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I. A DISTRESSING EXPERIENCE. The spectacle which Mount Zion exhibited was necessarily fitted both to agitate and afflict pious and patriotic soul. God had visited His own holy habitation in anger. Because of the transgressions of His people, He had afflicted them; because of their forgetfulness of His mercies, He had forsaken them; because of their abuse of His ordinances, He had carried them away captive. If such a state of things occasioned to the prophet a feeling of the deepest distress, similar must be the experience of the Lord's people, when any portion of the Church is visited with tokens of the Divine displeasure. Sins, by us unrepented of — sins, forgotten it may be by us, but not forgotten by God — these, undoubtedly, as affording cause of humiliation, grief, and bitterness, are to be considered in connection with the removal of the light of the Divine countenance; and if we cast our eyes abroad on any portion of the visible Church, if we look either at its past history or present condition, where can we take our station, and say that difficulties, or trials, or threatenings of judgment are being made manifest, without being constrained to acknowledge that there are sins to be accounted for, and for which a fearful reckoning may be demanded?

II. A REVIVING SENTIMENT. The prophet, amidst the very tears that were shed by him over the fallen fortunes of Jerusalem, could fix his thoughts upon One who is ever the same; and his spirit was revived in consequence. And thus have God's people in all ages been sustained. The Lord, as it regards His own cause, may hide His face; but it will only be for a season. He may remove His candle from one corner of the earth; but it will be to plant it in another — He will not suffer it to be extinguished. As His own existence and purposes are eternal and unchangeable, so is that provision which He has made for His Church, and for a continued succession of believers, who shall know His name, and rejoice in His salvation.

III. A HOLY EXPOSTULATION. Animated with a holy zeal for the glory of God as associated with the prosperity of His Church, the prophet asks whether it could be that God would afford no sign of His returning favour, which might reanimate the hopes of His afflicted people, and keep them from fainting under the reproach of their enemies? It is more than prayer; it is expostulation. Yet the sentiments which he breathed were not those of unhallowed presumption; for he bowed with the deepest reverence before God when he addressed Him. It was that enlargement of soul, which they only know, who, in the strength of a living faith, have long walked with the Most High as their Father and their Friend. And similar, accordingly, at times has been the experience of the saints in after ages. Thus, for instance, it was with Luther in that most eventful of all passages in his history, when his enemies who had gathered around him on every side, thought they had swallowed him up; when the proudest of earth's potentates sat in judgment over him; when the papacy had written out the sentence which doomed him to death, and which doomed the Reformation to destruction along with him. In these distressing circumstances, when. to the eye of man, the cause of truth seemed on the eve of perishing, he was overheard in an agony of soul to exclaim, "O God, Almighty God everlasting! if I am to depend on any strength of this world, all is over; the knell is struck; sentence is gone forth. O God! O God! O Thou my God, help me against the wisdom of this world: the work is not mine, but Thine. I have no business here. I would gladly spend my days in happiness and peace. But the cause is Thine; and it is righteous and everlasting. O Lord, help me. O faithful and unchangeable God, I lean not upon man. My God, my God, dost Thou not hear: my God, art Thou no longer living? Nay, Thou canst not die: Thou dost but hide Thyself. My God, where art Thou? The cause is holy; it is Thine own. I win not let Thee go; no, nor yet for all eternity."

(T. Doig, M. A.)

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KJV: For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim.

WEB: For this our heart is faint; For these things our eyes are dim;