"When Israel went out from Egypt,
the house of Jacob from a people of strange language,
2 Judah became his sanctuary,
Israel his dominion.
3 The sea looked and fled;
Jordan turned back.
4 The mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.
5 What ails you, O sea, that you flee?
O Jordan, that you turn back?
6 O mountains, that you skip like rams?
O hills, like lambs?
7 Tremble, O earth, at the presence of the Lord,
at the presence of the God of Jacob,
8 who turns the rock into a pool of water,
the flint into a spring of water."
Psalm 114
The rest of the wilderness journey is covered in 7, 8, underlining the sufficiency of the divine provision. What the Psalmist is saying to the returned exiles is: Israel of old did not lack one good thing all the time of their pilgrimage, and the all-sufficient God will not fail you either.
But we must also think of our Lord’s inmost thoughts as He faced His future, to accomplish the new Exodus which would seal the new covenant in His blood. Shortly after He sang that Psalm in the Upper Room He went out into the agony and anguish of Gethsemane, and said, 'My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death', as the crushing weight of the world's sin came down upon Him. In such a context, what must this Psalm have meant for Him, with its assurance of the all-sufficient, covenant God, standing with Him all the way through. Perhaps especially we should think of the association of ideas in what we said about 1, 2, and of Judah being His sanctuary, for this, surely, was our Lord's goal, to gather a people for His Name that He might dwell in them and among them forever. We should recall His words to the disciples in the Upper Room, in John 14:21, 23: '...he that loveth Me will be loved of My Father, and I will love Him, and will manifest Myself to him...if a man love Me he will keep My words; and My Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him'. The writer to the Hebrews speaks of 'the joy that was set before him' - this is the joy, of having an habitation through the Spirit, a place and a people in whom to dwell.