And they consider not in their hearts that I do remember all their wickedness.
The evil of inconsideration
What the prophet affirms of God’s ancient people is gravely distressing.
I. The fact asserted. God remembers the wickedness of men. Wickedness denotes what is hateful and destructive. Men may excuse it, deny it, forget it; but God remembers it.
1. This fact is clear from the declarations of His Word.
2. From the perfections of His nature. “The Lord is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed.”
3. From the equity of His government and a future judgment. You that forget God, and forget your sins, know that God remembers.
II. The evil stated. That men forget this fact. The evil lamented is inconsideration. The want of consideration appears--
1. In men’s continued commission of sin.
2. In their doing this without regret.
3. In their readiness to extenuate sin.
4. In their disregard of future consequences.
Wherein then consists the evil of this want of consideration?
(1) They who are thus chargeable neglect the plainest admonitions of Scripture.
(2) They oppose the frequent dictates of conscience.
(3) They allow themselves in the-practice of secret sins.
(4) They may even proceed to the commission of open vice.
(5) Thus proceeding they eventually ruin the soul.
As to the duty of consideration, the authority of God commands it. The grace of God recommends it. The reason of man approves it. The aversion of man to this duty implies its importance. (T. Kidd.)
Man’s sins in God’s mind
God alone knows us perfectly.
I. A fact in the Divine providence or government. “I remember all their wickedness.” “Remember,” as applied to God in Scripture, does not represent a faculty of the Divine mind, but a state of God’s nature, or the conduct of God in some particular instance. The text means, “Your sins are ever before Me.”
1. God remembers all kinds and degrees of sin.
2. All the sins of all men.
3. He remembers accurately and completely.
4. Continually and for ever. And--
5. With a practical result, that He may act upon His recollection.
Then how wonderful is God’s patience and forbearance! How entire must God’s pardon be when He forgives a sinner! How complete will be the transactions of the judgment day! How full will future and final punishment be!
II. This fact is forgotten by those who ought to remember it. They do not think or reflect, at least, so as to feel.
III. God’s complaint of this forgetfulness. God complains of forgetfulness, because it sears the conscience, leads to false views of a man’s position, is personally offensive to God, and is frequently the occasion of final ruin. God does not hate you as a being, but lie does hate your character. And this offensiveness to God is continually increasing. You can consider this matter, and at once. Enter then the path of serious thought and pursue it. (Samuel Martin.)
God’s remembrance of sin
I. God remembers men’s sins. “I remember all their wickedness.”
1. This is a wonderful fact. When we think of the infinite greatness of Him to whom the universe is as nothing. Sin is no trifle in the eye of Him whose glory is His holiness.
2. This is not only a wonderful, bat a solemn fact. God not only observes and knows my sins, but He remembers them.
II. Men disregard God’s remembrance of their sins. Why, then?
1. Because other thoughts engross their minds--thoughts of worldly wealth and power.
2. Because this thought, if it occurs to them for a moment, is too painful to be entertained.
III. That men’s disregard of God’s remembrance of their sins leads them to revel in iniquity. “How their own doings have beset them about; they are before My face.” Here we have--
1. Their sins in general. They are abundant and daring. Their sins encompass them on all sides, and they perpetrate them without shame under the very face of God.
2. Some of their sins are specified here. They made them glad “with their lies,” with the lying praises with which they crowned the favourites of the prince, and the lying calumnies and censures with which they blackened those whom they knew the princes disliked. (Homilist.)
God’s record of our sins
The great stone-book of nature reveals many strange records of the past. In the red sandstone there are found in some places marks which are clearly the impressions of showers of rain, and these so perfect that it can even be determined in what direction the shower inclined, and from what quarter it proceeded; and this ages ago! So sin leaves its track behind it, and God keeps a faithful record of all our sins.
Now their own doings have beset them about.
Man beset by his own doings
Down from the dark ages comes the story--if memory is true to its charge--of an expert blacksmith, who was such a master of his trade, and withal so proud of his skill, that he often boasted no man could break a chain made by him. In time the blacksmith himself was imprisoned and manacled. With the hope that he might make his escape, he examined the chain to see if it was possible to break it, when, to his horror, he discovered that the chain was one made by his own hands, which no living man could break, himself included. The chain forged by his own hands made the blacksmith a helpless, hopeless prisoner in that vile dungeon. Is it not the same with us? Each of us is forging a chain we cannot break. Every bad habit becomes a link in the chain, which will bind, in hopeless slavery, the soul that makes it. Acts form habits. Let your acts be beautiful and Christlike, and your habits will be likewise, (Paul S. Biggs Shipley.)
The sin of the people
The prophet now arraigns all the citizens of Samaria, and in their persons the whole people, because they rendered obedience to the king by flattery, and to the princes in wicked things, respecting which their own consciences convicted them. He shows that the defection which then reigned through all Israel ought not to be ascribed to the king or to few men, but that it was a common evil, which involved all in one and the same guilt, without exception. If they wish to east the blame on their governors, it will be done in vain. As soon as Jeroboam formed the calves, as soon as he built temples, religion instantly collapsed, and whatever was before pure, degenerated. How was the change so sudden? Even because the people had inwardly concocted their wickedness, which, when an occasion was offered, showed itself; for hypocrisy did lie hid in all, and was then discovered. It often happens that some vice creeps in, which proceeds from one man, or from a few; but when all readily embrace what a few introduce, it is quite evident that they have no living root of piety, or of the fear of God. They then who are so prone to adopt vices were before hypocrites; and we daily find this to be the case. When men become corrupt in their whole life, and degenerate from the pure worship of God, they are justly deemed adulterers. The prophet compares them to an oven, because they were not corrupted by some outward impulse, but by their own inclination and propensity of mind. They had been set on fire by an inward sinful instinct, and were like a hot oven. The blame rested wholly on themselves. (John Calvin.)
In the day of our king the princes have made him sick with bottles of wine.--
Court intemperance
On the king’s birthday, or some other solemnity yearly observed, the princes induced the king to drink until he became sick, and forgot and prostituted his place and authority by joining with scorners, or men eminently dissolute. Doctrine.
I. Days which men will have observed as days of festivity and solemnity do ordinarily prove days of great miscarriage and provocation against God.
2. Drunkenness and sensuality are heinous and crying sins, especially in rulers. It is a sad challenge that they should be given to “bottles of wine.”
3. Nobles and princes and great courtiers are ordinarily great plagues and snares to kings, who, having their ear and countenance, do make use of it for no other end but to draw them to sin against God.
4. It is the height of sensuality, when men not only become brutish themselves, but dare invite and tempt others to the same excess of riot, and by all means draw them to drunkenness.
5. Men by their intemperance do not only draw on the guilt of misspending time, and abusing the good creatures of God, but of self-murder and abusing their own bodies also.
6. Days of feasting and intemperance do also ordinarily prove days of great insolence and boldness in other sins.
7. It is also the great sin of drunkenness, that by their sensuality they deprive themselves of the use of reason, and render themselves contemptible, and like beasts, that they can neither know their place nor duty. The king debased himself to keep company with lewd persons and look like them. (George Hutcheson.)