John 5:1-18 After this there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.… A worse thing even in this life might befall him. His sickness had found him a youth, and left him an old man; it had withered up all his manhood, and yet a worse thing than this is threatened him, should he sin again. Let no man, however miserable, count that he has exhausted the power of God's wrath. The arrows that have pierced him may have been keen; but there are keener yet, if only he provoke them, in the quiver from whence these were drawn. What the past sin was we do not know, but the man knew, and Christ connected the man's suffering with his sin. As some eagle, pierced with a shaft feathered from its own wing, so many a sufferer, even in this present time, sees, and is compelled to acknowledge, that his own sin fledged the arrow which has pierced him and brought him down. And lest he should miss the connection, oftentimes he is punished, it may be is sinned against by his fellow man in the very kind wherein he has sinned against others (Judges 1:6, 7; Genesis 42:21; Exodus 35:6, 15; Jeremiah 51:49; Habakkuk 2:8; Revelation 16:6). The deceiver is deceived as was Jacob (Genesis 27:19, 24; Genesis 29:23; Genesis 31:7; Genesis 37:32): the violater of the sanctities of family life is himself wounded and outraged in his nearest and tenderest relations as was David (2 Samuel 11:4; 2 Samuel 13:14; 2 Samuel 16:22); the troubler is troubled (Joshua 7:25). He has no choice but to say, like Edmund in "King Lear," "The wheel has come full circle, I am here." And many a sinner who cannot thus read his own doom, for it is a final and fatal one, yet declares in that doom to others that there is indeed a coming back upon men of their sins. The grandson of Ahab is himself treacherously slain in the portion of Naboth (2 Kings 9:23); William Rufus perishes, himself the third of his family who does so, in the New Forest, a chief scene of the sacrilege and the crimes of his race. (Abp. Trench.) Parallel Verses KJV: After this there was a feast of the Jews; and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.WEB: After these things, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. |
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