Ezra 9:13-14 And after all that is come on us for our evil deeds, and for our great trespass… (a thanksgiving sermon for the removal of cholera): — I. A PAST REVIEWED. We are reminded — 1. That the distresses of a nation come upon them for their sins. Now on this point we must be careful to use nothing but the language of holy sobriety. We reason, indeed, neither wisely, nor safely, nor honourably to God, when we make every national calamity stand in some definite retributive relation to certain national sins. We have no data for establishing such a relation either in reason or in Scripture, or in the constituted order of moral government. Thus, if a country should lose its colonies through misrule or bad government, or if an army should be cut up through a general's inconsiderate rashness, or if our emigrant population should perish by hundreds through being sent out in vessels that were not seaworthy, or if a malaria should infect a neighbourhood where all sanitary precautions have been neglected, it were a manifest misuse of terms to call any one of these resulting evils by the name of a Divine judgment. They are the ordinary consequences of a broken law. Still, while it is neither safe nor Scriptural to interpret as direct Divine visitations what are manifestly only the immediate and perceived result of human misdoing, it is just as bad philosophy to disown the traces of God's hand in calamities where the efficient causes are more occult and indirect and far-removed and untraceable. This world is His world; we must not cast Him out of its management. The pestilence is His servant, not His vicegerent; the strict dispenser of His judgment, not the uncontrolled executioner of its own. Why, I could just as soon be an idolater as one of our modern worshippers of second causes; for, if the one bows the knee to Juggernaut, the other seems to build s temple to the plague. But we have not so learned the rod, or so misinterpreted its harsh but emphatic voice. If Providence does travel beyond its wonted cycles, if the Lord does come out of His place, we know what it is for; it is "to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity." Our state is probationary, but God will have some smaller reckonings with us now. "All this came upon us," said Ezra, "for our evil deeds and for our great trespass." 2. When God visits a nation for their sins, He always mingles mercy with His chastisements. "Less than our iniquities deserve!" Why, what do they deserve? What do our murmurings, and crimes, and cruelties, and wicked blasphemies deserve? What do we deserve for the licentiousness of our pleasures, the covetousness of our gains, the stint measure of our charities, the worldliness of our homes? What do our rich men deserve for their pride, or our poor men for their profaneness? What do patriots deserve for their lukewarm love, or Christian rulers for enforcing a breach of the Divine commandments? Oh! in all this we see how far apart are offence and chastisement, the nation's sins and the nation's scourge. II. A POSSIBLE FUTURE. Two points are here insisted upon. 1. Sins after warning are the worst sins. To go on committing the same sins after judgments and chastisements evinces an obstinacy in evil, a stoutness of heart, a baseness of ingratitude, and almost a defiance of God. A continuance in sin under such circumstances shows a man's spirit to be intractable. Alarm him with warnings, he will not be affected by them; load him with benefits, he will not be obliged by them. His heart is like an anvil, strokes only make it more hard. 2. Judgments after deliverance are the worst judgments. There is an awful expression used by the apostle, "vessels of wrath fitted for destruction." When God has used all merciful expedients to no purpose — when judgments awake no terror, and deliverances inspire no gratitude — then He takes a final leave of us; we must reap the fruit of our own doings. (Daniel Moore, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And after all that is come upon us for our evil deeds, and for our great trespass, seeing that thou our God hast punished us less than our iniquities deserve, and hast given us such deliverance as this; |
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