“You,
who are kept by the power of God…”
1
Peter 1:5
I
will lift up my eyes to the hills—
From
whence comes my help?
My help comes from the LORD,
Who
made heaven and earth.
He
will not allow your foot to be moved;
He
who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Shall
neither slumber nor sleep.
The
LORD is your keeper;
The
LORD is your shade at your right hand…
The
LORD shall keep you from all evil;
He
shall preserve your soul.
The
LORD shall keep your going out and your coming in
From
this time forth, and even forevermore.”
Psalm
121:1-5, 7-8
The
word Peter uses, kept, is the same word the Apostle Paul uses when he is
talking about the Governor under King Aretas who guarded the city of the
Damascenes. It is the same word that the same Apostle employs, with the same
emblematical reference as here, when he speaks of ‘the peace of God’ as
guarding your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. That is to say, we are to think
of some little undefended, unwalled village, which is made safe because a
strong force is thrown into it. St. Peter thinks that every Christian man has
enemies that he cannot beat back alone, and he thinks that every Christian man
may have round him a ring of defense against which all enemies will break and
foam themselves away like waves against a lighthouse.
First, the keeping is
all-inclusive. What is kept? We are kept. How much of us? The whole being. Does
God keep one part of us and not another? No. Some people have an idea that this
is a sort of vague general keeping, and that God will keep them in such a way
that when they die they will get to heaven. But they do not apply that word
‘kept’ to everything in their being and nature. And yet that is what God wants.
There are some people who
think God will keep them in spiritual but not in temporal things. Now, God
sends us to work in the world, but He does not say: I must now leave you to
earn your own money, and to get your livelihood for yourself. He knows we are
not able to keep ourselves. God says: My child, there is no work you are to do,
and no business in which you are engaged, and not a penny which you are to spend,
but I, your Father, will take into My keeping. God cares not only for the
spiritual, but also for the temporal. The greater part of the life of many
people must be spent amid the temptations and distractions of business; but God
will care for them there. The keeping of God includes all. In sunshine as in
the gloom, our God is ready to keep us all the time.
Once more, there are
others who think of God’s keeping thus: God will keep me from doing very great
wickedness, but there are small sins I cannot expect Him to keep me from. There
is the sin of temper. I cannot expect God to conquer that. When you hear of
some man who has been tempted and gone astray, or fallen into drunkenness or
murder, you thank God for His keeping power. ‘I might have done the same as
that man,’ you say, ‘if God had not kept me.’ We believe He keeps us from
drunkenness and murder. And why do we not believe that He can keep us from
outbreaks of temper? We thought that this was of less importance; we did not
remember that the great commandment of the New Testament is, ‘Love one another
as I have loved you.’ And when our temper and hasty judgment and sharp words
came out we sinned against the highest law—the law of God’s love. And yet we
say: God will not, God cannot—no, we will not say God cannot; but we say, God
does not—keep me from that. We perhaps say: He can; but there is something in
me that cannot attain to it, and which God does not take away. Listen to these
words, ‘Kept by the power of God.’ There is no qualifying clause to them. The
meaning is, that, if we will entrust ourselves entirely and absolutely to the
omnipotence of God, He will delight to keep us.
This keeping is not only
an all-inclusive keeping, it is also an almighty
keeping. God is almighty, and the Almighty God offers Himself to work in my
heart, to do the work of keeping me; and I want to get linked with Omnipotence,
or rather, linked to the Omnipotent One, to the living God, to have my place in
the hollow of His hand. David had very wonderful views of how the everlasting
God is Himself the hiding-place of the believing soul, and of how He takes the
believer and keeps him in the very hollow of His hand, in the secret of His
pavilion, under the shadow of His wings, under His very feathers. And we who
are the children of Pentecost, we who have known Christ and His blood and the
Holy Spirit sent down from heaven, why is it we know so little of what it is to
walk confidently step by step with the Almighty God as our Keeper?
God comes to us as the
Almighty One, and without any condition He offers to be our Keeper, and His
keeping means that day by day, moment by moment, God is going to keep us.
JAMES HASTINGS
First
Epistle of S. Peter
Look
out and up, then. Look up ‘from the depth,’ the vast depth of your weakness,
perhaps of your mysteriously inherited weakness. Look up out of your failure
under some temptation, inward or outward, inherited, so to speak from yourself,
from your own unfaithfulness in the past. Look up out of your ruined
purposes—unto Himself. He is able to rebuild, and more than rebuild, the ruins.
He is able to untie the knot, and draw out straight the line of will and
obedience to Himself. Being what His is, Keeper of Israel, God of the Promise,
Lord of the Sacrifice, Prince of Life, present Savior, indwelling Power, He is
able to keep you that your feet shall not totter.”
H.C.G. MOULE
All
in Christ
Will
our God, in His tenderhearted love towards us, not keep us every moment when He
has promised to do so?
ANDREW MURRAY
