I. The text is an assertion of the shortness and uncertainty of life. And we may naturally be surprised that there should be so sublime and startling a machinery for the delivery to us of so commonplace a truth. Here is a voice from the firmament. An invisible agency is brought to bear, as though for the announcement of something altogether startling and unexpected. The amazed prophet asks what the message can be for the delivery of which he is summoned by so awful a call. And then he is merely called to publish what every one knew before: "All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field." Truths, which we never think of disputing, may be practically those which we are most in the habit of forgetting. It is of well-known truths that a voice from heaven must speak to us, if it would speak of what it is important that we know.
II. It is but needful that the shortness and uncertainty of life should be actually felt, and there must pass a great moral revolution over the world; and numbers who persist in sinning because they believe themselves sure of an opportunity for repentance would be almost driven to an immediate attention to religion, feeling that if not an immediate there would probably be none. And the effect wrought on the unconverted, if we could penetrate them with a consciousness of the uncertainty of life, would not be without its parallel in the righteous on whom we cannot charge the habitual disregard of the dread things of the future. The same feeling is at work, if not in the same measure, in the righteous and the unrighteous the feeling that the day of death is not near. It could not be that men professing religion would so entangle themselves with the affairs of earth, be so loth to make sacrifices in the cause of God, and apply themselves with so little earnestness and self-denial to the discipline of the heart, were they fraught with the persuasion that "the Judge standeth at the door."
III. If the exhibitions of human frailty may not teach men how frail they are, it may be that these exhibitions will dispose men to prayer. They cannot produce the consciousness, that "in the midst of life we are in death;" but they may excite the feeling, that there ought to be this consciousness, and this feeling may issue in an earnest cry that God would implant it.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 1827.
References: Isaiah 40:6-8. A. Boyd, Penny Pulpit,No. 498; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xvii., No. 999; J. G. Wood, Contemporary Pulpit,vol. iv., p. 114.