The Psalms With Introductions And Critical Notes Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from The Book of Psalms, Vol. 2: A New Translation With Introductions and Notes, Explanatory and Critical There are some questions which never lose their interest, some problems of which it may be said, that they are ever old and yet ever new. Not the least anxious of such questions are those which deal with God's moral government of the world. They lie close to man's heart, and are ever asking and pressing for solution. They may differ in different times, they may assume various forms, but perhaps no man ever looked thoughtfully on the world as it is, without seeing much that was hard to reconcile with a belief in the love and wisdom of God. One form of this moral difficulty pressed heavily upon the pious Jew under the old Dispensation. It was this: Why should good men suffer, and bad men prosper? This difficulty was aggravated, we must remember, by what seemed to be the manifest contradiction between the express teaching of his Law and the observed facts of human experience. The Law told him that God was a righteous Judge, meting out to men in this world the due recompense of their deeds. The course of the world, where those who had cast off the fear of God were rich and powerful, made him ready to question this truth, and was a serious stumbling-block to his faith. And further, "the Hebrew mind had never risen to the conception of universal law, but was accustomed to regard all visible phenomena as the immediate result of a free Sovereign Will. Direct interposition, even arbitrary interference, was no difficulty to the Jew, to whom Jehovah was the absolute Sovereign of the world, not acting, so far as he could see, according to any established order." Hence it seemed to him inexplicable that the world of life should not reflect perfectly, as in a mirror, the righteousness of God. This is the perplexity which appears in this Psalm, as it does in the 37th, and also in the Book of Job. Substantially it is the same problem: but it is met differently. In the 37th Psalm the advice given is to wait, to trust in Jehovah, and to rest assured that in the end the seeming disorder will be set right even in this world. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.