GOD’S MESSAGE IN EVIL TIMES
‘Thus saith the Lord.’
I. If the former chapter deals with sins against the first table of the law, this deals with those against the second.—Men are depicted devising evil to their neighbours, coveting their goods, and oppressing their persons. Therefore God would devise evil against them. And as they would not have His yoke of mercy, they should bear that of heavy judgment. So absolute was to be the devastation of the land, that the inheritance should no longer descend from father to son, or be measured out by lot; and so inveterate would be the people’s revolt from God, that they would no longer bear to hear the words of the true prophet.
II. Jehovah protests that it is not His desire that such things should obtain.—They were not His doings. He wanted to do only good to them that walked uprightly. But the people had so absolutely forfeited all claim upon Him. They had deprived the helpless of the robes that they wore next their skin; they had taken advantage of widows and orphans in their distress; and therefore the sentence had gone forth for them to arise and depart, to go into captivity, since Canaan could no longer be their resting-place. Drunken men were offered the sinful people as their prophets, since they rejected the true.
III. Yet God would restore His people.—He would break a way for them through the gates of the walled cities in which they were imprisoned, and lead them back to their own land. Our Breaker is the Lord Jesus, Who broke a way for us from the prison-house of death, and we have but to follow Him Who passes on before us—the Lord at our head.