These verses summon the people
To humiliation for sin, and thanksgiving for mercy.
God, by his prophet, does not forbid the outward sign of sorrow, so customary among Orientals and common among the Jews; he rather insists upon the presence of the thing signified, without which the sign was more a mockery than a reality.
I. THE OCCASION OF THE HUMILIATION. It Was an earnest time with the people of the southern kingdom. Terrible desolation had been made in the land of Judah. An army of locusts had been the agents of Divine vengeance; sin had been the cause; the author of the punishment was God. "The prophet had described at length the coming of God's judgments as a mighty army. But, lest amid the judgments men should (as they often do) forget the Judge, he represents God as commanding this his army, gathering, ordering, marshalling, directing them, giving them the word when and upon whom they should pour themselves. Their presence was a token of this. They should neither anticipate that command nor linger. But as an army awaits the command to move, and then, the word being given, rolls on instantly, so God's judgments await the precise moment of his will, and then fall."
II. THE NATURE OF THE HUMILIATION.
III. THE MOTIVES TO HUMILIATION.
IV. THE METHOD OF THEIR HUMILIATION.
1. A great variety of circumstances is to be attended to.
2. The services of the occasion were to be conducted in an orderly and becoming manner. Everything connected with the house and service of God requires to be done decently and in good order. Thus, in the passage before us, nothing is left to haphazard; nor did anything remain to be improvised on the spur of the moment, and after the assembly met.
3. The prayer itself