The words of the text are awful, but not hopeless; they pronounce God's judgment on the finally impenitent; the penitent they but awaken, that they may "hear the voice of the Son of God and live."
I. The sentence pronounced is final. God is indeed longsuffering; He warns, calls, recalls, manifoldly, in various places; publicly, aloud, so that they must hear: but if, hearing, they will not hearken, a time will come when not only will He not hear those who would not hear Him, but all these calls will but increase their anguish and misery. Such is the fullest and most terrible meaning of the words; and in this they relate to the time when God will no longer pity nor spare, but the ungodly, who would not turn at His rebuke, shall perish by it.
II. But because, in their fullest sense, these words relate to the day of days, the day of judgment, is there then no sense in which they are fulfilled in this life, or are the fears which they awaken in the sinner's heart misplaced fears? By no means. Fear they should awaken, only not despair. Besides the great images of the day of judgment, when fire, or floods, or hurricanes, or earthquakes, or volcanoes, or man at once swallow up a whole people or city in one wide desolation, and end their trial here by sudden destruction, there are in the lives or deaths of individuals other events which so far partake of the same character, that they are final. All suffering, mental or bodily, has a twofold character: it is at once punishment and chastisement; it at once expresses God's hatred for the sin and mercy to the sinner; it is at once the wrath and love of Almighty God. And of these judgments many are for this life without remedy. God warns that He may not strike; but when He does strike, a man's whole life is changed. Whether for correction or for punishment, the restoration of penitents or the ripening of saints, we do see varied forms of sudden affliction, agonising, irremediable, darkening life at once, making the sufferer, if in this life only we had hope in Christ, of all men most miserable.
III. If God's fire do fall, then man's only wisdom is with what strength he has; darkened though his path be by the bewildering of past sin, to grope his way onward in the new path wherein God hath set him. The past is, in one sense, closed. It stands fixed as adamant, yet to him, as paradise to Adam, inaccessible. Yet, through God's overflowing mercy, there remains trial still. God answereth not in temporal mercies, that He may answer in eternal lovingkindness. He lets us eat of the fruit of our own way, that by its bitterness we may learn to leave our own way and choose His. There is trial yet; and where there is trial, there is God's strength ready to aid, and a Saviour looking on to uphold and to crown in heaven, where we see only that we deserved hell.
E. B. Pusey, Sermons from Advent to Whitsuntide, vol. i., p. 171.
I. God in mercy visits a rebellious generation. He calls, stretches out His hands, gives counsel, and administers reproof.
II. A rebellious generation neglect or resist the gracious visitation of God.
III. They shall eat the fruit of their own ways, and be filled with their own devices. As certainly as a husbandman in harvest reaps only what he sowed in spring, shall they, who in life sow sin, reap wrath in judgment.
W. Arnot, Laws from Heaven,1st series, p. 78.