Psalm 50:21 These things have you done, and I kept silence; you thought that I was altogether such an one as yourself: but I will reprove you… It is true God keeps silence. We might expect as soon as the sin is committed, as soon as the lie has passed the lips, or while it is trembling on the tongue, the lightning flash of God would strike him down dead, or when the false oath is uttered, that God would make His thunderbolt strike the wretch to the dust! "He is not a man," and therefore His are not the ways of man. Oh: the power of the silence of the omnipotent and infinite God, who could in a moment smite to ruin, to atoms, to annihilation the universe He has called into being, and yet poor, wicked, foolish worms dare to dash themselves "upon the thick bosses of His buckler," and to rush on in sin and iniquity as a war-horse rushes into battle. But the day is coming — "God has appointed a day in the which He will judge the world;" and that day, that hour no one knoweth; and yet there is the day, there is the hour, therefore God says — and this is the issue of such sad misconstruction, if persevered in — "I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes." Some He sets them before in darkness and despair. I have seen a few such cases, and they are terrible to witness, when a man awakes up to see the catalogue of his sins and he has no hope, but is given up to despair, and is abandoned by God; then a man has a foretaste of "the worm that never dieth." What must it be to have them set before us when it is too late? Oh! what a dark panorama of eternity passes before the mind, when, in the lurid light of eternity, a man reads the dread catalogue! Then turn to the Lord, now. (Hugh Stowell, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes. |
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