THE SHADOW OF A GREAT ROCK

Men might debate the nature of good government, but God has already described what the only all-wise, all-powerful and wholly-caring monarch will be like. In three simple similes He portrays for us a King more than adequate for every circumstance: the occasional storm of wind and tempest, the drought that comes at a particular season and the weariness of the noonday sun, a common experience for travellers in the Middle East. This good King is the Man whose sufficiency answers the rare and the regular, the frequent and the infrequent.

The Man on the throne will not neglect His subjects. He will bear the sceptre, but not at the expense of His sympathy. He will provide shade for the weary. Centuries before the Lord Jesus came into the world, Jacob prophesied that He would be ‘the shepherd, the stone of Israel’, Gen. 49. 24. God was promising in His King, the Lord Jesus, the sympathy of a Man, the sustenance of a Shepherd’s provision and the shadow of a great Rock in a weary land.

Although blind to His glories, Israel had spoken of this Rock as ‘the Rock that begat’ them, Deut. 32.18, and the Rock of their salvation, Ps. 89. 26. We know that this is the Rock that followed them, meeting their every need in the wilderness, 1 Cor. 10. 4. And now, as Isaiah’s prophecy pictures them newly back in the land after the fiercest period of persecution the world will ever see, they find that Rock willing to provide a shadow in their weariness. Well might Moses look at the heathen and conclude: ‘their rock is not as our Rock’, Deut. 32. 31. How different the king that the sinner serves!

What blessedness the saint has found under the shadow of that Rock! Often we have resorted there after trying the shade of the juniper tree, 1 Kgs. 19.4. True rest is under the Rock that cries still to the ‘weary and heavy laden’, Matt. 11. 28. There is also water to refresh, Num. 20. 8, and the added blessings of honey and oil, Deut. 32. 13. This is good government, and, as vv. 3-6 show, it will have profound effects on its subjects. These very effects are possible now among the Lord’s people, but only if we regularly seek the shadow of that great Rock.