Tender condition.
"As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you." These are the analogies of truth that reach the heart through the life-experience when mere intellectual disquisition is vain.
I. THE MOTHER-IDEAL CREATES THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF TENDERNESS. God is the great Mother as well as the great Father of all flesh. Therefore Christ, who came to reveal the Father, was perfect humanity. In taking, as the Divine Son of the Father, our flesh, he revealed in "humanity" not only perfect manhood, but perfect womanhood too.
II. THE MOTHER-IDEAL REVEALS WHAT TRUE COMFORT MEANS.
1. Sympathy with our frailties and mistakes.
2. Succour at supreme self-cost.
3. Hopefulness even to the last.—W.M.S.
HOMILIES BY W. CLARKSON
(Vide homily on Isaiah 57:15, Isaiah 57:16.)—C.
The rebuke of unrighteousness.
We have—
I. FOUR OFFENCES SPECIALLY HATEFUL TO THE HOLY ONE.
1. Insincerity. These worshippers who brought their bullocks, their lambs, their prescribed oblations, were as guilty in the judgment of God as if they brought to his altar that which was an abomination in his sight. Their guilt lay in their insincerity; their heart was far from God when their feet were nigh his house.
2. Heedlessness. When God calls and we pay no heed to his voice, we commit an aggravated offence against him.
3. Wilfulness. The "choosing of our own ways," instead of submitting to the Divine will, is a perpetual disobedience, a sustained disloyalty.
4. Arrogance. "Doing evil before mine eyes," though conscious of the presence and the observation of God.
II. GOD'S GRAVE REBUKE OF THIS UNRIGHTEOUSNESS.
1. He will make the fears of the guilty to be fulfilled—will "bring their fears upon them." The apprehensions of guilt may safely be taken as prophecies of evil. Sin is at least as mischievous as it seems to the sinner. If men who are living in obdurate rebellion against God have impressions or intimations of evil consequences, they may be sure that ruin is on the road, and will before long confront them.
2. He will visit with unexpected sorrow. "I will choose their delusions [calamities]." Not that God ever arbitrarily punishes his children, but that he does often bring down upon the guilty sorrows and calamities which they did not apprehend—from which, indeed, they imagined themselves to be secure. No man can possibly foresee where a sinful course will lead him, and in what it will land him.—C.