June 10

Thou hast stricken them, but they have not grieved; thou hast consumed them, but they have refused to receive correction: they have made their faces harder than a rock; they have refused to return. - Jeremiah 5:3.

HERE we may observe three things. First, That sin is the source of all our perplexities and miseries. This is the troubler of this world, and this is the “abominable thing which God hateth.” This is the worm gnawing at the root, which causeth our gourds to wither. “Fools make a mock at sin,” and they are only fools who will ever think lightly of sin, or roll it as a sweet morsel under their tongues. Sin has produced hell and prepared “Tophet of old.” It has “brought death into the world, and all our woe.” There is not any one thing that can hurt us if we were free from sin. But while we have any connection with sin, we have Ezekiel’s roll, “written within and without with lamentation, mourning, and woe.”

Secondly, It shows us the inefficacy of mere suffering to bring a man to a proper state of thinking and feeling. The heart may be broken, and yet may not be softened. It may be humbled and yet not humble. A man may be deprived of his weapons and yet still be disposed to fight. The enmity may remain, for the “carnal mind is enmity against God.” And even in his very suffering the sinner adds to his sin, and throws the blame on God, rather than take the shame to himself. Afflictions do not necessarily produce moral consequences. They ought to produce, and are naturally adapted to produce, salutary results; but there is antagonism enough in the depraved heart of man to counteract all this. It is said of Ahaziah, that “in his affliction he sinned yet more and more;” and Isaiah also says, “The people turned not to him that smote them.” So also here Jeremiah says, “Thou hast stricken them, and they have not grieved.”

Third, We here see the reality of a moral providence. There is a twofold providence of God. His natural providence and his moral providence. By the one he provides, by the other he governs. The one regards us as creatures, the other as subjects. And he has made us subjects as well as creatures. He has given us reason as well as passions, conscience as well as appetites, laws as well as blessings; and he will arraign us for our disobedience to the one as well as our misimprovement of the other. It is proper that sin should be punished; and though the present is not properly a state of retribution, yet we see there is even here a connection between sin and wickedness. There is a tendency in it to produce misery, and we say, that is God punishing a man. Now what does God punish? Man’s sins. The man sins; God need not go through all the plagues of Egypt in order to punish him. He says, “He is joined to idols, let him alone.”

If God leaves a sinner to himself he is his own tormentor, and sin is made to do the work of Divine justice in its effects.