The Judgments of God.
I. Our Lord does not say, Those Galileans were not sinners at all. Their sins had nothing to do with their death. Those on whom the tower fell were innocent men. He rather implies the very opposite. We know nothing of the circumstances of either calamity; but this we know that our Lord warned the rest of the Jews that unless they repented, that is, changed their minds, and therefore their conduct, they would all perish in the same way. And we know that that warning was fulfilled within forty years, so hideously and so awfully that the destruction of Jerusalem remains as one of the most terrible cases of wholesale ruin and horror recorded in history, and as, I believe, a key to many a calamity before and since.
II. But we may learn another lesson from the text. These Galileans, it seems, were no worse than the other Galileans; yet they were singled out as examples, as warnings, to the rest. Pestilences, conflagrations, accidents of any kind which destroy life wholesale, even earthquakes and storms, are instances of this law; warnings from God, judgments of God, in the very strictest sense; by which He tells men, in a voice awful enough to the few, but merciful and beneficent to the many, to be prudent and wise; to learn henceforth either not to interfere with the physical laws of His universe, or to master and wield them by reason and science.
III. The more we read, in histories, of the fall of great dynasties, or of the ruin of whole classes or whole nations, the more we feel however much we may acquiesce with the judgment as a whole sympathy with the fallen. It is not the worst, but often the best specimens of a class or of a system who are swallowed up by the moral earthquake which has been accumulating its force, perhaps, for centuries. May not the reason be that God has wished to condemn, not the persons, but their systems? that He has punished them, not for their private, but for their public faults? It is not the men who are judged it is the state of things which they represent; and for that very reason may not God have made an example, a warning, not of the worst, but of the very best specimens of a class or system which has been weighed in His balance and found wanting?
C. Kingsley, Westminster Sermons,p. 252.
References: Luke 13:1-5. Christian World Pulpit,vol. v., p. 254; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vii., No. 408; Homilist,new series, vol. iii., P. 150.