Very painful must it be to an intelligent spirit to be the executor of Jehovah's vengeance upon transgressors: the pain is only one remove the less to announce the coming doom. Yet, as we gain broader and clearer views of God's administration, we discover that the suffering of a few brings advantage to the many. The splendor and the rare excellence of God's righteousness are thereby clearly revealed. And gradually we perceive that pain and pleasure are matters vastly inferior to right and wrong. The well-being of heaven is suspended upon just government in the universe. Right must be done, though the stars should fall and the material fabric become a wreck.

I. AN AGGRAVATED NATIONAL OFFENSE.

1. It sprang out of an ancient hatred. The then-existent inhabitants of Israel had done the Edomites no wrong. It was simply an ember of an old fire the Edomites had fanned and kept alive generation after generation. Their duty clearly was to forgive and to forget. Centuries before, the blood-stained hatchet ought to have been buried. Heedlessly the Edomites were doing their own nature a cruel wrong. They were strangling their noblest qualities,

2. Hatred, nursed, soon develops into murder. "They had shed the blood of the children of Israel." Murder may stain the character of a state as much as it stains the character of an individual; and every war, unjustly provoked, is only murder. The lives of a myriad innocent men will be required at some tyrants' hands. And this murderous outrage was an act of basest cowardice. They had plunged the sword into Israel's breast when Israel was prostrate and wounded by other foes. It was as black deed as ever had been done under the eye of the sun.

3. Added to this was an attempted spoliation of Israel's territory. "Because thou hast said, These two nations ... shall be mine." Edom had hoped to blot Israel's name completely out of history, and to embrace the sacred territory in the empire of Edom. Their hatred had hatched a purpose to murder and bury a nation - a nation that had been and might again be a blessing to the globe. And the guilt was equally as great as if the vile purpose had succeeded. To the eye of our righteous God there is often a vast volume of crime secreted in a single purpose, in a hidden motive. The quintessence of sin may be found there.

II. CRIME AGAINST A NATION IS SIN AGAINST GOD.

1. God has identified himself with men. This was conspicuous in a marked degree in the case of Israel. Yet this identification with Israel's true welfare is typical of God's fatherly interest in all trustful souls. More or less, God identifies himself with humanity; and no wrong to humanity shall go unpunished. He will champion the interests of the oppressed everywhere.

2. God carefully notes every act of injustice. "I have heard all thy blasphemies which thou hast spoken against the mountains of Israel." Every whisper of man is heard by God. Such acute hearing staggers our understanding. Yet "he that formed the ear, shall he not hear?" The secrets of imperial councils are all seen and heard by Jehovah. Ultimately, and in the best time, he bathes all wicked designs.

3. Human folly in ignoring God's presence. "Whereas the Lord was there." In every age worldly men concoct their plans as if no God ruled over the affairs of men. Ambitious rulers parcel out a neighbor's territory, totally unmindful that God is in possession. "The earth is the Lord's," and his eye is never absent from his property. The weakest child of man may always summon God to his side - his Helper and Friend.

III. EQUITABLE RETRIBUTION.

1. Divine activity. "I will stretch out mine hand." Hath God, then, a human hand? The language is an accommodation to the understanding of man. God has an adaptation of power more than equivalent to the dexterous strength of the human hand. His almighty hand can reach to the very extremities of the universe. As by a breath of the lips he can create, so by a breath can he desolate cities.

2. Exact retribution. "Sith thou hast not hated blood, even blood shall pursue thee." No human judge has ever been able to mete out such exact penalties as God does. A combination of perfect qualities is needed, and this perfect combination no one possesses save Jehovah. It is always a real alleviation if the victim can feel that he has not deserved so much severity; and it is the very core of anguish to realize that the suffering is absolutely just. Conscience itself becomes the executioner of God.

3. The penalty will be set in the light of contrast. "When the whole earth rejoiceth, I will make thee desolate." It is a slight mitigation of suffering when others share it with us. It aggravates our suffering if all around us are bright with joy. The rich man of the parable felt his torment the keener because Lazarus was seen in the repose of blessedness. Isolation in misery is an additional element of woe.

4. The desolation was to be final. No prospect, not the most distant, could be entertained of relief. The stroke was to be, not disciplinary, but utterly penal. It was to be a perpetual desolation. The race was to suffer extirpation from the district.

5. The edict was confirmed by an oath. "As I live, saith the Lord God," this shall be done. This form of speech by God is a further accommodation to men. As an affirmation makes a deeper impression upon the minds of men when accompanied by an oath, by a solemn appeal to the presence of God, so God condescends to speak to men in such manner as shall most powerfully affect them. From God the simplest form of words is enough. "He is not a man, that he should lie." A word from him creates or destroys. But he speaks by way of oath, in order to arrest our thoughts and to convince our judgment.

6. Conviction of God's jurisdiction often comes too late. Men ignore God's presence and God's interference in human affairs, until events force upon them the fact that they are fighting, not simply against their fellows, nor contending against adverse circumstance, but are verily fighting against God. At length, out of the chaos of atheistic thoughts there looms the form and features of the living God. But the knowledge comes too late. They know God as their overpowering Foe, whereas they might have known him as a gracious Friend. - D.

Every breath of the autumnal wind brings down hundreds of faded leaves: they lie thick under the fast baring trees in thousands. Perfect in form, wonderful in construction, beautiful in hue, they are crushed down in myriads under every passing foot of man or beast. And what is the fall of one leaf among so many? Yet we are told by those who have studied the vast distances and proportions of this marvellous universe, — the fall of our world from the sphere of creation would be but as the fall of a leaf in the midst of a great forest. And our text does not even concern itself with the earth in its entirety, but speaks only of the members of the race that inhabits it, creatures of a moment, dying fast as the leaves of the autumn wood, and swept like them to decay.

1. "The Lord God." This holy name meant much to the devout Israelite in Ezekiel's time. The Jew had been taught to ascribe all around him — from the tiny herb on the wall to the cedars of Lebanon, from the raindrop against his easement to the blue waters of the Mediterranean that washed the shores of his beloved land, from the minute insect on the leaf to the lion roaring for his prey, from the lowest among the people to the majestic figure of a Moses or an Elijah — to the power and will of the Lord God. "For Thy pleasure they are and were created" was a fundamental article of his faith. And he associated with the holy name the conception of the Lawgiver. Yet what was his knowledge of the power and majesty of the Lord God compared with that we now possess? The power, the wisdom, and the greatness of the Lord God as creator have been magnified a thousandfold by the scientific research of later days. And certainly the discoveries of science have tended to magnify the idea of Law. We meet it everywhere, inflexible, unbending, supreme. If, then, it is dominant in the physical universe, and certain to justify itself upon the disobedient, must not we, who acknowledge the God of the Israelites, feel what an argument we thus have for the fact that the moral law is equally stern and unyielding in its demands on our obedience? Thus are we prepared to understand our need of the Gospel, and to comprehend in some degree the absolute necessity, of the perfect obedience and of the great Atonement which is set forth in the life and death of Jesus Christ. The first duty required of man — the initial duty, if he is to receive blessing and acceptance, is that he should bow down in humility and adoration before the Lord his God.

2. He, then, the High and Holy One that inhabiteth eternity, is the speaker. And looking down upon this little globe, a mere speck in His vast universe, He says of its inhabitants, "Ye My flock, the flock of My pasture, are men, and I am your God." And what has science to tell us of man? It has been busy with his origin, with his capabilities and his destiny, and every step in its progress has tended to do away with any special dignity as connected with our humanity. We are asked to believe that by a gradual process man has been developed from the lowest scale of organism to his present state of physical and intellectual power; we are told that all the researches of science go to prove that the difference between his mental capabilities and those of the higher animals is one of degree, not of kind; we are confidently assured that as they die so he dies. Science can find no trace of the spirit of man that goeth upward, and it can only pronounce upon what it sees, and the lofty conceptions of man's immortality it dismisses to the region of dreams.

3. And has our experience a more flattering tale to tell of human capabilities and destinies? A few years of bright hope and vigour, a narrow span of time which is utterly insufficient to fulfil one half of man's aspirations and purposes, a training which is suddenly arrested, an education broken short, a sharp discipline of sorrow and pain — and then the darkness and decay of death. Man's very work outlives him. The labours of his brain and hands have a vitality beyond his own. If we look at man morally, have we greater reason for speaking of his dignity? There is much that we may call noble, but how much that is unutterably mean and degrading! There is a gradual advance in civilisation and outward refinement, but the thin veneered surface covers a depth of moral defilement and evil.

4. Yet it is of man, of whom science and experience have but a mournful tale to tell, that the Lord God says, "Ye, the flock of My pasture, are men, and I am your God." And this is surely the point to which we are brought. Talk as we may of the dignity and destiny of humanity, we search in vain for any real proof of it till we come to the Revelation of God's Word. The Bible, which throws the clearest light on man's weakness and sin, exalts him to a height above all we could hope or desire. It marks out man from the rest of creation by the fact that he is capable by grace of hearing God's voice, of following after and of loving Him. The Lord takes one of the tenderest relations of pastoral life when He says, "Ye are My flock"; and in the fulness of time we have the clear explanation of these words in those of Christ Jesus our Lord, "I am the Good Shepherd: My sheep hear My voice and follow Me." He who believes that this world has been trodden by the human steps of the Son of God, that His prayers have ascended from it, that He shed His blood to redeem it, that He shared our humanity even unto death, and lives again at God's right hand, can receive with joy unspeakable the marvellous promises of the destiny of those who are Christ's. The love of God becomes a reality, life earnest, restoration to holiness possible.

(D. Reith, M. A.)