Israel's destruction arose from the fact of Israel having turned against
God, its Help. Sin is suicide. God is our Help, and only Help. His will
is love and blessing. His only relation to our sin is to hate it, and
fight against it. In conflict of love with lovelessness one of His
chiefest weapons is to drive home to our consciousness the conviction of
our sin. When He is driven to punish, it is our wrongdoing that forces
Him to what Isaiah calls, 'His strange act.' The Heavenly Father is
impelled by His love not to spare the rod, lest the sparing spoil the
child. An earthly father suffers more punishment than he inflicts upon
the little rebel whom, unwillingly and with tears, he may chastise; and
God's love is more tender, as it is more wise, than that of the fathers
of our flesh who corrected us. 'He doth not willingly afflict nor is
soon angry'; and of all the mercies which He bestows upon us, none is
more laden with His love than the discipline by which He would make us
know, through our painful experience, that it is 'an evil and bitter
thing to forsake the Lord, and that His fear is not in us.' In its
essence and depth, separation from God is death to the creature that
wrenches itself away from the source of life; and all the weariness and
pains of a godless life are, if we take them as He meant them, the very
angels of His presence.
Just as the sole reason for our sorrows lies in our wrongdoing, the sole
cause of our wrongdoing is in ourselves. It is because 'Israel is
against Me' that Israel's destruction rushes down upon it. It could have
defended its hankering after Assyria and idols, by wise talk about
political exigencies and the wisdom of trying to turn possibly powerful
enemies into powerful allies, and the folly of a little nation, on a
narrow strip of territory between the desert and the sea, fancying
itself able to sustain itself uncrushed between the upper millstone of
Assyria on the north, and the under one, Egypt, on the south. But
circumstances are never the cause, though they may afford the excuse of
rebellion against our Helper, God; and all the modern talk about
environments and the like, is merely a cloak cast round, but too scanty
to conceal the ugly fact of the alienated will. All the excuses for sin,
which either modern scientific jargon about 'laws,' or hyper-Calvinistic
talk about 'divine decrees,' alleges, are alike shattered against the
plain fact of conscience, which proclaims to every evil-doer, 'Thou art
the man!' We shall get no further and no deeper than the truth of our
text: 'It is thy destruction that thou art against Me.'
The pleading God has from the beginning spoken words as tender as they
are stern, and as stern as they are tender. His voice to the sons of men
has from of old asked the unanswerable question, 'Why should ye be
stricken any more?' and has answered it, so far as answer is possible,
by the fact, which is as mysterious as it is undeniable, 'Ye will revolt
more and more.' God calls upon man to judge between Him and His
vineyard, and asks, 'What could have been done more to My vineyard that
I have not done unto it? Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring
forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?' The fault lay not in the
vine-dresser, but in some evil influence that had found its way into the
life and sap of the vine, and bore fruits in an unnatural product, which
could not have been traced to the vine-dresser's action. So God stands,
as with clean hands, declaring that 'He is pure from the blood of all
men; that He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked'; and His word
to the men on whom falls the whole weight of His destroying power is,
'Thou hast procured this unto thyself.'