A Commentary on One Verse (Psalm 68:6)

“God makes a home for the lonely; He leads out the prisoners into prosperity,

Only the rebellious dwell in a parched [dry] land” (Psalm 68:6 NASB).

Many years ago I prophesied loudly from the back of the sanctuary a portion of this verse.  I declared boldly that “Only the rebellious dwell in a dry land.”  It seemed to crack across the ceiling like lightning and thunder.  I began to weep.  I have prophesied much through the years, but I can hardly remember a word more powerfully demonstrated.

Today (9/8/2019) my pastor preached a theme that spoke to this fragment of verse six.  At the end of his sermon I quoted this to him and our congregation (also from the back of the sanctuary).  At the time, I did not remember where it came from excepting that it was from one of the Psalms.  A brother near me looked it up and told me the verse.

This idea that God makes a home for the lonely and leads prisoners out of privation into prosperity is something I am currently experiencing.  I also know that my rebellion against some aspect of God’s leading was the cause of my spiritual dryness.  ONLY the rebellious dwells in dryness; this presently cursed earth (where we dwell in our present but temporary body of death) is spiritually vacant and dry, but also, like as Christ is depicted as “a root out of a dry ground,” so we too are bodily deprived and without spiritual comeliness in these vessels excepting that spring of living water which springs up into eternal life.  In other words, our context is dryness (in our earth-bound body), but our reality, spiritual saturation/wetness (as we also live in the heavenlies).  If we find ourselves dry—since ONLY the rebellious dwell there—we must have at least some measure of rebellion in our hearts.  Let us repent and get back to our first works and whatever else God requires of us.

I love Charles H. Spurgeon’s take on this verse; he wrote—in his classic “The Treasury of David”—the following:

“‘God setteth the solitary in families.’  The people had been sundered and scattered over Egypt; family ties had been disregarded, and affections crushed; but when the people escaped from Pharaoh they came together again, and all the fond associations of household life were restored.  This was a great joy.  ‘He bringeth out those which are bound with chains.’  The most oppressed in Egypt were chained and imprisoned, but the divine Emancipator brought them all forth into perfect liberty.  He who did this of old continues his gracious work.  The solitary heart, convinced of sin and made to pine alone, is admitted into the family of the First-born; the fettered spirit is set free, and its prison broken down, when sin is forgiven; and for all this, God is to be greatly extolled, for He hath done it, and magnified the glory of his grace.  ‘But the rebellious dwell in a dry land.’  If any find the rule of Jehovah to be irksome, it is because their rebellious spirits kick against his power.  Israel did not find the desert dry, for the smitten rock gave forth its streams; but even in Canaan itself men were consumed with famine, because they cast off their allegiance to their covenant God.  Even where God is revealed on the mercy-seat, some men persist in rebellion, and such need not wonder if they find no peace, no comfort, no joy, even where all these abound.  Justice is the rule of the Lord’s kingdom, and hence there is no provision for the unjust to indulge their evil lustings: a perfect earth, and even heaven itself, would be a dry land to those who can only drink of the waters of sin.  Of the most soul-satisfying of sacred ordinances these witless rebels cry, ‘What a weariness it is!’  and, under the most soul-sustaining ministry, they complain of ‘the foolishness of preaching.’  When a man has a rebellious heart, he must of necessity find all around him a dry land.”