Judges 13:23 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

If the Lord were pleased to kill us, he would not have received a burnt-offering and a meat-offering at our hands, &c.— Such was the argumentation of Manoah's wife against the fear and diffidence of her husband; and it might very well have become the most masculine understanding. God Almighty will be very well pleased, if we have so much confidence and faith in him, as in all our perplexities when our understandings are puzzled, and in all our distresses when our spirits are fainting, to use that kind of logick to support us. If he has at any time redeemed us from pressing or languishing wants and necessities, and supplied us beyond our hope, or at least beyond our expectation, by the charity of friends, compassion of strangers, or some such other seeming casualties as he usually transmits his favors by, in such a manner, as that we have found ourselves for a time at ease, and in a degree of plenty (and perhaps there are few men so miserable as not to have enjoyed such intervals); if he has at any time rescued us from a devouring danger, when our enemies were so near taking our lives from us, that we had death in our prospect, and by our sensible fear had even undergone some impressions of it (and God knows how many there are who have been instances of those articulate deliverances);—we may very well argue, that if he were resolved to destroy us, he could not have conferred those graces, and favours, and deliverances upon us. Nay, if he has given us grace to rely upon and put our trust in him, to pray heartily to him, and to preserve ourselves from the infection and contagion of prevailing and prosperous wickedness; if, in a time of powerful rebellion, we have, from a due sense of our duty to him, kept our allegiance to our king; if, when the sacrilegious and prophane have broken in upon the religion and worship of the most High, we have, for piety's sake, to our utmost power, and with our utmost hazards, opposed their desperate fury, and never consented to their wickedness, when we were no longer able to stop the progress of it; if, in a time of persecution, when men's lives and fortunes were with all imaginable rigour and severity taken from them, for not consenting to perjury and other violations of their consciences, and both lives and fortunes might be preserved by submitting to those impositions, we have passed through the fire of that persecution, and chosen imprisonment or banishment, or death, rather than comply with that power to the breach of our duty; we may very well expect some signal deliverance, upon this conclusion, that if God had meant we should be destroyed, he would not have received those burnt-offerings nor those meat-offerings at our hands; he would not have given us the grace and courage to have sacrificed our conveniencies, and property, and lives to his service.