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This petition supposes -

I. THE COMMISSION OF DELIBERATE WRONG by one man against another. A dispute may readily arise in which each man, affected in his judgment by his own personal interests, believes himself to make a righteous claim. This is a ease for impartial intervention, for the decision of one who is not prejudiced by any interest of his own. But the case here referred to by Solomon is one of deliberate wrong perpetrated by one man against his neighbour. It is a painful thing that this should have to be presupposed among the "people of God." Yet it was so. Enlightenment was not, and it is not, any positive guarantee against actual unrighteousness. A man may know all he can learn of Christ, sitting constantly and reverentially at his feet, and yet he may allow himself to do that which defrauds his brother and does him cruel and shameful wrong. Saddening observation only too frequently and only too powerfully attests it.

II. THE APPEAL TO GOD. The injured Hebrew made his appeal to the Lord his God; he required the offending neighbour to take an oath in the very presence of the Holy One, invoking the judgment of God against the one who was in the wrong. It was presumably a last resort, an ultimate appeal. Not formally, but substantially, we do likewise. If human judgment fails, we leave the guilty in the hands of God. We commit our righteous cause to his Divine arbitration. We ask God to make our innocence appear, to restore to us the good name or the possession of which we have been defrauded. We make our appeal from earth to Heaven.

III. THE DIVINE JUDGMENT. Solomon prayed God to intervene so that the wicked should be recompensed and the righteous justified. Under that dispensation he might rightly and even confidently make that request. But what may we expect now of the Divine justice? These three things:

1. That the righteous laws of God are always working for the overthrow of evil and the enthronement of integrity; the former is radically weak, and the latter is essentially strong and prevailing.

2. That unvisited evil is always attended with spiritual failure, while unrewarded rectitude is always accompanied and sustained by spiritual worth.

3. That there is a long future which holds ample compensations in its unsounded depths. Divine justice will prove to be completely vindicated when we have looked deep enough and waited long enough. - C.

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KJV: If a man sin against his neighbour, and an oath be laid upon him to make him swear, and the oath come before thine altar in this house;

WEB: "If a man sin against his neighbor, and an oath is laid on him to cause him to swear, and he comes and swears before your altar in this house;