Homiletic magazine Micah 2:10 Arise you, and depart; for this is not your rest: because it is polluted, it shall destroy you, even with a sore destruction. The prophecy of Micah stands conspicuous for the bright anticipations it gives of Messiah's days. It is to the desolation of the ten tribes add their scattering among the nations that the text refers. I. A TRUTH WHICH WE ARE ALL VERY RELUCTANT TO ADMIT. "This is not your rest." A just estimate of human life is a very rare thing, and seldom attained but at the price of painful experience. 1. It was never designed to be our rest. We are not forbidden to seek happiness; we are only forbidden seeking it in the wrong direction. The grand mistake of human nature is to suppose that there is some other good, some higher path to happiness than that which God has made coincident with human duty. God has given us on earth every requisite for our pilgrimage, but nothing adequate to our home. Things on earth are too poor to make us rich; too low to raise us to happiness; too limited and shortlived to fill the capacities of our nobler nature. Life, there fore, is a scene of progress towards something better. 2. It is never found to be our rest in actual experience. At our very best estate the world is altogether vanity. All experience tells us, "This is not your rest." Every broken hope, every unsatisfied desire, every withered rose, every opened grave, says, "This is not your rest." 3. Our religion tells us that this is not our rest, for it is polluted. II. A CHANGE FOR WHICH WE ARE MOST RELUCTANT TO PREPARE. 1. Our love of life induces us to linger. Like Lot's wife in Sodom. Trials, disappointments, bereavements, and the heaviest personal afflictions, instead of teaching us to take wing, by a perverse alternative seem to root us faster to the soil. 2. Our fears of death induce us to linger. We aim to put the subject far from us. Because the future is dreadful, and the realm unknown. 3. Our neglect of the great salvation heightens our reluctance. III. IT IS A COMMAND WHICH IT IS OUR INTEREST TO OBEY. Because the command comes from One who is the Lord of both worlds, and who has the highest interest in our welfare. He knows us better than we know ourselves, as He loves us better too. He knows how poor is this world, and how rich is the next. (Homiletic magazine.) Parallel Verses KJV: Arise ye, and depart; for this is not your rest: because it is polluted, it shall destroy you, even with a sore destruction. |
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