Isaiah 3

10. The righteous are encouraged by the assurance that the judgments of God shall not be indiscriminate. “Say ye of the righteous that it shall be well, for the fruits of their doings they shall eat.” The object of address seems to be not the prophets or ministers of God, but the people at large or men indefinitely. A.—No righteous man would, in his right mind, be willing to make an exchange of his smartest afflictions for a wicked man’s prosperity, with all the circumstances attending. It cannot, therefore, be bad with the righteous in the worst condition. Charnock.—The reward of right living, or of seeking after rightness of life, is sure, because it is among the promises of God. Truthfulness, charitableness, peaceableness—these are primary characteristics of the true followers of the Master. These are graces which may be possessed by the humblest disciples; by those who cannot do “great things” in the eyes of men, but who long to do “right things” in the eyes of God. Now we are assured that, to the truthful, new views of Divine truth will be unfolded; to the gracious and charitable, new conceptions of God’s love will be imparted; to the peaceable, enjoyment of the peace which truly passes all understanding will be vouchsafed. Interior.

Nothing of character is really permanent but virtue and personal worth. These remain. Whatever of excellence is wrought into the soul itself belongs to both worlds. Real goodness does not attach itself merely to this life; it points to another world. Political or professional reputation cannot last forever; but a conscience void of offence before God and man is an inheritance for eternity. Religion, therefore, is a necessary and indispensable element in any great human character. There is no living without it. Religion is the tie that connects man with his Creator, and holds him to his throne. If that tie be all sundered, be all broken, he floats away, a worthless atom in the universe; its proper attractions all gone, its destiny thwarted, and its whole future nothing but darkness, desolation and death. A man with no sense of religious duty is he whom the Scriptures describe, in such terse but terrific language, as living “without God in the world.” Such a man is out of his proper being, out of the circle of all his duties, out of the circle of all his happiness, and away, far, far away, from the purposes of his creation. Webster.

11. Woe unto the wicked, for the reward of his hands shall be given him.** The determination of character is in man’s own power; for he may get from God what elements of good he pleases, and may have whatever of evil he pleases taken away. The good is of God, and if a man sows that, he shall eat the fruit of it. The bad is of man and Satan, and if a man chooses that, he shall eat of the fruit of that. The warning against it and the salvation from it are of God. The misery consequent upon it is of the sinner’s own self, and not of God; though God is the security, both to the righteous and the wicked, of having their respective wages paid to them. “I will bring evil on this people,” says God, “even the fruit of their thoughts, because they have not hearkened to My words, nor to My law, but have rejected them. Say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their doings; but they that plough iniquity and sow wickedness shall reap the same.” This throws all consequences, even for eternity, back upon character. Character produces consequences, and is the great lord of destiny forever. God tells us that character formed according to His word, by His counsel, is safe, and forms a security of happiness for eternity; but otherwise it is a security of shame and misery, the shame and misery being the inevitable result and production of an irreligious character. And God, by the freedom with which He lets consequences come down even in this world, which confessedly is not the world of retribution, but of restraint, shows us what may be expected when consequences shall have their full swing and development, when complete justice shall be administered, and men shall be judged according to the fruit of their doings as well as the nature of their character. Cheever.

So long as God is in the universe every soul that is in the universe must feel His power. No space can be so wide, no time so long as to exhaust His influence. He that obeys must feel the ever-present God in joy. He that disobeys must feel Him in pain everywhere and forever. These are the terrible necessities of obedience and disobedience. We may state it, the Bible often does state it, judicially. We may speak of God’s vengeance. But greater and truer than any picture of angry vengeance, more solemn, more sublime, more impressive to the fear of a reasonable and thoughtful man, there is the mighty image of God standing in the centre of things. And all things have to touch Him. And as all things touch Him, according to their characters, He becomes to them blessing or cursing. He is the happiness of obedience and the misery of disobedience throughout His world. He looks with sympathetic joy or with profoundest pity on the souls He judges, but the judgments both come from Him. The right hand and the left hand are both His. Burning there like the sun to all the world, He must be a comforting and guiding light, or a consuming fire—one or the other—to every soul. Phillips Brooks.

Sometimes the wicked eat here in this world of the fruit of their own doings. They receive in themselves that recompense of their error which is meet. This is the case both physically and mentally. The habits of intemperance, of self-indulgence, of the violation of what are called the laws of nature, both of the body and the mind, are followed, after a certain period, with hopeless and incurable misery. Men of intemperate minds experience plenty of warnings as to the conclusion to which their passions are hurrying them; a conclusion as fixed as fate, when habit passes with its owner beyond the world of grace into a world where destiny is determined by character, and character is the sum and expression of all preceding habit. Our passions, even in this world, if we give way to them, are all turned into diseases that prey upon ourselves, making the recesses of our being like sepulchral caves inhabited by legions of evil spirits. Cheever.

‘Say to the righteous, it shall be well with him: woe unto the wicked, it shall be ill with him,’ is the voice of both Testaments. For under the New, which brings life and immortality to light, we are still assured that ‘Godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come.’ But while both the older and the newer revelation of the Divine character and intent thus supplement each other, it is to be observed that it takes the completed life of man to sum up reward and penalty. The revelation by the prophets had chiefly to do with man’s earthly experience; that by the Son had chiefly to do with man’s future blessedness. At the harvest home the minister takes his text from the Old Testament; at the bedside of the dying or at the head of the bier he chooses his Scripture lesson from the New. It takes a wise and well-balanced Christian to so faithfully embrace the two covenants in his creed that his piety be neither mystic nor materialistic. Even in Old Testament times, when the faith of God’s people was supported the rather by reference to temporal rewards, there were exceptions to the rule so notable as to force the most godly to cry out, ‘How doth God know; and is there knowledge with the Most High?’ It was when poverty and bereavement and sickness fell upon such a life that the faith of the servant of Jehovah ‘had almost slipped.’ It was only when he went into the house of God and ‘understood the latter end’ of the sinner and the righteous that the sun again broke over the darkened soul. It is thus even in the days when the supports of faith were chiefly in visible rewards that the soul was ofttimes driven to seek refuge in the unseen world. At no time have the spirits most in touch with God understood the promises of temporal blessings as other than conditional, so given that while their general fulfilment confirmed faith their not less evident exceptions did not destroy it.

It cannot be doubted, by those most intimately conversant with the spiritual life of the day, that some of our most devout disciples suffer from a teaching which exaggerates the assurance of temporal prosperity while intending only to honor the word. Assuming that wealth and health are ‘good things,’ the promise that ‘No good thing will be withhold from them that walk uprightly,’ seems conclusive that worldly prosperity and freedom from pain are assured to the faithful disciple. A thorn in the flesh becomes therefore the evidence of unfaithfulness, and the loss of flocks and herds by the Sabeans the sure token of Divine displeasure; ignoring the most evident fact that the one was thrust upon the most eminent New Testament saint and the other befell the only man whom the Old Testament calls ‘perfect.’ It ought never to be forgotten that the Divine intent has but ‘a single eye.’ God’s purpose is ‘not enjoyment and not sorrow,’ but ‘righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.’ Rule and exception are both subservient to the one purpose, the image of God in the life of the believer. The very disciple who preached the Gospel as containing within itself the ‘promise of the life that now is’ had ‘suffered the loss of all things,’ and yet rejoiced with ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory.’ To preach that the upright man will never know Job’s boils or Paul’s thorn in the flesh is to spread a net for the feet of the unwary; to preach that the consecration of any portion of our substance to the Lord will save us from the results of bad business habits or rash investments is to promise what God has nowhere assured. But to say that neither the height of prosperity nor the depth of want shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, is to preach

a Gospel good for every age and needed by every soul. Interior.