Therefore have I hewed them by the prophets - Since they despised God’s gentler warnings and measures, He used severer. “He hewed” them, He says, as men hew stones out of the quarry, and with hard blows and sharp instruments overcome the hardness of the stone which they have to work. Their piety and goodness were light and unsubstantial as a summer cloud; their stony hearts were harder than the material stone. The stone takes the shape which man would give it; God hews man in vain; he will not receive the image of God, for which and in which he was framed.
God, elsewhere also, likens the force and vehemence of His word to “a hammer which breaketh the rocks in pieces” Jeremiah 23:29; “a sword which pierceth even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit” Hebrews 4:12. : He “continually hammered, beat upon, disquieted them, and so vexed them (as they thought) even unto death, not allowing them to rest in their sins, not suffering them to enjoy themselves in them, but forcing them (as it were) to part with things which they loved as their lives, and would as soon part with their souls as with them.”
And thy judgments are as the light that goeth forth - The “judgments” here are the acts of justice executed upon a man; the “judgment upon him,” as we say. God had done all which could be done, to lay aside the severity of His own judgments. All had failed. Then His judgments, when they came, would be manifestly just; their justice clear “as the light which goeth forth” out of the darkness of night, or out of the thick clouds. God’s past loving-kindness, His pains, (so to speak,) His solicitations, the drawings of His grace, the tender mercies of His austere chastisements, will, in the Day of Judgment, stand out clear as the light, and leave the sinner confounded, without excuse. In this life, also, God’s final “judgments are as a light which goeth forth,” enlightening, not the sinner who perishes, but others, heretofore in the darkness of ignorance, on whom they burst with a sudden blaze of light, and who reverence them, owning that “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether” Psalms 19:9.
And so, since they would not be reformed, what should have been for their wealth, was for their destruction. “I slew them by the words of My mouth.” God spake yet more terribly to them. He slew them in word, that He might not slay them in deed; He threatened them with death; since they repented not, it came. The stone, which will not take the form which should have been imparted to it, is destroyed by the strokes which should have moulded it. By a like image Jeremiah compared the Jews to ore which is consumed in the fire which should refine it; since there was no good in it. “They are brass and iron; they are all corrupted; the bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain, for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them” Jeremiah 6:28-30.