Himself _a shade upon the right hand, and the sun shall not smite by day,
nor the moon by night_. And there is the Loneliness of the Deep, when we
are plunged into the pit of our hearts to fight with terrible
temptations--a conflict no other man knows about or can help us in. Shall
God, Who sees us fighting there, and falling under the sense of our
helplessness, leave us to fight alone? The Lord is thy shade on thy right
hand; thy Comrade, fighting with thee, His presence shall keep thy heart
brave and thine arm fresh. It is a truth enforced through the whole of the
Old Testament. God is not a God far away. He descends, He comes to our
side: He battles for and suffers with His own.

These then are the main thoughts of this Psalm. What new authority and
vividness have Jesus Christ and His Cross put into them? There are few of
the Psalms which the early Christians more frequently employed of Christ.
On the lintel of an ancient house in Hauran I once read the inscription:
'O Jesus Christ, be the shelter and defence of the home and of the whole
family, and bless their incoming and outgoing.' How may we also sing this
Psalm of Christ? By remembering the new pledges He has given us, that God's
thoughts and God's heart are with us. By remembering the infinite degree,
which the Cross has revealed, not only of the interest God takes in our
life, but of the responsibility He Himself assumes for its eternal issues.
The Cross was no new thing. The Cross was the putting of the Love of God,
of the Blood of Christ, into the old fundamental pieties of the human
heart, the realising by Jesus in Himself of the dearest truths about God.
Look up, then, and sing this Psalm of Him. Can we lift our eyes to any of
the hills without seeing His figure upon them? Is there a human ideal, duty
or hope, with which Jesus is not inseparably and for ever identified? Is
there a human experience--the struggle of the individual heart in
temptation, the pity of the multitude, the warfare against the strongholds
of wickedness--from which we can imagine Him absent? No; it is impossible