- Preserve and Deliver
Psalm 97:10
Ye that love the Lord, hate evil:
He preserveth the souls of his saints;
He delivereth them out of the hand of the wicked.
The Lord promises to preserve the souls of the saints, His redeemed people. The promise directly applies to the soul, not explicitly to the body although the soul can refer to the whole person. It is the inner life that is protected and guarded by the Lord. He will not allow your mind, will and emotions to crack and crumble and become fragmented. When the saint begins to feel a cracking in the soul he needs to remember and reclaim this promise that he will not be lost or broken.
We could, of course, take ourselves out from under the preservation and protection of the Lord by ignoring Him and purposefully turning to the evil way. The enemies of the soul (sin, death, devil) cannot take us away from God’s preserving presence, but they could theoretically tempt us to willingly leave His protection. Here then the second promise of this verse comes into play: He will deliver his saints out of the hand of the wicked. We cannot stop the temptations to sin and to ignore God from entering the soul, but the promise is that He will deliver us from the control (hand) of the enemies that would try to destroy us. The Lord will “lead us out of temptation” and “deliver us from evil.” The soul’s enemies will definitely try to distort our mind and its thinking and believing, bend our will, and mess with our emotions, but try as they might we have the promise of preservation and deliverance by God.
Therefore, we are enabled by grace to love the Lord and hate evil. To truly love God with all your heart is to agree with Him about his feelings toward sin: He hates it. And I hate it also; I avoid it and fight it; I confess it in me; I bring it all to the Lord and let Jesus absorb it all on the cross. Then, I enjoy His blessing and protection.