As always, here’s my fairly literal translation of this verse:
9He
has scattered. He has given to the needy ones.
His righteousness stands forever.
His horn will be high in honor.
I really like these lines. It was already said in verse 5
that a good man is a generous man. Here we see it again. I like it.
Once again, a person can be “religious” and still be a
tight-fisted, heartless grouch. But real grace will have none of that. Our God “so
loved the world He gave” and “gives to all men liberally.” He “makes His sun to
shine on the evil and the good.” He “opens His hand and satisfies the desires
of every living thing.” We may live our lives “in malice and envy, hating and being
hated,” but “when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, He saved
us, not because righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy. He
saved us … by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us generously through
Jesus Christ our Savior.”
Anyone who has genuinely received such grace; anyone who has
genuinely experienced and realized that overwhelming kindness of such a God and
Savior, cannot for long be anything less. We’re all still quite capable of fits
of selfishness, but still, as this Psalm has now asserted twice, the people who
know their God can’t help but be like Him. His is a big, generous heart and His
dearly loved children cannot help but be the same.
It has generally been true throughout human history that
there always are the very rich and the very poor, with precious few anywhere in
between. For a short time, America was a nation where that wasn’t true. We had
a robust middle-class and that level of prosperity was available to anyone
willing to work for it. I would maintain that happened because of the truth of
Psalm 112:9. For the first two hundred years of our history, there was a
genuine vein of godliness that pervaded the rich and poor of our country. I
would suggest that very godliness meant that the “rich,” though they did
accumulate their wealth, also never lost sight of some sense of benevolence,
and so that very wealth was “scattered.” Today we have people like Bill Gates
or Sam Walton’s family, who accumulate billions and billions of dollars for
themselves while wages stagnate, while that middle class steadily shrinks, while
young people are plunged head over heel into debt just to get an education, and
those “rich” will only get richer and richer.
This is a living illustration of the truth, “Blessed is the
nation that fears the Lord.” And unfortunately we have become a living illustration
of what happens when that same nation casts Him aside. The very graciousness
that emanates from His heart is no longer present to pervade our society and
so, instead, we more and more reflect the face of him who is a murderer and who
has been a liar from the beginning.
All that, to me, is enormously sad. I knew this nation when
it was great. It is so sad to see what it has become. But I am very thankful
for the grace I’ve been shown and, as I said in the beginning, I like this
verse. It is, in fact, who I want to be. “True religion and undefiled is this:
to visit widows and the fatherless in their affliction.” True religion makes us
want to care about people less fortunate than ourselves.
And that is how it should be.
It is interesting too to see the other two lines of the
verse. The second line repeats the words of verse 3 and 111:3, “His
righteousness stands forever.” I already commented on this under verse 3, but I
would suggest in this case it is speaking of the memory of his righteousness.
In other words, his righteousness stands forever in the sense that people will
not soon forget a man’s kindnesses. There are a few people in history
remembered for the excess of their cruelties but, for the most part evil men
are soon forgotten. Andrew Carnegie is one of those very wealthy men of an
earlier age whose name is still remembered because he built libraries in
practically every small town in America.
And then the last line says, “His horn will be high in
honor.” This is a simple old testament statement of Jesus’ words, “He who
exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Why are the rich miserly? They imagine that their wealth (and more of it) will somehow
exalt them. So they hoard it to themselves, cheat everyone they can, maneuver
themselves to get even more, and, instead of being “exalted” they end up living
in a world of endless family animosity, constant intrigues and legal battles
over who gets what, and, while they may in fact get to live “the good life” of extravagant
vacations and palatial mansions, yet they lack the one thing that makes life
worth living – love.
The godly man, while he may in fact prosper in his business,
never loses some sense of generosity. He can “let loose” of some of that wealth
to benefit others, trusting God that what he gives he actually receives. As it
says in Proverbs, “One man gives and receives only more.” And because he has
been kind, because he has given of himself to those less fortunate, Jesus would
have him to know he will somehow be exalted.
Once again, I like this verse. Even though I live in this
world where it really does seem like the best plan is to “look out for #1,” yet
I can live knowing that I don’t need to. I do need to “guide my affairs with
discretion” (v5), but I can do so with open hands and live my life caring about
the people the Lord places around me.
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