PSALM 24

All through the Bible we are taught that the demonstration of harmony, that is, health, prosperity, and happiness, is God’s Will for man; because until he has attained all-round harmony, man is not expressing God—and to express God is his destiny.

The Twenty-fourth Psalm is the great summing up of the Bible teaching on this subject. In the unique Bible idiom it explains harmony, which is the true meaning of salvation; and it analyzes in a masterly fashion, as only the Bible can, the causes that produce harmony. In its literary form the Psalm is a magnificent prose-poem in five stanzas. The first verse constitutes a concise, and, at the same time, exhaustive statement of the great metaphysical law. Let us consider what it really says, or, in other words, let us translate the technical terms employed into the common phraseology of modern life.

The opening verse forms one of the best known phrases in the Scriptures.

The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

These words are constantly quoted on all sorts of occasions, but the context in which they are used seldom gives evidence of any spiritual understanding of their true import. At worst, I have seen them used as an attempt at consolation in the face of death or of great financial misfortune. The implication seems to be that as everything belongs to God, He is entitled to destroy whatever He pleases without consulting the feelings of mankind. At best, they are taken in the sense of pious, but rather vague, recognition of God as the general source of our supply. Of course, even the vaguest recognition of this primary fact is better than no recognition at all; but unless we get a definite, scientific understanding of the meaning underlying the words, we shall derive no real profit from them.

  To suppose that God, the Great Source, Substance Itself, could cause, or even endorse death or misfortune, is the deadly error that lies at the root of all our troubles; and it is characteristic of the carnal mind thus to pervert a text which, above most others in the Bible, explains the real Law of Life and Prosperity. This carnal mind, as Paul calls it, is, of course, nothing but our own restricted and ignorant manner of thinking. To be ignorant of the laws of life, or to misunderstand them, cannot, it is true, change those laws; but it can and does cause us suffering and deprivation of every kind—even to the death-belief itself—until such habits of thought are corrected.

The key to the true meaning of this first stanza is found in the two pivotal words, “Lord” and “earth,” and here at the very beginning we must pause and ask ourselves what we mean by the Lord. “God, of course,” we will say, and that is true; but in the Bible the word “Lord,” as a rule, means God in the special sense of our own Indwelling Christ; our own true identity, the Divine Spark—the I AM. So this verse states, once and for all, that the “earth” which, as we know, is a general term covering all our expression or manifestation, is under the jurisdiction of the I AM. Now all trouble of every kind really arises from the belief that the “earth” is subject to the dominion of some outer power or law which is able to govern it independently of the I AM, or to destroy it altogether. But the Law of Being is, that man is the image and likeness of God, and has full dominion over all his conditions—all of them—and our Psalm emphasizes this wonderful fact by adding the world, and they that dwell therein. Our earth, which is our world, down to every detail of our lives, is really under our own dominion, and is made and unmade by our word.

For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.

Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place?

He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.

  The hill of the Lord, or His holy place, means the realization of God. It is that vivid, real sense of the Presence, that wonderful experience of security and joy that is truly the peace that passeth all understanding. When one attains to this he knows indeed that all is well, and that nothing can by any means hurt him. At such times too he has a marvelous power of helping and healing others. This state of mind is really the one thing that is worth possessing, for having that, one has all; and lacking that, he has nothing. To reach this state is the real object of all our prayers and treatments. It is nothing less than the dominion that we are promised in Genesis; and here the Bible impresses this truth upon us, and also instructs us how we are to get it. It is indeed a “holy” place because nothing defiled in any way can reach us there. Sickness, poverty, and sin cannot enter; that is to say, we cannot feel that such things are real while we are in this state of mind, and, as soon as we feel that they are not real, they disappear into nothingness.

The inspired writer then goes on to tell us how we are to raise ourselves into this wonderful consciousness, and it is splendid to note that he makes a point of affirming that it is founded upon the seas, and established upon the floods. This means that people like ourselves with all sorts of limitations and difficulties are the very people for whom the promise is intended, and that in spite of all our shortcomings we may reach it too; for it is founded upon the waters—and water is always the human soul as we know it, subject, as we are only too sadly aware, to storms, floods, and sometimes even typhoons. So we see that there is not the slightest reason to be discouraged merely because one’s present demonstration seems to be very poor and spiritual power seems entirely lacking. It does not matter, because the high consciousness is built upon just such stormy seas as this. “Many waters cannot quench Love, neither can the floods drown it.” Having thus indicated, as the Bible does on almost every page, that God’s salvation is for anybody and everybody, “the wayfaring man though a fool shall not err therein,” it goes on in its usual practical way to explain exactly how the thing is to be done. It says that for the great task we require clean hands and a pure heart, and that we must not lift up our souls to vanity, nor swear deceitfully. These instructions are certainly definite, and it will pay us to study them in some detail.

First in logical order comes the need for a pure heart—“Blessed are the pure in heart—for they shall see God.” I suppose it is only life-long familiarity with this statement that blinds us to its staggering importance. Just try to realize for a moment the thing that is said here—“they shall see God.” Think what that must mean, and think whether any price could be too much to pay for that experience—to see God. Well, the Bible promises that on certain terms the wayfaring man, you and I, may see God. Of course, you will understand that there is no question of “seeing God” with the physical eyes as one sees a man or a house. With the physical eyes one can see only physical things, and God is Spirit, and spiritual things have to be spiritually discerned. Also, spiritual perception is not a matter of apprehending outlines and surfaces as physical sight is. Spiritual perception is direct spiritual experience in which the subject and the percipient become one. Therefore, to see God means—as far as our restricted and crippled human speech can express the thing at all—a realization of perfect essential unity with Divine Goodness Itself.

But who are the pure in heart? In the Bible use of the term, the words “pure” and “purity” are not confined to physical purity, absolutely essential as that is; they are expanded to include freedom from every kind of error and limitation. Now all error arises from a belief in the possibility of a cause other than God, and so, fundamentally, purity means complete loyalty to the belief in one single, all-embracing, Omnipotent Cause, which is utterly good—God, Our Father which art in heaven. To believe in God as the only cause, and absolutely to reject any claim for a lesser cause of any kind; to refuse to concede the power of causation to such things as climate, germs, man-made medical laws, or laws of poverty or decay; to refuse to concede reality to the race limitations of time and space; and, in the face of appearances, to judge righteous judgment, and hold unswervingly to the One Cause—this is purity.

In the Bible, the heart usually stands for what we call the subconscious mind, and it is our subconscious mentality that we have to redeem and purify. To keep one’s mentality consciously loyal to the One Power is only half the battle, though it is the first and therefore the more important half. The other half is to purify and re-educate the subconscious from the errors which have accumulated there in the course of time. If we do this work faithfully, we shall sooner or later arrive at the point where we really have a pure heart in the full Bible sense, and then we shall see God. Jesus had reached this stage when he said “the prince of this world cometh and findeth nothing in me,” meaning that his subconsciousness was so purified that no limitation thoughts could have any effect upon him; although at one time he was “in all points tempted like as we are.”

This purifying of the soul, not merely from the grosser sins which everybody recognizes, but from the thousand-and-one concessions to limitation belief that fill the everyday life of humanity, is the one and only pathway to freedom. It is a wonderful beginning when we accept the Spiritual Basis of the Allness of God; but it is only when we have begun to apply this truth in every practical detail of our lives, day after day—when we are not in the humor to do so as well as when we are—that we really begin to get results. This is to have “clean hands.” The hand is always the power of manifestation of expression, and unless our expression—our all-day thinking—is “clean,” that is to say, spiritual and true, we have not clean hands, and we cannot expect to ascend that wondrous “hill of the Lord.”

This wonderful lesson receives its emphasis by repetition in a slightly different form, as in the Hebrew literary tradition. So we are told that the redeemed, or saved, is he who does not give his soul unto vanity—another way of saying one who does not look for his happiness to manifestation instead of to Cause, or believe in more causes than the One. To swear deceitfully is to pin your faith to error, to have a real conviction, as so many people have, that evil is true.

He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

This is the generation of them that seek him, that seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah.

To many it may seem that the purification of the heart, or the redemption of the subconscious, will be a long and wearisome task, but we have to remember that when we pray it is God who works and not we, and that tasks difficult or impossible to us present no difficulty to Him. If you will use the power of the Word to declare that God is purifying you, that God is setting you free, that God is inspiring and enlightening you, you will be amazed how seemingly impossible difficulties will be overcome; how old habits of thinking will fall away and new ones come in; and this is because you will receive your righteousness, or right thinking, from God. You have “sought His face,” and, under the Great Law, you must begin to express something of His nature, for we always grow like unto that which we contemplate. Here the expression “O Jacob” means “O God of Jacob.”

Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.

Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.

Lift up your heads, O ye gates; even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of glory shall come in.

Who is this King of glory? The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. Selah.

This, the third stanza of the poem, is a glorious statement of the power of prayer. It is not exaggerating to say that it is probably the most glorious tribute to the power of prayer ever written. Gates and doors always symbolize understanding. A little thought will show the good logic of this. The gate or door is the place where we pass in or out of a city, in or out of a house, or a field, from one room to another, and so forth. In other words, it marks a change of consciousness. The place that you are in at any moment is really the state of consciousness which you have at the moment, and what we know as movement through space from one place to another, from Europe to America, or from the dining room into the drawing room, is really a partial change of consciousness. Of course, the only change of this kind which has any true value is the absolute change brought about by an increase in the understanding of Truth, and every time that we do gain such an increase we enter a fresh stage upon the Path. Lift up your heads, O ye gates is a dramatic way of telling us that it is only by the attainment of a higher degree of understanding that the King of glory—the vivid realization of God which we are seeking—can come to our souls. The gates and doors are told to lift up their heads, that is to say, to become loftier. In order that there may be no possible room for any misun-understanding of the mighty import of the message, we are then told to ask ourselves who the King of Glory is, and for what He stands; and it is impressed upon us that He is nothing less than the Lord, and that His is strong and mighty in battle. Not just a figurehead potentate, but a man of war, and the battle He fights, of course, is our battle for the overcoming of sin, sickness, and death.

The poet concludes with the re-affirmation that the power we contact in prayer is the Lord of Hosts, which is the Bible term for the aspect of God as Power.

These Bible Treatments are not mere literary exercises; they are definite methods for bringing about a change in consciousness. That means that it is of very little use merely to read one of them through hurriedly and then put it aside. A Treatment such as this Psalm should be read over slowly many times. As you read, you should pause frequently to become receptive for a moment in order to give a chance for inspiration to come through. Do not make these pauses too long. Pause for an instant, long or short, according to whether you are a slow or a quick thinker, and then, if nothing comes, continue reading.

Always, when reading the Bible, put in between the lines, so to speak, the thought that God is inspiring you. This is the way to get direct illumination on the Bible teaching, at first hand. Remember that other people’s interpretations of the Bible, however helpful and stimulating they may be, can never be as valuable as those that you get for yourself. The Bible will give you new and wonderful knowledge having a direct bearing upon your own personal and private problems and difficulties, if only you will make that possible by adopting the right attitude of mind.

When your usual methods of treating a problem do not seem to be bringing results, it is a good plan to discontinue them altogether for a time, and to work exclusively for inspiration instead. This can be done by opening the Bible at random and reading whatever texts your eye falls upon. If the first page opened does not interest you, try elsewhere, and continue to do so until you do find something that gives you a new light. Note carefully, however, that it is a change in consciousness that you are now seeking, a change that will enable you to pray more freshly and effectively, and to be more sensitively receptive. You are not now seeking precise practical instructions. Do not take the working of any text literally as a direction for conduct, as such a practice easily ends in superstition. It is the letter of the Bible that killeth, the spirit that giveth light.

EMMET FOX