Isaiah 17:10, 11 Because you have forgotten the God of your salvation, and have not been mindful of the rock of your strength… We learn - I. THAT GOD IS WRONGED AND GRIEVED BY OUR NEGLECT OF HIMSELF AS WELL AS BY OUR DISOBEDIENCE TO HIS LAWS. Men sometimes mistakenly suppose that their sin is limited by the number of their transgressions of God's positive enactments. They make a very serious mistake in so judging. Great guilt, indeed, is contracted by the breach of Divine commandment, by setting at defiance the "Thou shalt not" of sacred Scripture. But our obligation strikes deeper far, and, when we flail, our sin includes immeasurably more than this. God deserves, and he desires, and he even demands, that we, his human children, should render to him, himself, all that filial love and fellowship which is due from such beloved and enriched ones to such a gracious and bountiful Father. His charge against us is not merely that we have done numbers of things which he has prohibited; it is that we have lived on through days, weeks, months, years, through whole periods and stages of our life, and have forgotten him, the God of our salvation, have not been mindful of him, the Rock of our strength; it is that we have taken blessings and deliverances from his strong, redeeming hand, and have been content to spend our days in ungodliness, withholding the gratitude, the affection, the submission, the willing and joyous service which a relationship so near as is ours to him, and which benefits so great as are his to us, do emphatically demand. The simple and true answer to the question, "What have we failed to render to our redeeming and our beneficent God?" should cover us with shame and send us to our knees in penitence. II. THAT AN UNGODLY LIFE IS NOT ONLY A PROLONGED INIQUITY, BUT IS ALSO A SUPREME MISTAKE. "Because thou hast forgotten... therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants... but the harvest shall be a heap," etc. The mistake of ungodliness is seen in that: 1. It leaves out and loses all the real nobility from human life - all that which raises man's nature above the brutes, and connects it with the angelic and Divine. 2. It includes only that which is absolutely insufficient and unsatisfactory. It supplies treasures which the thief can steal, joys which pall and perish, friendships which linger only for a few passing years. It has nothing which fills and satisfies the human soul, made, as that is made, for heavenly wisdom, for holy service, for the worship and the love of God. Its harvest is only a heap of husks, and not the granary of life-sustaining corn. 3. It makes no provision for the time of trial - for "the day of grief and of desperate sorrow," for the day of death, for the day of judgment. - C. Parallel Verses KJV: Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips: |
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