CHAPTER 9

From Psalm cxliii.

The Descent of the Lord from Heaven for Men's Salvation, (d) and the New Song sung thereafter, which is the Song of the New Covenant.

[Passages quoted, Ps. cxliii. 3, 5, 9.]

I CONSIDER this to be connected with my present subject. (267) For in his wonder at the knowledge of God the Word coming to men, the Psalmist is astonished above measure at the love by which He descends from His Divinity, and lessens His natural Majesty, and reckons the human race worthy of bearing Him. So here he prays, saying, "Lord, bow the heavens and descend." While in the Seventeenth Psalm it is written, "And he bowed the heavens, and descended, and it was dark under his feet. And he rode upon Cherubim, and flew, he flew upon the wings of the winds," wherein there is a prophecy of His Ascension (b) from earth to heaven. And when there is a fit opportunity I will shew that we must understand the Descent and Ascension of God the Word not as of one moving locally, but in the metaphorical sense which Scripture intends in the use of such conventional terms.

But we should also note here the new Covenant, into which the Coming of Christ was about to invite men. And the new Covenant is that which succeeds the old and is given to all nations. And so the oracle before us says, "O God, I will sing a new song to thee." The words, (c) "Touch the mountains and they shall smoke," I think are a veiled prophecy of the burning and abolition of all forms of idolatry, which had its chief seats among the ancients in mountains, it being a common charge against the Jews themselves, that they worshipped idols on every high mountain in imitation of foreign nations.