k their places slippery, and subject to a momentary desolation. If a great name and glory,-the Lord cannot only suffer time and ignorance to draw out all the memory of a man, but can presently roth his name from under heaven. If corn, and the fruits of the earth,-the Lord can kill it in the blade, by withholding rain three months before the harvest: He can send a thief, a caterpillar, a palmer-worm to eat it up :-if it hold out to come into the barn, even there he can blow upon it, and consume it like chaff. However men think, when they have their corn in their houses and their wine in their cellars, they are sure, and have no more to do with God; yet he can take away the staff and life of it in our very houses: yea, when it is in our mouths and bowels, he can send leanness and a curse after it. "Awake, ye drunkards, and howl, ye drinkers of wine, (saith the prophet',) because of the new wine, for it is cut off from your mouths." The Lord could defer the punishment of these men till the last day, when undoubtedly there will be nothing for them to drink, but that "cup of the Lord's right hand," as the prophet calls it: (a cup of fury and trembling", a cup of sorrow, astonishment, and desolation; a cup which shall make all that drink thereof, to be moved and mad", to be drunken and fall, and spew, and rise up no more, even that fierce and bitter indignation, in the pouring out of which the Lord will put his right hand, his strong arm'; not only the terror of his presence, but the glory of his power:) I say, the Lord could let drunkards alone, till at last they meet with this cup, (which undoubtedly they shall do, if there be either truth in God's word, or power in his right hand; if there be either justice in Heaven, or fire in Hell;) till, with Belshazzar, they meet with dregs and trembling in the bottom of all their cups. But yet, oftentimes, the Lord smites them with a more sudden blow, snatcheth away the cup from their very mouths, and so makes one curse anticipate and prevent another. Though Haman and Ahithophel should have lived out the whole thread of their life, yet, at last, their honour must have lain down in the dust with them. Though Judas could have lived a thousand m 8 Psal. Ixxiii. 18, 19. 30, 31, 1 Joel. i. 5. P Jer. xxv. 16. 27. h Prov. x. 7. m Hab. ii. 16. q Isai. lxii. 8. i Amos iv. 7. 9. n Isai. li. 17. 22. 2 Thes. i. 9. k Psal. lxxviii. Ezek. xxiii. 33. years, and could have improved the reward of his master's blood to the best advantage that ever usurer did, yet the rust would at last have seized upon his bags, and his money must have perished with him. But now the Lord sets forward his curse; and that which the moth would have been long in doing, the gallows despatcheth with a more swift destruction. Thus as the body of a man may have many summons and engagements unto one death, may labour at once under many desperate diseases, all which by a malignant conjunction, must needs hasten a man's end (as Cæsar was stabbed with thirty wounds, each one whereof might have served to let out his soul); so the creatures of God, labouring under a manifold corruption, do, as it were, by so many wings, post away from the owners of them, and for that reason must needs be utterly disproportionable to the condition of an immortal soul. Sect. 28.-Now to make some application of this particular before we leave it. This doth first discover and shame the folly of wicked worldlings, both in their opinions and affections to earthly things. Love is blind, and will easily make men believe that of any thing which they could wish to be in it: and therefore, because wicked men wish with all their hearts, for the love they bear to the creatures, that they might continue together for ever, the devi! doth at last so deeply delude them as to think that they shall continue for ever. Indeed in these, and in the general, they must needs confess, "that one generation cometh and anothers goeth :" but in their own particular they can never assume, with any feeling and experimental assent, the truth of that general to their own estates: and therefore whatever, for shame of the world, their outward professions may be, yet the prophet David assures us, "that their inward thoughts," their own retired contrivances and resolutions are, "that their houses shall endure for ever," and their dwelling-places to all generations; and upon this immortality of stones and monuments they resolve to But the Psalmist concludes this to be but brutish and notorious folly: "This their way is their folly; they, like sheep, are laid down in their graves, and death feeds upon rest. them." And indeed, what a folly is it for men to build upon the sand, to erect an imaginary fabrick of I know not what immortality, which hath not so much as a constant subsistence in the head that contrives it! What man will ever go about to build a house with much cost (and, when he hath done, to inhabit it himself) of such rotten and inconsistent material, as will undoubtedly, within a year or two after, fall upon his head, and bury him in the ruins of his own folly? Now then, suppose a man were lord of all the world, and had his life co-extended with it; were furnished with wisdom to manage, and strength to run through all the affairs incident to this vast frame, in as ample a measure as any one man for the government of a private family; yet the Scripture" would assure even such a man, that there will come a day, in which the heavens shall pass away with a noise, and the elements shall melt with heat,-and the earth, with the works that are therein, shall be burnt up; and that there is but one hour to come, before all this shall be; "Behold, now this is the last hour"." And what man, upon these terms, would fix his heart and ground his hopes upon such a tottering bottom, as will, within a little while, crumble into dust, and leave the poor soul that resteth upon it, to sink into Hell? But now when we consider that none of us labour for any such inheritance; that the extremities of any man's hopes can be but to purchase some little patch of earth, which to the whole world cannot bear so near a proportion as the smallest mole-hill to this whole habitable earth; that all we toil for, is but to have our load of a little " thick clay," as the prophet speaks; that when we have gotten it, neither we nor it shall continue till the universal dissolution, but in the midst of our dearest embracements we may suddenly be pulled asunder and come to a fearful end; it must needs be more than brutish stupidity for a man to weave the spider's web, to wrap himself up from the consumption determined against the whole earth, in a covering that is so infinitely too short and too narrow for him. We will conclude this particular with the doom, given by the prophet Jeremiah: "As the partridge sitteth on eggs and hatcheth them not," (she is either caught by the fowler, or her eggs X u 2 Pet. iii. 7. 10. v 1 John ii. 18. w Isaiah lix. 5. J Jer. xvii. 11. * Isaiah xxviii. 20. are broken ;)" so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and in the end shall be a fool." Sect. 29.-Secondly, This serves to justify the wisdom and providence of God in his proceedings with men: the wicked here provoke God, and cry aloud for vengeance on their own heads, and the Lord seems to stop his ears at the cry of sin, and still to load them with his blessings. "He maketh their way to prosper, they take root, and grow, and bring forth fruit:" they shine like a blazing comet, and threaten ruin to all that look upon them: they carry themselves like some tyrant in a tragedy, that scatters abroad death with the sparkles of his eyes, and darts out threats against the heaven above him they are like Agag before Samuel, clothed very delicately, and presume that there is no bitterness to come. And now the impatiency of man, that cannot resolve things into their proper issues, that cannot let iniquity ripen, nor reconcile one day and a thousand years together,—begins to question God's proceedings, and is afraid lest the world be governed blindfold, and blessings and curses thrown confusedly abroad for men, as it were, to scramble and scuffle for them. But our God, who keepeth times and seasons in his own power, who hath given to every creature under the sun limits which it shall not exceed, hath set bounds unto sin likewise wherein to ripen. The stars, howsoever they may be sometimes eclipsed, have yet a fixed and permanent subsistency in their orbs: but comets, though they rise with a greater train and stream of light, yet at last vanish into ashes, and are seen no more: the tyrant, though in two or three acts or scenes he revel it, and disturb the whole business, yet, at last, he will go out in blood and shame : even so, though wicked men flourish and oppress, and provoke God every day, and rage like the sea, yet the Lord hath set their bounds which they shall not pass; they have an appointed time to take their fill of the creature; and then when they have glutted and cloyed themselves with excess, when their humours are grown to a full ripeness, the Lord will temper them a potion of his wrath, which shall make them turn all up again, and shameful spewing shall one day be a d their glory. "Thus saith the Lord, For three transgressions, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment of Damascus, and those other cities "." So long as the wicked commit one or two iniquities, so long I forbear, and expect their repentance; but when they proceed to three, and then add a fourth, that is, when they are come to that measure of sin which my patience hath prefixed, then I will hasten my revenge, and not any longer turn away the punishment thereof. In the fourth generation, saith God to Abraham, thy posterity shall come out of the land where they shall be strangers, and shall inherit this land; "for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full." There is a time when sin grows ripe and full, and then the sickle comes upon it. When the prophet saw a basket of summer fruits,' that were so ripe, as that they were gathered off the tree, (which was a type of the sins of God's people, which are sooner ripe than the sins of heathens which knew him not, because they have the constant light and heat of his word to hasten their maturity,) then saith the Lord, "The end is come upon my people, I will not pass by them any more," I will have no more patience towards them. "Jeremy, what seest thou? I see the rod of an almond-tree. Thou hast well seen, saith the Lord, for I will hasten my word to perform it." When men hasten the maturity of sin like the blossoms of an almond-tree (which come soonest out), then, saith the Lord," will I hasten the judgments which I have pronounced." We read in the prophet Zachary f of an ephah, a measure, whereinto all the wickedness of that people, figured by a woman, shall be thrown together; and when this measure of sins is full to the brim, then there is a mass of lead, importing the firmness, immutability, and heaviness of God's decree and counsel, which seals up the ephah, never more to have any sin put into it; and then come "two women with wind in their wings," which are the executioners of God's swift and irreversible fury, and carry the ephah between heaven and earth (intimating the public declaration of the righteous judgments of God) into the land of Shinar, to build it there an house; denoting the constant and b Amos i, 2. c Gen. xv. 16. d Amos i. 2. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. e Jer. i. 11, 12. |