Sensibility.
Ezra was a man not only of vigorous mind and strong will, with whom things soon took shape and form, but also of keen sensibility, into whose heart things cut deeply, and whose soul was stirred with strong emotion. Therefore he knew not only great joys, but great sorrows also.
"Dearly bought the hidden treasure
Finer feelings can bestow;
Chords that vibrate deepest pleasure
Thrill the deepest notes of woe."
When he learnt how the children of Israel had gone astray in the matter of the mixed marriages, he was overwhelmed with strong and profound feeling. There was—
I. DISMAY AT THE PRESENCE OF SIN (verse 5). He sat "astonished until the evening sacrifice" (verse 4), having just given way to an Oriental exhibition of extreme agitation (verse 3). This blow seems to have stunned him. He was simply dismayed, appalled. After a burst of grief he sat overwhelmed with a sense of the exceeding great folly and iniquity of the people.
II. SHAME UNDER A SENSE OF SIN (verses 5, 6, 15). Placing himself in penitential attitude, he addressed himself to God, and said, "O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee "(verse 6). He went on to identify himself (though personally guiltless) with his people: "Our iniquities," etc. (verse 6). "We are before thee in our trespasses" (verse 15). And he concluded by saying, "We cannot stand before thee because of this" (verse 15). Such was his intense fellow-feeling and sympathy with those whom he was serving, that he felt overwhelmed with shame under a consciousness of their guilt. Sin, the sin of our family, of our city, of our country, of our race—quite apart from our personal share in it—is a shameful thing, something to humiliate us and cause us "confusion of face."
III. FEAR OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF SIN. "Wouldest thou not be angry with us till thou hadst consumed us," etc. (verse 14). He lamented that the brief sunshine they were enjoying would probably disappear, in God's rekindled wrath, in utter darkness. God's mercy was for a space encompassing them, and now they were going to throw it, desperately and wantonly, away. No sooner were they out of bondage than they were inviting the great Disposer, in his righteousness, to send them back into captivity. Sin had ruined them before, and would surely ruin them again, and this time utterly and completely (verses 7, 8, 9, 14). What insensate folly!
We may look at sensibility in respect of sin as it relates to—
1. Our Divine Lord himself. He became man in order that he might suffer in our stead; in order that, as man, he might bear the penalty we must otherwise have borne. The Sinless One was never conscious of sin, nor yet of shame as we know it; but by becoming a member of our race, thus entering into perfect fellowship and intense sympathy with us, he could be affected, sorrowfully and sadly, by a sense of human sin. He did, in a way necessarily mysterious to us, thus suffer for us. It was to his soul a dreadful, horrible, shameful thing that mankind—to whose family he belonged, and of which he was a member—should have sinned so grievously as it had.
2. Our own souls. It is well for us indeed when we have come to feel the shamefulness of our own sin. The heart that, thus affected, can say, "O my God, I am ashamed and blush to lift up my face unto thee" (verse 6), is in that state of contrition, of poverty of spirit, "of which is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3). Sin is shameful because
(a) multiplied his mercies unto us in so many ways, and
(b) borne so long with us, and
(c) done and suffered, in Christ, so much to reclaim us; and because
3. Our fellows. We may well be sympathetically affected by the sins of others—our kindred, our fellow-citizens, our fellow-men. Rivers of water should run down our eyes because men keep not his law. We may well be ashamed and appalled, and pour out our souls to God, under a sense of the guilt of the world.—C.