The contrasts of the religious with the irreligious life.
The prophet notices three main contrasts.
I. GOD'S SERVANTS ARE FED WITH A FOOD THAT SATISFIES; HIS ADVERSARIES ARE TORMENTED BY A CEASELESS CRAVING. Man is so constituted that nothing short of his highest good contents him. Earthly blessings, health, wealth, success, fame, power, glory, leave a void in the heart which nothing earthly can fill up. The worldling is always dissatisfied, always desires more than he has, craves some fresh excitement, desires some "new pleasure." "Hungry and thirsty, their souls faint in them" (Psalms 107:5). With God's servants the case is different. A Divine contentedness fills their hearts. They have been given to drink of a water of which "whosoever drinketh shall never thirst," but it "shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14). They have God for their Saviour; they are at one with him; and in this communion they rest satisfied; they neither hunger nor thirst.
II. GOD'S SERVANTS SING FOR JOY OF HEART; HIS ADVERSARIES HOWL FOR VEXATION OF SPIRIT. "The voice of joy and thanksgiving is in the dwellings of the righteous" (Psalms 118:15). The love of God, which "casts out fear" (1 John 4:18), reigns in their hearts, and elevates them above the troubles and anxieties of ordinary human life. They "know whom they have believed;" they know in whom they trust. All their care they have cast upon God; and hence they are without care; their souls are full of an ineffable joy and satisfaction; they want nothing, unless it be to have their communion with God complete (Romans 8:23; 2 Corinthians 5:2, 2 Corinthians 5:4; Philippians 1:23, etc.). But the adversaries of God are always vexed in spirit. Worldly cares trouble them; worldly disappointments annoy them; doubts and misgivings with respect to the future weigh on them; an awful fear lest they have entirely mistaken the true end and aim of life broods over them. In the expressive language of Scripture, they "howl" through anguish of heart—complain, murmur, proclaim themselves pessimists. The world, to their thinking, is the worst of conceivable worlds; the scheme of the universe, if there be any such scheme, a gigantic fraud and mistake.
III. GOD'S SERVANTS BRING A BLESSING UPON THE EARTH; HIS ADVERSARIES LEAVE THEIR NAME AS A CURSE TO IT. "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump": (1 Corinthians 5:6). God would have spared Sodom if it had contained "ten righteous" (Genesis 18:32). It is the existence of his servants upon the earth that especially commends the earth to his care, and causes him to watch over it, to sustain it, and to bless the increase of it. Moreover, the servants of God are a blessing to mankind at large,
God's adversaries, on the contrary, are in every respect a curse to the earth. They debase its moral tone; they stir up strife in it; they are the authors of war, bloodshed, enmities, calumnies, uncleanness, variance, sedition, heresy, blasphemy, and the like; they caused God once to "repent that he had made man on the earth" (Genesis 6:6), and they cause him continually to look upon the earth with more or less of disfavour. Their presence pollutes the earth, and makes it necessary that "the first heaven and the first earth" shall "pass away" (Revelation 21:1), and he superseded by "new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness" (2 Peter 3:13).