Charles H. Spurgeon on Psalms 144:15

Yea, happy is that people, whose God is the LORD. "Yea, happy." This is the best wine, kept to the last, though all men be not of this opinion. You shall hardly bring a worldly man to think so. The world is willing enough to misconstrue the order of the words, and to give the priority to civil happiness, as if it were first in dignity, because 'tis first named: they like better to hear of the cui sic than the cui Dominus. To prevent this folly, the Psalmist interposes a caution in this corrective particle, "yea, happy." It hath the force of a revocation, whereby he seems to retract what went before, not simply and absolutely, but in a certain degree, lest worldly men should wrest it to a misinterpretation. It is not an absolute revocation, but a comparative; it doth not simply deny that there is some part of popular happiness in these outward things, but it prefers the spirituals before them: "Yea", that is, Yea more, or, Yea rather; like that of Christ in the Gospel, when one in the company blessed the womb that bare him, he presently replies, "Yea, rather blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it": Lu 11:28. In like manner, the prophet David, having first premised the inferior part and outside of a happy condition; fearing lest any should of purpose mistake his meaning, and, hearing the first proposition, should either there set up their rest, and not at all take up the second; or if they take it in, do it preposterously, and give it the precedence before the second, according to the world's order, Virtus post nummos. In this respect he puts in the clause of revocation, whereby he shows that these outward things, though named first, yet they are not to be reputed first. The particle "Yea" removes them to the second place; it tacitly transposes the order; and the path of piety, which was locally after, it places virtually before. 'Tis as if he had said, Did I call them happy who are in such a case? Nay, miserable are they if they be only in such a case: the temporal part cannot make them so without the spiritual. Admit the windows of the visible heaven were opened, and all outward blessings poured down upon us; admit we did perfectly enjoy whatsoever the vastness of the earth contains in it; tell me, What will it profit to gain all and lose God? If the earth be bestowed upon us, and not heaven; or the material heaven be opened, and not the beatifical; or the whole world made ours, and God not ours; we do not arrive at happiness. All that is in the first proposition is nothing unless this be added, "Yea, happy are the people which have the Lord for their God." —Richard Holdsworth.