Still another utterance of the same suppliant in the same condition. But there is more desire after the house of God, longing for the ark and habitation of the Lord; and thus an advance still in the experience and liberty of the soul may be observed in this Psalm, as in the preceding.
This Psalm may have been the breathing of our blessed Lord while He was standing silent before Caiaphas (Matt. 26:63). False witnesses were then rising up against Him; but those who came to eat up His flesh had already fallen. (See Matt. 26:59; John 18:6.) At that moment also He anticipated His glory. (See Psalm 27:6; Matt. 26:64.) And we know that in those trying sufferings He was sustained by hope. (Psalm 27:13; Heb. 12:2.)
The strong and abrupt change in the current of the soul at Psalm 27:7 is easily understood by the Lord’s history. It is just what might be looked for, as He passed from witnessing the divine favor expressed in the garden, to become the captive of the wicked (John 18:6,12).
But I am quite prepared to refuse the suggestion which has long been made by some who have exercised their thoughts (and that too in a spirit of reverence) over the Psalms, that if the Lord be seen or heard in one verse of a Psalm, the whole of it must be received as belonging to Him. The word of the Lord to David by Nathan in 1 Chronicles 17 would be witness against this; for there the words “I will be His Father, and He shall be My Son” are applied to the Lord Jesus (Heb. 1:5), while at the same time we may most fully assure ourselves that the whole of that divine oracle could not be so applied to Him.
In the last verse Jesus, as it were, delivers a word of exhortation to His saints, as the fruit of His own experience, as I may say He does at the close of Isaiah 1, and still more surely at the close of Matthew 11; and I may add that we see one of His saints very much with Him in the spirit that animates Him here; for here we find confidence, though in the midst of the din of war and trouble, just because the heart was set upon one thing—desire to dwell in the house of the Lord. And “the same spirit of faith” is found in St. Paul when he says, “Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord ... .We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5).
And the Apostle himself, under the Holy Ghost, traces another kindred mind between him and his Lord in the chapter that precedes this. (See 2 Cor. 4:13, and Psa. 116:10.)