This Psalm opens out a new and special source of delight, but which unfolds itself in many other passages. When God put man in Paradise, it was not God's dwelling but man's—God visited him there—though man was already unfit for His presence; but, at best, it was man's dwelling though prepared of God for him. But now God calls us to dwell in His house, His tabernacle. This is altogether a new thing and of sovereign grace-our dwelling with Him and in His house (compare John 14-we learn this by His dwelling in us and so our dwelling in Him) for thus we know the joy of what belongs to the place where God has made His house, and thus become the home of the soul where He dwells. The passages above, Eph. 2, at the end—Rev. 21-1 John 4, and last verse of chapter 3, all open this out.
In this beautiful Psalm, beautiful in its principles for all saints, we find the heart and thoughts of the saints in Israel find a rest again in the courts and dwelling-place of the Lord of Hosts. The relation resumes its place. “The Lord God of Hosts," "The God of Jacob," He is enthroned again in Zion, and in the hearts of all the people. Zion is the center of the hopes and pleasures of the people, happy in God their Lord.
9. We have here the center on which the desired rays of His glory shine. “Blessed the man who dwells!” “Blessed the man in whose heart are the ways!”
This Psa. 1 believe to be the representation of the blessedness of those who are gathering in, one by one, after the close of and clearing of the Jewish land, and those, it appears to me, whether the Remnant in the Land, or rather His elect gathered from the four winds, who have had their strength in Jehovah. It is their return to the joy of their tabernacle, or God's, however now the gathering-point and resort of the people though it be one by one. The last verse has its aspect to Christ, who was the only Faithful One, when the real day of crisis and moral trouble came; all the rest was the fruit of that. The Psalm is full of lovely beauty. I only give its actual basis. It only shows, and there only shows, how every moral blessedness or principle shall be drawn out in the exigencies and orderings of that latter day of restoration.
In this Psalm we have the rest of joy, and strength for the way; in Psa. 63 we have joy in God Himself in contrast with the desert, and hence blessing while we live.
It is well then to compare these two Psalms, as showing, the former the joy of the common celebration of joyful service and praise in God's house—the tabernacles of God—and hence the love to the ways that lead there, let them, as they will, be tears and the Cross, and the deeper sense that, come what will, though sensible of this estrangement from the public celebration of His praise (see Psa. 42, which gives its tone to Psa. 84) God Himself was sufficient for the soul that sought Him, thirsted for Him in the dry and thirsty land where there was not the smallest refreshment—nothing that life could find its object in and refresh itself by; and hence because His loving-kindness was better than life, it could always praise—was satisfied as with marrow and fatness while it lived—though there was nothing for life, could praise still. Nothing separated it from God's love—the thirsty land only threw it more completely on its proper portion.
I cannot enter into God's dealings here to produce this; but what an amazingly blessed and admirable place it sets the soul in! Where God and nothing else makes its happiness—suffices, fills it, and with His own proper purity—Himself in what He is, and naught human to sustain mere nature, and distract the soul from Him. It is divine joy, and independent of all mere creature (as Rom. 8). This enables one to enjoy rightly gifts and blessings, and carries one calmly through sorrows too, for nothing separates from His love. It is not a question of journeying to His tabernacles here, or the way there; only in the thirsty land, the wilderness, God has been and is a help, and one rests under the shadow of His wings there where one is. It is evident how Psa. 42 puts the soul, thus, tried, there; and God knows how to do it for us.