direct and immediate. These, in many instances, reach the creatures through the intervention of numerous channels, various agencies and instrumentalities. God does not now, as of old, rain bread upon the earth--and neither while preserving man or beast in His precious grace is the hand of the Lord seen, or His voice heard, or His glory visible. Still, He Himself is the one great benefactor of all flesh, of every living thing. In Him our breath is, and His are all our ways.

II. The multitude and variety of the dependents. “Every living thing.” Yes, the king in his palace, and the spider which shares the chamber with the monarch; the old man, staff in hand from very age, and the infant smiling on its mother’s lap; the mariner in his ship in the midst of the sea, and the ploughman with his oxen in the peaceful valley; the senators in their council-hall, and the birds singing in the branches of the forest; the rich man feasting in his mansion, and the sheep which stray on its lawns; the cattle upon a thousand hills; the poor blind man begging his bread from door to door, the faithful dog which guides his sightless steps,--toward all these, and multitudes greater far, and in varieties more perplexing still, does our God open His hand and satisfy the desire!

III. The freeness and liberality of the gifts. “Thou openest Thine hand.” No doubt in the course of Providence there are seasons of famine or of scarcity. We are to have the poor always with us, and we discover constant instances of poverty or destitution. There have been years that the locust did eat, and the canker worm, and the caterpillar, and the palmer worm--God’s great army which He sends against us. Even mid the joy of this plentiful harvest we have to lament blight and failure in a portion of the produce of the earth. These, however, are exceptional seasons, and, as judgment is God’s strange works, as these occur they are to be regarded as reproofs for sin, meant to instruct the earth in righteousness, and that man having “cleanness of teeth” appointed him may be taught his weakness, and turn unto the Lord.

IV. The satisfaction which the gifts afford. “Thou satisfiest the desire of every living thing.” Is it any comfort, is it any relief to us to obscure the perfections of the one great Benefactor, and to conceal His administration in all the earth, to say that the satisfying of the desire of every living thing is the effect of natural laws, the order of the earth; and that while it remaineth “seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease”? Thus may speak philosophy falsely so called, and with such crude and false reasoning many may be content. Natural laws, and the order of the earth, forsooth! Who ordained these laws, and who keeps them in operation? Who appointed that order, and preserves it from derangement or disturbance? Revelation teaches us to ascribe all this to God. Reason is fully satisfied only when admitting His dominion in the universe. (John Smart, D. D.)

The Satisfier of all desires

(with verse 19):--You observe the recurrence, in these two verses, of the one emphatic word “desire.” Its repetition evidently shows that the psalmist wishes to run a parallel between God’s dealings in two regions. The same beneficence works in both. Here is the true extension of natural law to the spiritual world.

I. Two kinds of pensioners.

1. “Every living thing.” Life makes a claim on God, and whatever desires arise in the living creature by reason of its life, God would be untrue to Himself, a cruel Parent, an unnatural Father if He did not satisfy them. “He is a faithful Creator;” and wherever there is a creature that He has made to need anything, He has hereby said, “As I live, that creature shall have what it wants.”

2. Then take the other class, “them that fear Him”; or, as they are described in the context--by contrast with “the wicked who are destroyed”--“the righteous.” That is to say, whilst, because we are living things, like the bee and the worm, we have a claim on God precisely parallel with theirs for what we may need by reason of His gift, which we never asked for--His gift of life--we shall have a similar but higher claim on Him if we are “they that fear Him”--with that loving reverence which has no torment in it,--and that love Him with that reverential affection which has no presumption in it, and whose love and fear coalesce in making them long to be righteous, like the object of their love, to be holy like the object of their fear. It comes to this--wherever you find in people a confidence which grows with their love of God, be sure that there is, somewhere or other in the universe of things, that which answers it.

II. Two sets of needs. The first of them is very easily disposed of. “The eyes of all wait upon Thee, and Thou givest them their meat.” That is all. Feed the beast, and give it the other things necessary for its physical existence, and there is no more to be done. But there is more wanted for the desires of the men that love and fear God. These are glanced at in the context, “He also will hear their cry, and will save them”; “The Lord preserveth all them that love Him.” That is to say, there are deeper needs in our hearts and lives than any that are known amongst the lower creatures. Evils, dangers, inward and outward; sorrows, disappointments, losses of all sorts shadow our lives in a fashion which the happy, careless life of field and forest knows nothing about. What is the object of desire to a man that loves God? God. What is the object of desire to a man that fears Him? God. What is the object of desire to a righteous man? Righteousness. And these are the desires which God is sure to fulfil to us. Therefore, there is only one religion in which it is safe and wise to cherish longings, and it is the region of the spiritual life where God imparts Himself. Everywhere else there will be disappointments--thank Him for them. Nowhere else is it absolutely true that that He will “fulfil the desires of them that fear Him.” But in this region it is. Whatever any of us want to have of God we are sure to get. We open our mouths and He fills them. In the Christian life desire is the measure of possession, and to long is to have. And there is nowhere else where it is absolutely, unconditionally, and universally true that to wish is to possess, and to ask is to have.

III. Two forms of appeal. “The eyes of all wait upon Thee.” That is beautiful! The dumb look of the unconscious creature, like that of a dog looking up in its master’s face for a crust, makes appeal to God, and He answers that. But a dumb, unconscious look is not for us. “He also will hear their cry.” Put your wish into words if you want it answered; not for His information, but for your strengthening.

IV. The two processes of satisfying. “Thou openest Thine hand.” That is enough. But God cannot satisfy our deepest desire by any such short and easy method. There is a great deal more to be done by Him before the aspirations of love, and fear, and longing for righteousness can be fulfilled. He has to breathe Himself into us. God’s best gifts cannot be separated from Himself. They are Himself, and in order to “satisfy the desires of them that fear Him” there is no way possible, even to Him, but the impartation of Himself to the waiting heart. He has to discipline us for His highest gifts, in order that we may receive them. And sometimes He has to do that, as I have no doubt He has done it with many of us, by withholding or withdrawing, the satisfaction of some of our lower desires, and so emptying our hearts and turning the current of our wishes from earth to heaven. Not only has He to give us Himself, and to discipline us in order to receive Him, but He has put all His gifts which meet our deepest desires into a great storehouse. He does not open His hand and give us peace and righteousness, and growing knowledge of Himself, and closer union, and the other blessings of the Christian life, but He gives us Jesus Christ. We are to find all these blessings in Him, and it depends upon us whether we find them or not, and how much of them we find. Expand your desires to the width of Christ’s great mercies; for the measure of our wishes is the limit of our possession. He has laid up the supply of all our need in the storehouse, which is Christ; and He has given us the key. Let us see to it that we enter in. “Ye have not because ye ask not.” “To him that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.” (A. Maclaren, D. D.)

Satisfieth:

It is God’s own word. It is not in the world’s vocabulary, much less in the devil’s. This, too, is love’s word. Love is never satisfied until there is a perfect satisfaction. So, then, here is the salvation of our wishes. Nurse your aspirations, encourage your desires. They cannot be too great since God waits to satisfy them. Wishing is not an idle folly when we bring our wishes to God. Then our desires do become pure prophecies; the whispers of God’s love to the soul. Be not afraid of your desires; let the soul be thrilled with the thought of heroism, adventure, nobility, grand deeds grandly done. Take these to God, for He hath need of them, and He knows how to turn these wishes to account. This is the very meaning of our salvation, to turn the idle poetry of our wishes into solid fact that blesses men. It is to inspire the very loftiest longing and to fulfil that which He inspires that Jesus Christ has lived and died and risen in His resurrection power. Do you but give yourself right up to God, and no dream of good is there, no blessed vision of service but shall come to pass. He satisfieth the desire,--the desire of every living thing. (M. G. Pearse.)

All needs freely supplied

A man who engaged a passage on a coasting steamer was in straitened circumstances, and had but a small sum left when his ticket was paid for. Part of this he invested in bread and cheese, thinking the cabin fare too expensive for his limited means. After a while his bread tasted fiat and stale, and his cheese became hard and mouldy. To aggravate matters, he was obliged, three times a day, to inhale the odours from the cook’s galley, and the delicious aromas drove him almost frantic. Finally, when within a day’s sail from the port of destination, he grew desperate. Seeing the steward bearing a huge platter with a turkey, he waylaid him at the entrance of the dining-saloon, and said: “See here, I haven’t much money, but I have stood this thing as long as I can. How much will a dinner like that cost? Cost!” exclaimed the steward; “why, man, it don’t cost you anything, it’s all paid for in your passage.” Our God has made abundant provision for our welfare on the journey heavenward. We do not need to live on dry bread and mouldy cheese. He sets a rich table for all who trust Him. Christ’s command is: Eat and be filled.