Ye that put far away the evil day, and cause the seat of violence to come near.
Man’ s evil day
I. All men have an evil day in their future. Calamities and trials are common to all. There is one evil day, it is death; but it need not be evil.
II. Some men adjourn in thought this evil day.
1. Not because they have any doubt as to its advent.
2. Not because they lack reminders of its approach. Why then do they adjourn the thought? The reason is found--
(1) In the strength of our material attachments.
(2) In our lack of interest in the spiritual.
(3) In our dread of the mysterious.
(4) In our conscious unpreparation for the scenes of retribution.
III. None who adjourn this evil day in thought can delay it in fact. These men so ignored their coming calamities that by their conduct they hastened them on. A general truth is suggested here,--That a man who adjourns all thought of his end, will pursue such a course of conduct as will hasten its approach. (Homilist.)
The knowledge of sin
Only history can tell what sin is; nothing but Divine judgment can give you a definition of bad doing. We must watch the desolation if we would know the meaning of certain terms and the range of certain actions. We must study Divine judgment if we would know human sin. The difficulty of the teacher herein is that so many persons are unconscious of sin and are therefore mayhap the greater sinners. Some do not distinguish between crime and sin. They have not been criminals, and therefore they think they have not been sinners,--as if all the story of life did not lie in the disposition rather than in the action. The heart is the seat of evil. None knoweth the heart but God. The heart does not know itself; and if there were not a concurrent line called history, or providence, or judgment, we should never know the real state of the heart. We must go to the broader history, the larger experience of mankind, and find, not in it alone, but in it as interpreted by Divine providence, God’s meaning of the term sin. (Joseph Parker, D. D.)