We have in these words the confession of Asaph who wrote this Psalm, after the Lord had delivered him from the trial through which he passed, a trial which brought him so low that he concluded his hope and his profession were all in vain. When he got deliverance this was the new song that was in his mouth — “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.”
As the Lord may enable us we shall consider:
1. Those who have this confession and who have a right to such a confession
2. A few things implied in their confession.
It is clear from the Psalm that it is the Israel of God, His own ransomed people, who are led and guided by the Lord. As the Lord delivered His people out of the land of Egypt and guided them through the wilderness, and into possession of Canaan the promised land, so the Lord is guiding all whom He delivers out of the Egypt of a state of nature to the heavenly Canaan of eternal glory. And what is true of them? The Psalmist here through the Holy Spirit tells what is true of them. They are a people to whom the Lord is good, good and gracious to them in all His dealings with them. It is the fruit of His goodness, of His everlasting love to them that they are of a clean heart, that a principle of life and purity was implanted in their souls in the day of their regeneration and thereby blessed in their union to Christ. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.” They shall at last be with Him where He is, beholding His glory, as that is brought before us in Christ’s intercessory prayer on their behalf: “Father I will that they also, whom thou hast given me be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory which thou hast given me; for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.”
There is nothing clean in the heart of man as he is by nature. It is in connection with the heart of man that the question is put: “who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?” The Word of God declares that “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?” The Lord alone knows the depths of depravity of our nature, what a cesspool of filth and sin the heart of man is. “Out of the heart,” says the Saviour, “proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.” We were born in sin and shapen in iniquity. We have a nature that drinks in iniquity like water. Sin is sweet to our fallen and depraved nature. We are guilty before God the Judge of all, of choosing and seeking after the pleasures of sin, which are but for a season, to gratify the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Such is the power and love of sin in the heart of a sinner that he will set at nought the counsel of God, the warnings of God in His Word, no matter how solemn, and the invitation of God, no matter how gracious, in order to go on in his own way. He walks, as the Word of God says, in the ways of his own heart and not in Wisdom’s ways, although Wisdom’s ways are pleasantness and all her paths are peace. He walks in the light of his own eyes and not in the light of God’s Word, vainly and foolishly imagining that all shall be well. But what the Lord says shall stand — “Rejoice, O young man in thy youth; and let thy heart cheer thee in the days of thy youth; and walk in the ways of thine heart, and in the sight of thine eyes; but know thou that for all these things God will bring thee into judgment.”
We live in a day when the counsel of God is cast aside by leaders in the professing Church. Like the false prophets of old they stand not in the counsel of the Lord, and the woe of the Lord is upon them. The pronouncements they make on doctrinal and moral issues are diametrically opposed to God’s counsel. “They have rejected the Word of the Lord and what wisdom is in them.” They are blind leaders. The light which they profess to have is darkness, and those who follow them are blind also. “But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost; in whom the god of this world hath blinded the eyes of them that believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ should shine unto them.” All who sponsor and support the Ecumenical movement are blinded by Satan as an angel of light and are heading towards the midnight darkness of the Church of Rome in time, and towards the blackness of darkness in eternity. “To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according to this Word, it is because there is no light in them.”
The leaders in the State are equally guilty of rejecting the counsel of the Lord. The civil magistrate or the civic authorities are duty bound according to the Word of God, to uphold the law of God, not only the second table of the law, in seeing to it that thieves, murderers and all evil doers are judged and punished for their crimes, but also the first table of the law, the first four commandments setting forth our duty to God. In holding the view that this is outside their province they prove their rejection of the counsel of God, and that is clearly revealed in the recent decision of the Wellington City Council to permit organised sport on the Lord’s Day. The god of this generation is but an idol of their own imagination, not the one living and true God who is infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, and in all His glorious perfections, unchangeable too in His hatred of sin. The God of truth cannot be mocked, as desecrators of His day shall discover, either in mercy or in judgment. “Cursed is that health,” said the great Dr Love, one of the most renowned ministers of Scotland in the 18th century, “and cursed is that wealth and cursed is that recreation which is obtained by criminal encroachments on God’s holy day.” And the saintly Rev. Murray McCheyne said that the polished Sabbath breaker and the murderer are one in God’s sight. They are both guilty of contempt and defiance of God’s law. The polished Sabbath breaker is guilty of trampling under foot the memorial of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, and therefore guilty of trampling under foot the blood of Christ and of rejecting the great salvation which Christ by His precious blood obtained. Sabbath breakers are pure in their own eyes. They do not look upon their Sabbath breaking as a sin. God in His Word declares that “There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness.” Sabbath breakers are in that class. They are not of the Israel of God who are clean in heart because washed with the washing of regeneration. If you have no love for God’s day and seek your own pleasure on it, you are not of the Israel of God who are journeying toward eternal glory. You are being led captive by the devil at his will on the way that will end, if you repent not, in eternal perdition.
We shall now notice the counsel by which the Lord is leading His people, and according to which He will bring them at last to glory. That counsel is the covenant of grace. Were it not for the covenant of grace no sinner of the lost race to which we belong would ever get grace in time or glory in eternity. By breaking the covenant of works, Adam the covenant head and representative of the human race, forfeited the promise of eternal life and procured for himself and for his posterity the sentence of eternal death. But the Lord in His grace, love and mercy, made the covenant of grace with His beloved Son on behalf of all whom He purposed to save, a number which no man can number, as the dust of the earth, and the stars of the heaven, innumerable. It is in terms of this everlasting covenant that Christ assumed in the womb of the Virgin the nature of those whom He came to save. In terms, too, of the covenant of grace, He satisfied all the claims of God’s law and justice, made reconciliation for iniquity and brought in an everlasting righteousness, purchased eternal life for sinners deserving eternal death, pardon and peace for the guilty and the lost. Christ is the Head and Mediator of the covenant of grace. All the blessings of the covenant and the blessings of salvation are at His disposal, and conveyed and revealed by the Holy Spirit to all who are savingly taught by Him. The Father, Son and Holy Ghost are one, one in their witness that God hath given to us eternal life and that this life is in His Son. However guilty, ruined, lost and hell deserving you may be, there is eternal life in Christ for you. “Incline your ear,” he says, “and come unto me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David.” The blessings to be found in Christ, bound up in the eternal life that is in Him, are sure mercies. He Himself says, “I came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” The witness and testimony of His Israel is, “Thou hast received gifts for men, for such as did rebel; Yea, ev’n for them, that God the Lord in midst of them might dwell.” “Hear and your soul shall live.” Hear what He says concerning you that you have destroyed yourself, that you are undone in your state and nature. You say, I believe that I am a graceless and Christless sinner. On what authority do you believe that? I believe it on the authority of God’s Word, for if I would say otherwise I know I would be but deceiving myself. And if you believe that on the authority of God’s Word, you have the authority and the warrant of God’s Word for believing that there is in Christ, and in Christ alone, what will meet all your needs as a sinner. “O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself, but in Me is thine help.” “Hear and your soul shall live and I will make an everlasting covenant with you.” What a blessing it would be if you would hear in your soul the voice of Christ speaking to you as a sinner and calling upon you to return to Him and to receive that eternal life which is to be found in Him alone. And at this very moment that gracious invitation is coming to us from the Saviour, for He is nigh to us in His Word. How we should be crying to Him — O Lord turn me from every evil way. Enlighten me lest the sleep of death me overtake. Remember me with that love which thou bearest to thine own. Visit my soul with that salvation wherein thy glory is made great. Leave me not to be deceiving myself for eternity. Wash me and I shall be whiter than the snow. You will find Christ to be according to His Word, for He never said to the seed of Jacob to seek His face in vain.
Now, those who are of the Israel of God are fully satisfied with God’s counsel, with God’s way of salvation. It is salvation from sin and salvation that ensures conformity to the image of Christ. They know that without holiness no man shall see the Lord, but there is in this salvation what will sanctify them and make them perfect in holiness at death. We find David confessing on his death-bed, “Although my house be not so with God; yet he hath made with me an everlasting covenant, ordered in all things and sure; for this is all my salvation, and all my desire, although he make it not to grow.” If the question were put to David, “How do you know David, that the Lord has made an everlasting covenant with you and that the blessings of the covenant are yours, grace in time and glory in eternity?” We have his own answer — “It is all my salvation and all my desire.” I desire no other salvation but this salvation, the salvation planned and presented in the covenant that is ordered in all things and sure.
If you are satisfied with God’s way of salvation, that there is no hope for you apart from Christ and His precious blood, with God’s way of salvation, with the glorious scheme of redemption, things which the angels desire to look into, you cannot but be dissatisfied with yourself. The house of your soul is far from what you would have it to be. But with all your backwardness, backsliding and wretchedness is this not your cry — “Say unto my soul, I am thy salvation?” It is because you are a partaker of that salvation that you are satisfied with Christ and dissatisfied with yourself. You are embraced in the promise of the covenant. “For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee.”
The Word of God which is His counsel, is precious to His Israel. They do not sit in judgment on the Word of God, for they have been, and are being judged by it. All who sit in judgment on God’s Word, impugn its inspiration and infallibility and are not of the Israel of God. They are of their father the devil and his lusts they will do. They are in this dark day of apostacy like a plague in the schools, colleges and pulpits of our land. All who have an ear and a heart for their teaching are not of Christ’s sheep. The Lord Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd, says concerning His sheep “And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.”
The doctrines of Christ are to His Israel the words of eternal life. What His counsel reveals they accept. Saving faith receives and embraces the doctrines of the faith — the fall of man, his total depravity and inability, the doctrine of election, redemption by the blood, regeneration by the Spirit, the perseverance of the saints and the offer of Christ, free, full and unfettered to all to whom the gospel comes.
II. It is clear from the history of the Israel of God that, through the power of indwelling sin, unbelief and the wiles of Satan, at times they have been taken aside to follow counsels of their own.
It was his own counsel that Jonah the prophet of the Lord followed when he fled to Tarshish. It was not the counsel of the Lord that Joshua and the elders of Israel followed when they gave the right hand of fellowship to the Gibeonites, for the account they gave of themselves was so plausible and the evidences, that they had come a long journey, so convincing. But Joshua and the elders of Israel soon discovered that they had been taken in. And the reason? — “they asked not counsel at the mouth of the Lord.” And how often history repeats itself. Philip the evangelist, a man full of the Holy Ghost, received and baptised Simon the sorcerer, and the apostle Paul speaks of Demas who afterwards fell away, having loved this present world, as a fellow-labourer.
It was following his own counsel, his own reasoning on the dispensations of God in His providence that led Asaph, as he confesses in this Psalm, into the trial which brought him so low. He saw and even envied the prosperity of the wicked. They rejected the counsel of the Lord, blasphemed His name, lived as if God did not exist, and yet they prospered. On the other hand Asaph was given the bread of adversity and the water of affliction. “All the day long I have been plagued, and chastened every morning.” During this period all that he was conscious of was the plague of his own heart, plagued by its carnality and corruption and the rod of the Lord upon him. “Verily,” he concludes, “I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocency.” “With the heart,” it is written “man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” My faith cannot be saving and the public profession I have made cannot but be false. It cannot be that I am of the Israel of God to whom the Lord is good and who are of a clean heart.
But although Asaph was writing bitter things against himself, he was by his speech betraying that he was an Israelite indeed. “If I say I will speak thus; behold I should offend gainst the generation of thy children.” There is a tenderness in grace toward the Lord’s people. Although I cannot see myself to be of them, I know the Lord is good to His Israel and I would not desire to hurt them. One of Jonathan Edwards’ seventy resolutions was, “Let there be something of benevolence in all that I speak.” Asaph also desired to be in the sanctuary of God. “The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob.” Grace in the heart loves what the Lord loves, where the Lord is publicly honoured and publicly praised. The godly in the past, although none more diligent in the private means than they, would walk long distances to be present in the public means. In the days of the persecution in Scotland a young woman set off to attend a communion service far among the hills and the glens which afforded seclusion and protection. The journey was long, and she was in danger, if caught, of being either tortured or shot. The Red Dragoons who were out for the life of the Lord’s witnesses spied her and rode up to her. On enquiring where she was going, she said, “The Elder Brother has died. His last will and testament is being read today and I am going to see if there is anything in the will for me.” Not understanding the language of Canaan, they expressed their sympathy in her loss and allowed her to continue her journey.
It was in God’s sanctuary that Asaph got deliverance. The Lord in leaving Asaph’s deliverance in the sanctuary on record, did so for our learning, that with David who also honoured the private means, we might say — “A day in thy courts is better than a thousand.” I knew a godly woman in Scotland whose prayer and desire was that when she would not be able to attend the public means of grace that the Lord would remove her out of this world. Her desire was granted to her. In her younger days she used to walk the distance of about 30 miles to a neighbouring parish to hear the Word of life, denied her at that time in the parish in which she lived.
Asaph was given to see in the sanctuary the end of the wicked. He may have heard in the reading of the law the solemn words “To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time : for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.” He sees them hastening unconcernedly down on the slippery slope of worldly prosperity to be received at death not into glory, but to be cast into the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone which is the second death. And he exclaims, “How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment! they are utterly consumed with terrors.”
“How foolish and ignorant I was and in thy sight a beast! Nevertheless I am continually with thee.” I am not with the wicked, their way is not my way, their prosperity is not my portion. I am not with them. I am with thee. I am continually with thee even when in deep and darksome caves. Thou art ever watching over me for thou art the Keeper of Israel who slumbers not nor sleeps, and who art making continual intercession on behalf on thine own. Asaph’s deliverance was the fruit of Christ’s intercession as surely as Peter’s was. “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat, but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.”
“Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel.” Save me from walking in counsels of mine own. It is thy counsel that shall stand. Thy counsel is good, for good is the will of the Lord. What thou hast ordained for me shall come to pass, for the covenant is ordered in all things and sure. Whatsoever comes to pass is for thy glory, and what is for thy glory must be for my good. Thou art guiding thine Israel by a right way however dark and difficult and mysterious the way at times may appear.
“And afterward receive me to glory.” Thou art my shepherd. Thou hast restored my soul from wandering in forbidden paths which led me into darkness and bondage. Reviving and restoration are in the covenant for His Israel. “Many times did he deliver them; but they provoked him with their counsel, and were brought low for their iniquity. Nevertheless he regarded their affliction, when he heard their cry, and he remembered for them his covenant, and repented according to the multitude of his mercies.” “My soul He doth restore again,” is the testimony of His Israel. The Psalmist therefore in the light of the Lord’s manifold restorations and deliverances to his soul from darkness, desertion and bondage, could say, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” My foes shall be found liars unto me. I shall feast eternally in Immanuel’s land. I shall be anointed with the oil of gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away. My cup shall be overflowing and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.
“Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel and afterward receive me to glory.”
Are they not a blessed people whose God is the Lord! They only are a happy people. “Happy art thou, O Israel: who is like unto thee, O 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.” You shall never know what true peace and true happiness is until you find the peace and the happiness that is in the One who redeemed His people and who says “I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” And the message also of His Word is to you, “The Master is come and calleth for thee.” “The Master is come and calleth for thee.”