This is a Psalm of peculiar beauty. The Remnant in Israel are looking at the house where their fathers praised; and they own to the Lord, as it were, that that holy and beautiful place is laid waste, that all there is silent as death now, but ready to break forth again in the glad performance of vows, and in the gathering of all the world into His sanctuary, when He has heard His people’s prayer (Psa. 65:1-2). In a spirit of repentance, they then own that their iniquities alone must account for their present ruins; but they have confidence in the coming divine remission of their nation’s guilt (Psa. 65:3). They look for God’s goodness to themselves, and for His righteousness upon their enemies; anticipating that the ends of the earth will be moved when they hear of these divine judgments in righteousness on Israel’s enemies (Psa. 65:4-8). And at the close, they anticipate the millennial joy and fruitfulness of the earth, when the Lord shall again become the husbandman of the land of His people, as He was in old time, when His eyes shall return to rest on that land from one end of the year to the other, when beauty and gladness and rich fertility shall attest the care and skill of the divine dresser of His loved and favored vineyard, when days of heaven shall be on earth. (See Deut. 11:10-21.)
Nothing can exceed this picture. The thoughts of the Remnant are rapidly carried through sorrows and judgments up to the millennial rest and prosperity. But there they indulge themselves at some length over the happy scenes around them. The wilderness and the solitary place are glad. The Lord is for the mountains and hills, the rivers and the valleys of Israel again, and they are tilled and sown. “The desolate land shall be tilled, whereas it lay desolate in the sight of all that passed by, and they shall say, This land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden” (Ezek. 36:35). In poetic words—
“The fruitful field
Laughs with abundance—and the land, once lean,
Exults to see its thirsty curse repealed.”