rapturous call to all creatures, animate and inanimate, on earth and in
heaven, to praise Him. The golden waves of music and song pour out ever
faster and fuller. At last we hear this invocation to every instrument
of music to praise Him, responded to, as we may suppose, by each, in
turn as summoned, adding its tributary notes to the broadening river of
harmony--until all, with gathered might of glad sound blended with the
crash of many voices, unite in the final words, 'Let every thing that
hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye the Lord.'

I. We have here a twofold declaration of God's great purpose in all His
self-revelation, and especially in the Gospel of His Son.

Our first text may be translated as a joyful exclamation, 'Oh! the
blessedness of the man--whose delight is in the law of the Lord.' Our
second is an invocation or a command. The one then expresses the purpose
which God secures by His gift of the Law; the other the purpose which He
summons us to fulfil by the tribute of our hearts and songs--man's
happiness and God's glory.

His purpose is Man's blessedness.

That is but another way of saying, God is love. For love, as we know it,
is eminently the desire for the happiness of the person on whom it is
fixed. And unless the love of God be like ours, however it may transcend
it, there is no revelation of Him to our hearts at all. If He be love,
then He 'delights in the prosperity' of His children.

And that purpose runs through all His acts. For perfect love is
all-pervasive, and even with us men, it rules the whole being; nor does
he love at all who seeks the welfare of the heart he clings to by fits