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Manoah feared that he and his wife were going to be destroyed, because they had been visited by an angel of God. Our text is his wife's reply to him. We often need to apply a similar train of reasoning to the mysteries of Providence. God's angels come to us in fearful forms — the angels of disease, desolation, and death. At such times the murmuring heart will say in distrust, "Why hast Thou done thus?" The one calamitous event often stands out by itself. Nothing has gone before it to interpret it, or to lighten its severity; nothing has accompanied it for our special relief or solace; and nothing has as yet followed it in the world without, or in our own experience, to justify the ways of God, and to sustain submission by reason. Under these mysterious visitations of Providence we are driven, or rather we gladly have recourse, to reasoning like that in our text. We appeal to other and more frequent experiences, in which the Divine mercy has been manifest, — to sorrows which have been sanctified to our growth in grace, and to our long seasons of unmingled and unclouded happiness. If by the present sorrow God meant to crush us to the earth, if it came even on an errand of doubtful mercy, the past could not have been what it has been. Divine love could not thus have followed us step by step, and hour by hour, only to prepare for us a severer fall and a deeper gloom. In tracing out this thought let us follow the order suggested by our text.

1. "If the Lord were pleased to kill us, He would not have received a burnt-offering at our hands." Have not burnt-offerings from our households gone up to God, — lambs without fault or stain, not indeed selected by ourselves, but chosen by the Most High, — taken wholly from us, consumed, lost to the outward sight, — their unseen spirits mounting to the upper heaven, as the smoke from the ancient altars rose to the sky? These bereavements have left blessings in their train. When met and borne in faith they have given us new experience of spiritual joy. They have opened new fountains of inward life. They have bound us by new and stronger ties to the unseen world. Our sorrows have cut short our sins, nurtured our faith, given vividness to our hope, and made our love more and more like that of the Universal Father. In new sorrows, then, from which we have not had time to gather in and count the happy fruits, we will hear from like scenes that are past the call to trust and gratitude. Did it please God to destroy us, He would not have accepted our burnt-offerings.

2. Nor yet our meat-offerings. Have those alms gone forth which may sanctify all the rest? If offered God has accepted and blessed them. And whether we have rendered or withholden them, how many are the favours, the deliverances, the peculiar mercies of our homes, to which we should look back, when in any hour of doubt or sorrow a murmuring spirit would arraign the Divine goodness!

3. To pursue the order of the text — "If the Lord were pleased to kill us, neither would He have showed us all these things." What has He showed us? What is He daily showing us? How much is there in every scene and form of outward nature to rebuke distrust, to quell fear, and to make us feel that the world we live in is indeed our Father's! From the first song of the birds to the last ray of mellow twilight, whether in sunshine, beneath sheltering clouds, or fresh from the baptism of the midday shower, the whole scene is full of the present and the loving God. He sustains the wayfaring sparrow. He gives the raven his food. He clothes the frail field-flower with beauty. In our seasons of doubt, darkness, and sorrow have not these miracles of Divine care and love a message from God for us?

4. Manoah's wife added, "If the Lord were pleased to kill us, he would not have told us such things as these." She referred to promised temporal mercies in her own household. God has told us yet more, infinitely more. In the revelation by Jesus Christ He has revealed to us truths and given us promises which, received in faith, must put to flight all hopeless despondency and gloom. In His teachings and in the record of His pilgrimage we learn all that we can need to know of the mysterious dealings of Providence. To interpret them fully we cannot expect or hope. But we do learn, and are left without a remaining doubt, that, when the most severe, they are sent in love — are hidden mercies, designed to discipline our faith, to spiritualise our affections, and to draw us into closer fellowship with our Saviour's sufferings, that we may afterwards become partakers of His glory.

(A. P. Peabody.)

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KJV: And the children of Israel did evil again in the sight of the LORD; and the LORD delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years.

WEB: The children of Israel again did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh; and Yahweh delivered them into the hand of the Philistines forty years.