The Reach of His Faithfulness
George H. Morrison
Psalm 36:5
The faithfulness of God is one of the strong truths of the Old Testament. It is one distinction of the Jewish faith in contrast with the ancient pagan faiths. Pagan gods were not generally faithful, whether in Babylon or Greece. They were immoral, careless of their promises, regardless of their plighted word. And the wonderful thing about the Jewish faith was that the God of the Jew was always faithful, both to His covenant and to His children. This magnificent and upholding thought sprang not alone from personal experience. It was interwoven with the fact that the Jewish faith was an historical religion. The Jew could look backward over the tracts of time and discover there the faithfulness of God in a way that one brief life might never show. As he recalled the story of the past, of Abraham traveling to the promised land, of the slaves in Egypt rescued from their slavery, of the desert pilgrimage of forty years, one thing stamped upon his heart, never to be erased by any finger, was that the Lord was a faithful God. That thought sustained the psalmist and with him all the saints of the Old Covenant. In the Old Testament the word faith is rare; but the word faithfulness occurs a score of times. And here the psalmist in his poetic way, and like Jesus drawing his images from nature, says, Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.
One thinks, for instance, of the clouds of Scripture in such a passage as the Ascension story. When our Lord ascended to the Father, a cloud received Him from the disciples' sight (Acts 1:9). That was a lonesome and desolating hour when the cloud wrapped Him around, and He was gone. They had loved Him so and leaned upon Him so, that I take it they were well-nigh brokenhearted. Then the days went on, and they discovered that the engulfing cloud was not the end of everything. It, too, was touched by the faithfulness of heaven. He had promised to be with them always, and He was ...
George H. Morrison
Psalm 36:5
The faithfulness of God is one of the strong truths of the Old Testament. It is one distinction of the Jewish faith in contrast with the ancient pagan faiths. Pagan gods were not generally faithful, whether in Babylon or Greece. They were immoral, careless of their promises, regardless of their plighted word. And the wonderful thing about the Jewish faith was that the God of the Jew was always faithful, both to His covenant and to His children. This magnificent and upholding thought sprang not alone from personal experience. It was interwoven with the fact that the Jewish faith was an historical religion. The Jew could look backward over the tracts of time and discover there the faithfulness of God in a way that one brief life might never show. As he recalled the story of the past, of Abraham traveling to the promised land, of the slaves in Egypt rescued from their slavery, of the desert pilgrimage of forty years, one thing stamped upon his heart, never to be erased by any finger, was that the Lord was a faithful God. That thought sustained the psalmist and with him all the saints of the Old Covenant. In the Old Testament the word faith is rare; but the word faithfulness occurs a score of times. And here the psalmist in his poetic way, and like Jesus drawing his images from nature, says, Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.
One thinks, for instance, of the clouds of Scripture in such a passage as the Ascension story. When our Lord ascended to the Father, a cloud received Him from the disciples' sight (Acts 1:9). That was a lonesome and desolating hour when the cloud wrapped Him around, and He was gone. They had loved Him so and leaned upon Him so, that I take it they were well-nigh brokenhearted. Then the days went on, and they discovered that the engulfing cloud was not the end of everything. It, too, was touched by the faithfulness of heaven. He had promised to be with them always, and He was ...
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