read in Deut. xxx. 2, 3, "to the Lord thy God, and the Lord thy God
turneth to thy captivity." And in the same chapter, vers. 6, 7: "The
Lord thy God circumciseth thy heart, and _then_ the Lord thy God
putteth all these curses upon thine enemies." Before Gideon is called
to be the deliverer of the people from Midian, the Prophet must first
hold up their sin to the people, Judg. vi. 8 ff., and Gideon does not
begin his work with a struggle against the outward enemies, but must,
first of all, as Jerubbabel, declare war against sin. All the
prosperous periods in the people's history are, at the same time,
periods of spiritual revival. We need only think of David, Jehoshaphat,
and Hezekiah. Outward deliverance always presents itself in history as
an _addition_ only which is bestowed upon those seeking after the
kingdom of God. Without the inward foundation, the bestowal of the
outward blessing would be only a mockery, inasmuch as the holy God
could not but immediately take away again what He had given. But the
circumstance that it is the _outward_ salvation, the deliverance from
the heathen servitude, the elevation of the people of God to the
dominion of the world, as in Christ it so gloriously took [Pg 77]
place, which are here, in the first instance, looked at, is easily
accounted for from the historical cause of this prophetic discourse
which, _in the first instance, is directed against the fears of the
destruction of the kingdom of God by the world's power_. Ps. xxiii. 4;
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear
no evil; for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,"
must so much the more he considered as the fundamental passage of the
verse under consideration, that the Psalm, too, refers to the whole
Christian Church. It was in the appearance of Christ, and the salvation
brought through Him, in the midst of the deepest misery, that this
Psalm found its most glorious confirmation.--[Hebrew: clmvt], "darkness
of death," is the darkness which prevails in death or in Sheol. Such
compositions commonly occur in proper names only, not in appellatives;
and hence, by "the land of the darkness (shadow) of death," hell is to
be understood. But darkness of hell is, by way of a shortened
comparison, not unfrequently used for designating the deepest darkness.
The point of comparison is here furnished by the first member of the
verse. Parallel is Ps. lxxxviii. 4 ff., where Israel laments th