Psalms 34

Psalms STRUGGLING AND SEEKINGPsalm 34:10 . If we may trust the superscription of this psalm, it was written by David at one of the very darkest days of his wanderings, probably in the Cave of Adullam, where he had gathered around him a band of outlaws, and was living, to all appearance, a life uncommonly like that of a brigand chief, in the hills. One might have pardoned him if, at such a moment, some cloud of doubt or despondency had crept over his soul. But instead of that his words are running over with gladness, and the psalm begins ‘I will bless the Lord at all times, and His praise shall continually be in my mouth.’ Similarly here he avers, even at a moment when he wanted a great deal of what the world calls ‘good,’ that ‘they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.’ There were lions in Palestine in David’s time. He had had a fight with one of them, as you may remember, and his lurking place was probably not far off the scene of Samson’s exploits. Very likely they were prowling about the rocky mouth of the cave, and he weaves their howls into his psalm: ‘The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good.’ So, then, here are the two thoughts-the struggle that always fails and the seeking that always finds. I.

The struggle that always fails. ‘The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger.’ They are taken as the type of violent effort and struggle, as well as of supreme strength, but for all their teeth and claws, and lithe spring, ‘they lack, and suffer hunger.’ The suggestion is, that the men whose lives are one long fight to appropriate to themselves more and more of outward good, are living a kind of life that is fitter for beasts than for men. A fierce struggle for material good is the true description of the sort of life that hosts of us live. What is the meaning of all this cry that we hear about the murderous competition going on round us? What is the true character of the lives of, I am afraid, the majority of people in a city like Manchester, but a fight and a struggle, a desire to have, and a failure to obtain? Let us remember that that sort of existence is for the brutes, and that there is a better way of getting what is good; the only fit way for man. Beasts of prey, naturalists tell us, are always lean.