Behold, I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves.
--We go to-day to the gate of the harvest-field, to see the waggon piled up aloft with many sheaves come creaking forth, making ruts along the field. What a picture is a waggon loaded with corn of you and of me, as loaded with God’s mercies! Alas! that such a sign should be capable of another reading. That while God loadeth us with mercy, we should load Him withsin. The text is only a figure, since God cannot actually be oppressed by man. God speaks to us as a great father may talk to his little child. Just as a cart has the axles bent, and as the wheels creak under the excessive load, so the Lord says that under the load of human guilt He is pressed down, until He crieth out, because He can bear no longer the iniquity of those that offend against Him.
I. Sin is very grievous and burdensome to God. There is no suggestion anywhere that the whole burden of creation is any weight to the Most High. The heathen picture Atlas stooping beneath the globe; but the eternal God, who beareth up the pillars of the universe, “fainteth not, neither is weary.” Nor does providence fatigue the Lord. His incessant working has not diminished His strength, nor is there any failing, or thought of failing, with Him. But sin burdens God, though the world cannot; and iniquity presses the Most High, though the whole weight of providence is as the small dust of the balance.
1. Sin is the great spoiler of all God’s works. Sin looked on Eden, and withered all its flowers. Nothing tarnishes beauty so much as sin, for it mars God’s imago and erases His superscription.
2. Sin makes God’s creatures unhappy. Shall not, therefore, the Lord abhor it?
3. Sin attacks God in all His attributes. It assails Him on His throne, and stabs at His existence. What is sin? Is it not an insult to God’s wisdom? Does it not abuse God’s mercy?
4. Sin is an onslaught upon God Himself. For sin is atheism of heart. Surely sin is exceedingly sinful; so it must be grievous and burdensome to God.
II. Some sins are more especially grievous to God. There is no such thing as a little sin, and yet there are degrees of guilt. There are sins which especially provoke God.
1. Licentiousness.
2. Oppression.
3. Idolatry.
4. Blasphemy.
Many men are especially obnoxious to God, because of their length in sin God takes special note, and feeleth an especial weariness of sin that is mixed with obstinacy. And ingratitude is intensely burdensome to God. While it is true that sin is grievous to the Lord, it magnifies His mercy when we see that He bears the load. As the cart is not said to break, but is pressed only, so is He pressed, and yet He bears. If you or I were in God’s place, should we have borne it?
III. God, in the person of his son, did bear and take away sin. Here stood the great problem. God must punish sin, yet He desired to have mercy. Jesus comes to be the substitute for all who trust Him.
IV. If not in Christ, that same load will crush us for ever. After judgment, for a soul out of Christ, what awaits? (C. H. Spurgeon.)
God’s grief
(compare Hosea 8:10; Hosea 11:8):--These three passages give us an intimation, a glimpse of the burden and grief of the Infinite. What is this burden that presses on the heart of the Divine? What are the thorns under the golden crown of universal dominion? Can we know what they are? Yes, the burden of the King of princes is the sin of His creatures, and to clear it from the world is the one great problem of the Divine. If sin were committed by any who were independent of God--were it possible for such to exist--it might cause Him no such sorrow. But all are dependent on Him, closely united by creation. Sin is evidently a matter of greatest cost to God, and something much more awful than we can comprehend. Sin meets God in His world at every turn. Sin now rears its serpent head amid the glories of God’s creation, and is now working terrible damage in the fair world of our Father. It may seem a trifling thing to many; but it is a real burden and annoyance to God. It is not necessary that a man should have a sharp stone in his eye in order to feel a smart. A speck of dust, a grain of sand, will be sufficient to blot out to us for a season the glories of the most beautiful landscape. As to the presence of such a slight foreign substance, the eye is most sensitive, so is the nature of God to the presence of sin in His creature. To a Being of such great love it must be a great burden to see such multitudes of His creatures rushing on in the misery of sin. In proportion to the infinite tenderness of the Divine nature, so is the burden increased. God knows the far-reaching effects of man’s sin. It is a very common thing to represent God as existing only in unalloyed happiness. It is only like Him to take up our burdens, to know our sorrows. He Is most like God when love leads to an infinite self-sacrifice in bearing man’s burdens, and sympathising in human sorrow. We should not believe in God’s sympathy and love so much apart from this bearing some burden. We should not go to Him so readily. There was not, let us remember, in Christ, who manifested God, the appearance of submission to suffering. It was real suffering, because there was a real burden and sympathy. If the Divine Being sympathises with man, He also shows us that He wishes to have from us sympathy and love in return. We are “to sorrow a little for the burden of the King of princes.” And the measure of our power to enter into sympathy with the Divine is the measure of the strength of our spiritual character. (F. Hastings.)
God’s sin-burden
This verse, as it is by some translated, is a part of the sentence or threatening, showing that God would press their place or land, and fill it with heaps of judgments and enemies, as a cart is pressed and filled with sheaves in harvest. But as it is here translated, it is a general conclusion introductory to the sentence; wherein the Lord declareth, that the multitude and variety of these their sins did so provoke His justice and patience, that He might justly complain of them as insupportable and intolerable, as a cart groans under burdens; and therefore He would punish, as is declared in the following verses. Doctrine.
1. It is the way of secure sinners to lay over the weight of all their sins on God, and on His mercy, as if He were but a cart to lie under the burden of them all, that so they may sleep the sounder and sin the faster.
2. The Lord, even toward secure sinners, will take on this burden so far, as to suffer their manners long, before He cast it off, albeit He be provoked by every sin, and doth not allow their presumptuous casting off their iniquities upon Him, yet He doth not complain nor strike, till He be pressed, “as a cart that is full of sheaves.”
3. God’s patience and long-suffering will at last weary to endure the provocations of sinners, as becoming insupportable.
4. When the cup of men’s iniquities is full, and God is about to bear them no longer, yet they may be so stupid as to need up-stirring to consider it. (George Hutcheson.)
Ill-treatment of God
Consider, then, for a moment, how bad human nature must be, if we think how ill it has treated its God. I remember William Huntington says, in his Autobiography, that one of the sharpest sensations of pain that he felt after he had been quickened by Divine grace was this: “ He felt such pity for God.” I do not know that I ever met with the expression elsewhere, but it is a very expressive one, although I might prefer to say sympathy with God and grief that He should be so evil entreated. Ah, there are many men that are forgotten, that are despised, and that are trampled on by their fellows; but there never was a man who was so despised as the everlasting God has been. (C. H. Spurgeon.)