Charles H. Spurgeon on Psalms 94:19

Observe the greatness of this man's distress. This is forcibly expressed in the text, though in our translation it is scarcely obvious. The word in it rendered "thoughts, "scholars tell us, signifies originally the small branches of trees. The idea in the psalmist's mind appears to be this: `Look at a tree, with its branches shooting in every direction, entangling and entwining themselves one with another; let the wind take them —see how they feel it, how restless they become and confused, beating against and striving one with another. Now my mind is like that tree. I have a great many thoughts in it; and thoughts which are continually shifting and changing; they are perplexed and agitated thoughts, battling one with another'. There is no keeping the mind quiet under them; they bring disorder into it as well as sorrow. And mark the word "multitude" in the text; there is exactly the same idea in that. It signifies more than number; confusion. Think of a crowd collected and hurrying about: `so, 'says the psalmist, `are my thoughts. I have a crowd of them in my mind, and a restless confused crowd. One painful thought is bad enough, but I have many; a multitude of them; and almost countless, a disturbed throng.' We now, then, understand the case we have before us. The man's sorrow arose, at this time, from disquieting thoughts within his own breast; and his sorrow was great, because these thoughts were many, and at the same time tumultuous. When the psalmist says, "Thy comforts, "he means more than comforts of which God is the author or giver. God is the author and giver of all our comforts —of all the earthly comforts that surround us; they are all the work and gift of his gracious hand... We are to understand here such comforts as are peculiarly and altogether God's, such as flow at once from God; not from him through creatures to us, but from him immediately to us without the intervention of creatures. The comforts that we get from his attributes —from meditating on, and what we call realising them; the comforts we get from his promises —believing and hoping in him; and the comforts of his presence, he drawing near to our souls and shining into them —we knowing he is near us, conscious of it by the light and happiness and renewed strength within us. "Thy comforts" —the comforts we get from the Lord Jesus Christ; from looking at him, considering him; thinking of his person, and offices, and blood, and righteousness, and intercession, and exaltation, and glory, and his second coming; our meeting him, seeing him, being like him. "Thy comforts" —the comforts which come from the Holy Spirit, "the Comforter": when he opens the Scriptures to us, or speaks through ceremonies and ordinances, or witnesses within us of our adoption of God; shining in on his own work of grace in our hearts; enabling us to see that work, and to see in it God's peculiar, eternal love to us; not opening to us the book of life, anal showing us our names there, but doing something that makes us almost as joyful as though that book were opened to us; showing us the hand of God in our own souls —his converting, saving hand —his hand apprehending us as his own; making us feel as it were, his grasp of love, and feel, too, that it is a grasp which he will never loosen. Charles Bradley.