Haggai 2:17 I smote you with blasting and with mildew and with hail in all the labors of your hands; yet you turned not to me, said the LORD. The scope of the second part of this sermon is to show that however God will put difference betwixt workers, and knoweth who are sincere and who are not, yet to encourage them to be diligent in it, as being a work which He approves in itself, and which He will reward with temporal blessing, and a change of His former dispensations. 1. Though the Lord's dispensations be visible and felt by all, yet the right considering and understanding of them is a work of much difficulty, and to which men need serious stirring up, especially to take up the right cause of them. 2. Famine and scarcity is one of the public scourges whereby the Lord chastises the sinful contempt and negligence of His people in His work and service; and He will be conspicuous in inflicting of it. 3. As it is the usual plague accompanying common judgments that they do not work upon the hearts of men, to draw them nearer God, but rather harden them; so such an impenitent disposition when God strikes, is a ground of further controversy; therefore He marks by the way their stupidity. "Yet ye turned not to Me, saith the Lord." 4. However temporal things are not to be looked on as the chief reward of serving God, nor as absolutely promised, nor yet are they to be so much looked to under the Gospel, as the Church of the Jews might under their pedagogy; yet in this the promise, even concerning these things, holds good, that following God, hath the promise of this life, in so far as it is for the followers' good; that God's changing adversity into prosperity when a people set about His work, should be a confirmation to their faith, and strengthen their hands; that whatever adversity come on the Church, it is not to be fathered on God's work, as if it had been the cause of her woe; that as neglecters of God's work are real losers in their own affairs, and will prove so in the end, so followers of His work have a real advantage in it; and, in a word, that God's work is never followed without a blessing evidenced some way or other to the godly's satisfaction. 5. It is a profitable study to remark the advantages of following God, and to study encouragement in that duty. So much are we taught by the Lord's exciting them to consider the change of His dealing, as trysting with the very day of their amending their fault. 6. God is so sovereign and absolute a Lord of all things, and hath times and seasons, blessings and cursings so in His hands, as He may undertake to do things, whereof there is no visible probability or certainty in the second causes, and can certainly perform them: therefore doth He undertake to bless them, when second causes and the season could speak no such thing. 7. It is the prerogative of God only to know future contingent events, which depend on times and seasons, and uncertain second causes, and their influences, but only by immediate revelation; this is held forth as God's prerogative, by His extraordinary prophet, to foretell in the midst of winter, what the succeeding harvest should produce. (George Hutcheson.) Parallel Verses KJV: I smote you with blasting and with mildew and with hail in all the labours of your hands; yet ye turned not to me, saith the LORD. |
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