19. I am a stranger in the earth. This is meant for a plea. By divine command people are bound to be kind to strangers, and what God commands in others he will exemplify in himself. The psalmist was a stranger for God’s sake, else he had been as much at home as worldlings are: he was not a stranger to God, but a stranger to the world, a banished man so long as he was out of heaven. Therefore he pleads, Hide not thy commandments from me. If these are gone, what have I else? Since nothing around me is mine, what can I do if I lose thy Word ? Since none around me know or care to know the way to thyself, what shall I do if I fail to see thy commands, by which alone I can guide my steps to the land where thou dwellest? David implies that God’s commands were his solace in exile: they reminded him of home, and showed him the way thither, and therefore he begged that they might never be hidden from him, by his being unable either to understand them or to obey them. This prayer is a supplement to “open thou mine eyes,” and as the one prays to see, the other deprecates the negative of seeing, namely, the command being hidden. We do well to look at both sides of the blessing we are seeking, and to plead for it from every point of view.
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