Psalms 37:25

They can never be oppressed by the fasting of famine whose bread is that "they should do the will of the Father who is in heaven" and whose soul that "bread that comes down from heaven" nourishes.

If you take it at face value, the meaning is obvious: in his own lifetime, David never saw the just forsaken. But a lifespan is brief, and the statement is moreover incredible. We have seen plenty of just people in this world who have been forsaken by people as soon as those just ones are persecuted by people in power. No one dares to go near them so long as they are subject to fear and injury. Remember what Job said: "My brothers have departed far from me, they recognize strangers more than they recognize me; my friends have become merciless and those who knew me once have forgotten even my name." As for David, not only was he deserted, but also he was even attacked by his friends and those closest to him by family ties: "My friends," he says, "and my neighbors have advanced against me." How, I ask, can David state that which is the exact opposite of this? We can only understand it in this sense: the just person, even if forsaken by the world, is not abandoned by the Lord. Even Job on his dunghill was not deserted by the Lord. In the council of the angels, the Lord had praised Job with his own voice; and he allowed him to be tempted only so that he might win the crown. He allowed Job's body to undergo severe testing, but he spared his life.

"I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread" [Psalm 37:25]. If it is spoken but in the person of one single individual, how long is the whole life of one man? And what is there wonderful in the circumstance, that a single man, fixed in some one part of the earth, should not, throughout the whole space of his life, being so short as man's life is, have ever seen "the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread," although he may have advanced from youth to age. It is not anything worthy of marvel; for it might have happened, that before his lifetime there should have been some "righteous man seeking bread;" it might have happened, that there had been some one in some other part of the earth not where he himself was. Hear too another thing, which makes an impression upon us. Any single one among you (look you) who has now grown old, may perhaps, when, looking back upon the past course of his life, he turns over in his thoughts the persons whom he has known, not find any instance of a righteous man begging bread, or of his seed begging bread, suggest itself to him; but nevertheless he turns to the inspired Scriptures, and finds that righteous Abraham was straitened, and suffered hunger in his own country, and left that land for another; he finds too that the son of the very same man, Isaac, removed to other countries in search of bread, for the same cause of hunger. And how will it be true to say, "I have never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread"? And if he finds this true in the duration of his own life, he finds it is otherwise in the inspired writings, which are more trustworthy than human life is.