The righteous is delivered out of trouble, and the wicked cometh in his stead.
Trouble in its relation to the righteous and the wicked
All men have their troubles. The relation of the good and the bed to trouble is strikingly different.
I. The righteous are going out of trouble. The troubles of the righteous arise from physical infirmities, mental difficulties, secular anxieties, moral imperfections, social dishonesties, falsehoods, end bereavements. But the fact is, that they are being delivered out of these troubles.
1. Partially, they are being delivered out of trouble now.
2. Completely, they will be delivered out of all trouble at death.
II. The wicked are going into trouble. They are going deeper into trouble every step they take. They are forging thunderbolts and nursing storms. The trouble they are going into is unmitigated. (D. Thomas, D.D.)
Retributive justice
Thus do these two classes change places in the dispensations of God. The same Providence often marks Divine faithfulness and retributive justice. The Israelites were delivered out of the trouble of the Red Sea; the Egyptians came in their stead. Mordecai was delivered from the gallows; Haman was hanged upon it. The noble confessors in Babylon were saved from the fire; their executioners were “slain” by it. Daniel was preserved from the lions; his accusers were devoured by them. Peter was snatched from death; his jailors and persecutors were condemned. Thus “precious in the sight of the Lord is” the life, no less than “the death, of his saints.” To what source but his own free and sovereign love can we trace this special estimation? (C. Bridges.)
The wicked cometh in his stead
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came unhurt out of the “burning fiery furnace”; whilst the men who cast them in were slain by the fierceness of the heat (Daniel 3:22-27.) Daniel was taken up alive and uninjured out of the lions’ den; whilst the men who had accused him were cast into the same den, and the lions, which had not touched Daniel, “brake all their bones in pieces” before they reached “the bottom of the den” (Daniel 6:23-24).