Through the long, sad history of the world, the glory of God has very much arisen from the display of His power in contest with human iniquity. He has an overruling wisdom and power, which can constrain the mighty evil that is in the world to render Him honour against its will, to act with an unconscious and undesigned subservience. The "wrath of man" very generally involves a corrupt principle: pride, arrogance, resentment, revenge. Can such a thing as this be made to praise the all-righteous Being? How transcendent then His power! Notice several of the ways in which He has manifested this power.
I. Sometimes He has suddenly quelled and crushed the wrath itself.
II. Sometimes the wrath and the persons actuated by it have been suddenly crushed by an avenging stroke of Divine justice.
III. The wrath of man has been made subservient to the "praise" of God by provoking signal manifestations of His power in very many ways, for example those in vindication of His insulted majesty. Not that His supreme majesty can be injured, or can need any avenging. But if He is to govern the earth, it is requisite that that be done which shall preserve an awful reverence in His subjects, that He shall not be defied with impunity by wrath pointed at Him. Therefore such transactions have taken place as those at Egypt and the Red Sea.
IV. Again, the "wrath of man" as against the cause and people of God has been overruled to His "praise." Persecution has driven the adherents of the good cause into a wide dispersion; and wherever they have gone, they have carried their sacred faith and become its apostles: they have carried much of their Christian virtues also. And then, again, by His avenging judgments on those who have endeavoured to destroy His people and cause, God has gained Himself glory.
V. It were a somewhat varied illustration of the text to observe that God has in some instances suffered the wrath of man to work on in a successful process, and without any apparent interference or opposition, till it was just coming to its natural result, and then by a sudden interposition has caused a result infinitely different.
VI. God makes use of this great evil, the "wrath of man," to make war on and destroy other great evils in the earth; He lets it go forth, with His commission, as a giant demolisher. One wicked nation has been made His avenger on the greater wickedness of another.
J. Foster, Lectures,1st series, p. 282.