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Calvin on Psalm
22:9-10
“Surely thou didst draw
me forth from the womb, and thou didst cause me to confide upon the
breasts of my mother. I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art
my God from my mother’s belly.”
It is the Holy Spirit
who teaches the faithful the wisdom to collect together, when they
are brought into fear and trouble, the evidences of God’s goodness
to sustain and strengthen their faith. We ought to regard it as an
established principle that God never wearies of exercising his
liberality and the most exuberant bestowment cannot exhaust his
riches. It follows then that as we have experienced him to be a
father from our earliest infancy, he will show himself the same
towards us even to extreme old age.
In acknowledging that
he was taken from the womb by the hand of God, and that God had
caused him to [trust in him] upon the breasts of his mother, the
psalmist means that although by the operation of natural causes
infants come into the world and are nourished by their mother’s
milk, yet the wonderful providence of God brightly shines forth in
that still. It is true that we make less of this miracle because of
its ordinary occurrence, but if ingratitude did not veil our eyes
with stupidity, every childbirth in the world would ravish us with
admiration.
What prevents the
child from perishing -- as it might -- a hundred times in its own
corruption before the time for bringing it forth arrives, except
that God, by his secret and incomprehensible power, keeps it alive
in its grave? And after it is brought into the world, seeing it is
subject to so many miseries and cannot stir a finger to help itself,
how could it live even for a single day, if God did not take it up
into his fatherly bosom to nourish and protect it?
Therefore the psalmist
says with good reason that the infant is cast upon him, for unless
he fed the tender little babes, and watched over all the offices of
the nurse even at the very time of their being brought forth, they
are exposed to a hundred deaths by which they would be suffocated in
an instant.
Commentaries, Psalm 22.
Volume 4, page 359. Grand Rapids: Baker Book Books, repr. 1998.
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