Incomplete redemptions.
While thankfully acknowledging all that God has done for his people, the psalmist clearly sees that it was but the "fierceness" of God's wrath from which he had turned, and that some of his wrath remained, seeing that the work of national recovery was incomplete, and heavy burdens still pressed on the people. Perowne recalls the circumstances of the exiles as Nehemiah found them. They were "in great affliction and reproach." "It was only in the midst of perpetual opposition and. discouragement that he was able to carry on his work. The bright prospect which was opening before the exiles had been quickly dashed. They had returned, indeed, but it was to a desert land and a forsaken city, whose wails were cast down, and her gates burned with fire; whilst jealous and hostile tribes were ever on the watch to assail and vex them. Hence it is that the entreaty for mercy follows so hard upon the acknowledgment that mercy has been vouchsafed." As a person might look, in a depressed mood, on the returned exiles, God's redemption was incomplete. Their restoration to their own land had brought them apparently no rest, no consolation, no hope for the future.
I. THERE IS A SENSE IN WHICH GOD'S REDEMPTIONS ARE NEVER COMPLETE. They are always redemptions from some calamities, not redemptions from all calamities. Every redemption is a beginning, holding within it the promise of something more that God is about to do. Open this fully out by showing that a spiritual redemption is to be followed by a bodily redemption. Christ wins the soul, and then proceeds to win the whole human sphere, and eventually all creation. The great redemption removes the soul penalties of sin; but it is not a perfect redemption until it has removed all the bodily penalties and disabilities of sin also. As a matter of Christian experience, we always feel, with the apostle, as if redemption were something yet to come. As we read our lives, they are still spheres for a divinely redemptive work. The full salvation "is ready to be revealed in the last time." Redemption thought of as complete checks a living dependence. Redemption thought of as incomplete keeps us in close reliance on the present and ever-working Redeemer.
II. THERE IS A SENSE IN WHICH GOD'S REDEMPTIONS ARE EVER IN PROGRESS. They are only incomplete as the building at which the workmen are working. Those exiles would be comforted as they realized God with them, delivering and rescuing, and carrying, in practical detail, to its perfection his gracious redemptive thought.—R.T.