our lives, make us deeply obnoxious to Divine justice: how much more the concurrent guilt of actual and original sins! The acts of sin are transient and pass away; but the guilt and stain of sin, and the conscience of sin remain, and no less than eternal punishment is commensurate to the obliquity. From hence there is the clearest reason to justify God, in all his proceedings. “The throne is established in righteousness." The Psalmist saith, "Thy righteousness is like the great mountains ; thy judgments are a great deep," Psalm xxxvi. 6. The special ends of God, in severe dispensations, are sometimes indiscernible, but never unjust; his righteousness is obvious to every eye. The actual consideration of this is powerful to silence the uproar of the passions, and to make us lie humbly at his feet, under the sorest chastisements. "I will bear the indignation of the Lord (without a murmur, saith the afflicted church), because I have sinned against him," Micah vii. 9. As disobedience, in our inclination and actions, is a tacit reflection upon the equity of God's law, as if the restraints of it were unreasonable; so impatience and fretful discontent is upon the equity of his providence, as if the afflictive dispensations of it were not due to us; and the sense of our sinfulness and of God's righteousness, is an excellent preventive of it. If thou be in great afflictions, and feel any tumultuous thoughts-any rebellious risings within thee, consider thou art a sinner guilty of ten thousand provocations; and darest thou appear before his enlightened and dread tribunal, and—challenge him for any unrighteous proceedings ? "Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins?" Lam. iii. 39. Our deserts are less than the least of God's mercies, and our offences greater than the greatest of his judgments. This should make us not only patiently submit, but humbly accept the punishment of our iniquity; as far less than what we have deserved, Lev. xxvi. 41. If the sentence of death against a malefactor be exchanged for banishment, or banishment be remitted for a short confinement, is there not incomparably more cause to be thankful for what is pardoned, than to complain for what is suffered? What ingratitude is it to be impatient and murmuring for these temporary afflictions, when we deserve an eternal and insupportable weight of misery in hell! It is infinitely more becoming us, and safe, to condemn our irregular passions, than to tax God's righteous dispensations. 3. God's power is immense and uncontrolable, and it is a vain attempt to contend with him, as if the eternal order of his decrees could be altered or broken. The contest between God and the sinner is, whose will shall stand. It is His glorious work to depress the proud, and subdue the refractory spirits. The punishment of the first pride in the angels is an eternal and terrible example of his powerful justice; and how intolerable a crime it is, which heaven could not bear, but presently opened, and the guilty fell into the bottomless pit. Now pride is a seminal evil, and lies at the root of stubbornness, and impatience under judgments. Proud dust is apt to fly in God's face upon every motion of the afflicting passions. And by the resistance of self-will, he is provoked to more severity. "Woe unto him that striveth with his maker!" Isaiah xlv. 9. This is to be like the restive horse or mule, without understanding, that flings and foams when the burden is laid upon him, but gets nothing but blows, without the removal of his burden. It is our duty and interest to observe the apostle's direction: "Humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time," 1 Peter v. 6. There is a passive humbling by His irresistible providence, and an active voluntary humbling, which implies a subjection to his law, and a submission to his will: this is infinitely pleasing to him, it is the right disposition that prepares us for mercy, and is the certain way of exaltation, for then God obtains his end. The humble prostrating ourselves at his feet to receive his correction, causes his bowels to relent, and stops his hand the seeming humiliation of Ahab procured a respite of those fearful judgments denounced against his house. "We have had fathers of our flesh which corrected us, and we gave them reverence: shall we not much more be in subjection to the Father of spirits, and live?" Heb. xii. 9. Unsubmission induces a deadly guilt upon the rebellious. : 4. His paternal care in sending afflictions, is a sufficient argument to win our compliance with his will. The blessed apostle applying lenitives to the afflicted, propounds two divine truths, which if seriously thought of, and stedfastly believed, are powerful to mitigate the bitterness of all sufferings, and support the spirit under the greatest agony. The first is, "God scourgeth every son, whom he receiveth," Heb. xii. 6; and the other that is joined with it is, "Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth." The rule is general :— (i.) All his sons are under the discipline of the rod; and who would be so unhappy as to be exempted from that number, for all the prosperity of the world? Afflictions, sanctified, are the conspicuous seal of adoption ; and who would forfeit the honor of that adoption, and lose the benefit annexed to it-the eternal inheritance, rather than patiently bear his fatherly chastisements? Others that enjoy a perpetual spring of pleasure here, are declared in scripture to be bastards, and not sons, Heb. xii. 8. They are, indeed, within the compass of his universal providence, but not of that peculiar care that belongs to his sacred and select progeny. His corrections are a proof of his authority as our Father, and an assurance that we are his children: this should induce us not only with submissive temper of soul, but with thankfulness to receive the sharpest correction from the hands of our heavenly Father. This was the reason of our Saviour's meek yielding himself to the violence and cruelty of his enemies. (ii.) Chastisement is the effect of His paternal love. He is the Father of our spirits, and that divine relation carries with it a special love to the spirits of men, and in that degree of eminence, as to secure and advance their happiness, though to the destruction of the flesh. The soul is of incomparably more worth than the body, as the bright orient pearl than the mean shell that contains it this, God most highly values; for this he gave so great a price, and on it draws his image. If temporal prosperity were for our best advantage, how willingly would God bestow it on us? He that gives grace and glory, the most real testimonies of his love, certainly withholds no good thing from his people. I shall produce one convincing instance of this:-St. Paul, who by an incomparable privilege was rapt up to the celestial paradise, and heard ineffable things, yet was tormented by the messenger of Satan, and his earnest repeated prayer for deliverance not presently granted. Did God not love that blessed apostle, whose internal love to Christ almost equalled the seraphims, and was expressed in the invariable tenor of his life, by such miraculous actions and sufferings for the propagating and defence of the faith of Christ, and the glory of his name? If "we love him, because he first loved us," as St. John testifies, certainly, he that returned such superlative love to Christ, received the greatest love from him. Now, if Christ did love Paul, why did he not, upon his repeated, earnest prayer, deliver him from his wounding trouble, whatever it was? That permission was a demonstration of the love of Christ to him, as it is acknowledged by himself: "lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me," 2 Cor. xii. 7. That the afflictions of the saints proceed from God's love, will be evident, by considering First, God's gracious design in sending them. God doth not afflict willingly, but if need be; not for his own pleasure, "but for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness," Heb. xii. 10. The expression is emphatical, “his holiness," the brightest glory of his nature— the divinest gift of his love. The two principal parts of holiness are ceasing from doing evil and learning to do well; and afflictions are ordained and sent as profitable for both these effects; for the cure and prevention of sin, which is an evil incomparably worse in its nature, and terrible consequences, in this and the next world, than all the mere afflicting temporal evils. Sin defiles and debases the soul, which is the proper excellency of man, and separates from God our supreme good. "Your sins have separated between you and your God, and have hid his face from you." All afflictions that can befal us here in our persons or concerns, the most disgraceful accidents, the most reproachful contumelious slanders, the most loathsome contagious diseases, that cause our dearest friends to withdraw from us, yet cannot deprive us of union with God by faith and love, nor of the enjoy |