“The young lions do lack and suffer hunger, but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good” (Ps. 34:10).
One might have pardoned David at such a moment in the wilderness of his life if some cloud of doubt or despondency had crept over his soul. But instead of that his words are running over with gladness, and the psalm begins, “I will bless the Lord at all times, and His praise shall continually be in my mouth.” Similarly here he avers, even at a moment when he wanted a great deal of what the world calls “good,” that “they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.”
There were lions in Israel in David’s time. Very likely they were prowling about near the rocky mouth of the cave, and he weaves their howls into his psalm: “The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger, but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good.” Here, then, are two thoughts: the struggle that always fails and the seeking that always finds.
The struggle that always fails: “The young lions do lack and suffer hunger” are taken as the type of violent effort and struggle, but “they lack and suffer hunger.” The suggestion is, that the men whose lives are one long fight to appropriate for themselves more and more of outward good, are living a kind of life that is fitter for beasts than for men. A fierce struggle for material good is the true description of the sort of life that hosts of us live.
What is the meaning of all this cry that we make about the murderous competition going on around us? What is the true character of the lives of people in a city, but a fight and a struggle, a desire to have, and failure to obtain? Let us remember that that sort of existence is for the brutes, and that there is a better way of getting what is good; the only fit way for man. Beasts of prey, naturalists tell us, are always lean. It is the graminivorous order that meekly and peacefully crop the pastures, that are well fed and in good condition–“which are an allegory.”
“The young lions do lack and suffer hunger”–and that just states the fact that is every man’s experience. For there is no satisfaction or success ever to be won by this way of fighting and struggling and scheming and springing at the prey. For if we do not utterly fail, which is the lot of so many of us, still partial success has little power of bringing perfect satisfaction to a human spirit.
In every way it is true that the little annoyances, like a grain of dust in a sensitive eye, take all the sweetness out of mere material good. And I suppose that the are no more bitterly disappointed men in this world than the perfectly “successful men” as the world counts them. They have been disillusioned in the process of acquirement.
You remember the old story of the Arabian Nights, about the wonderful palace that was built by magic, full of treasures, but an enemy looked on all the wealth and suggested a previously unnoticed defect by saying, “You have not a roc’s egg.” The owner had never thought about getting a roc’s egg, and did not know what it was. But the consciousness of something lacking had been roused, and it marred his enjoyment of what he had, and drove him to set out on his travels to secure the missing thing.
There is always something lacking, for our desires grow far faster than their satisfactions; and the more we have, the wider our longing reaches out, so that as the wise old Book has it, “He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver, nor he that loveth abundance with increase.” You cannot fill a soul with the whole universe if you do not put God in it. The greatest work of fiction of modern times, as I take it, ends, or all but ends, with a sentence something like this, “Ah! who of us has what he wanted, or, having it, is satisfied?” “The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger” and the struggle always fails–“but they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing.”
The seeking which always finds: Now, how do we “seek the Lord?” It is metaphorical expression, of course, which needs to be carefully interpreted in order not to lead us into a great mistake. We do not seek Him as if He had not sought us or was hiding from us. It is a short search that the child by her mother’s skirts, or her father’s side, has to make for mother or father. It is a shorter search that we have to make for God.
We seek Him by desire. Do you want Him? A great many of us do not. We seek Him by such a turning of thought to Him, as will prevent our most earnest working upon things material from descending to the likeness of the lions’ fighting for it. We seek Him by desire, by communion, by obedience. And they who thus seek Him find Him in the act of seeking Him, just as certainly as if I open my eye I see the light. For He is always seeking us.
That is a beautiful word of our Lord’s to which we do not always attach all its value. “The Father seeketh such to worship Him.” Why put the emphasis upon the “such,” as if it were a definition of the only kind of acceptable worship? It is that. But we might put more emphasis on the “seeketh” without spoiling the logic of the sentence. Thereby we should come nearer the truth of what God’s heart to us is.
If we do seek Him we shall surely find. In this region there is no search that is vain, no desire unaccomplished, no failure possible. We each of us have precisely as much of God as we desire to have. If there is only a very little of the Water of Life in our vessels it is because we did not care to possess any more. “Seek, and ye shall find.”
We shall be sure to find everything in God. Look at the grand confidence, and the utterance of a life’s experience in these great words: “Shall not want any good.” For God is everything to us, and everything else is nothing; and it is the presence of God in anything that makes it truly able to satisfy our desires. Human love, sweet and precious, dearest and best of all earthly possessions as it is, fails to fill a heart unless the love grasps God as well as the beloved dying creature. And so with regard to all other things. They are good when God is in them, and they are ours in God. They are naught when wrenched away from Him.
You remember the old rabbinical tradition which speaks a deep truth, dressed in a fanciful shape. It says that the manna in the wilderness tasted to every man in the wilderness just what he desired, of whatever dainty or nutrient he was most wishful. The one God is everything to us all, anything that we desire, and the thing that we need. “Seek ye first the kingdom…and all these things shall be added unto you.”
Let us begin, dear brethren, with seeking, and then the struggling will not be violent, nor self-willed, nor will it fail. If we begin with seeking, and have God, be sure that all we need we shall get, and that what we do not get, we do not need. It is hard to believe it when our vehement wishes go out to something that His serene wisdom does not send. It is hard to believe it when our bleeding hearts are being wrenched away from something around which they have clung. But it is true for all that. And he that can say, “Whom have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire but Thee,” will find that the things which he enjoys in subordination to his one supreme good are a thousand times more precious when they are regarded as second than they ever could be when our folly tried to make them first.
Now, all that is very old-fashioned truth. Dear brethren, if we believed it, and lived by it, “the peace of God which passes understanding” would “keep our hearts and our minds.”
There be many that cry, “Oh, that one would show me any good.” The wise do not cry to men, but pray to God: “Lord, lift Thou the light of Thy countenance upon me.”