Psalm 92:12-14
‘The righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree! He shall grow, like a cedar in Lebanon!… They shall flourish in the courts of our God! They shall still bring forth fruit in old age!’ Psalm 92:12-14.
The righteous are here compared to palm-trees and cedars of Lebanon. The palm-tree frequently rises to more than a hundred feet; grows strongly for about one hundred years; and every year produces four hundredweight of dates. The Lebanon cedar is prodigiously enormous; lives for more than a thousand years; and its wood is so durable it is reputed to be incorruptible.
The date-palm when mature bears even as many as six hundred pounds of fruit. Side by side with the palm, is the cedar — the prince of trees. It is gracefully lofty; intense in its vegetative strength; and also perpetual in the verdure of its foliage and the perfume it exhales.
Calvin comments: “Nothing is more difficult than for the saints of God to entertain expectations of being raised up and delivered, when they have been reduced almost to the state of the dead…. Though the righteous may appear for a time to be withered or to have been cut down, they will again spring up with renewed vigour and flourish…like the stateliest trees upon Lebanon….
“He who was a hundred years old, should be a child. Meaning, that though old age naturally tends to death, and (that) one who had lived a hundred years is upon the very borders of it — yet in the Kingdom of Christ a man would be reckoned as being merely in his childhood and starting in life, who entered upon a new century! This could only be verified in the sense that, after death, we have another existence — in Heaven!”
Calvin also adds in his Institutes II:10:17 “that the Holy Fathers under the Old Testament were not ignorant that…God…directed their minds to His sanctuary…as the Final Judgment of God…. They doubted not that…a time would at length arrive, when the divine promises would be fulfilled….
“‘The righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree; he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those that be planted in the house of the Lord, shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing’ (Psalm 92:12-14)!”
Calvin declares in his Psychopannychia: “Brethren, let no man rob you of this faith, though all the gates of Hell should resist!… You have the assurance of God, Who cannot deny His truth! There is not the least obscurity in His language to the Church while still a pilgrim on the Earth….
“Let us ever call to mind what the Spirit has taught by the mouth of David (Psalm 92:12-14): ‘The just shall flourish like the palm-tree; he shall be multiplied like the cedar on Lebanon. Those who have been planted in the House of the Lord, will flourish in the courts of our God! They will still bud forth in their old age! They will be fat and flourishing!'” Even till the end of their life!
