Your fathers, where [are] they? and the prophets, do they live for ever?
Ver. 5. Your fathers, where are they?] Is not the grave their house? have they not made their beds in the dark? are not they gone down to the congregation of all living? Job 30:23. Every man should die the same day as he is born; as being born a child of death; the wages of sin is death, and this wages should be paid him down presently. But Christ begs their lives for a season, 1 Timothy 4:10; he is the Saviour of all men, not of eternal preservation, but of temporal reservation. But what a sad thing is it for men to die in their sins, as these in the text and their nephews did, John 8:21; John 8:24. How may such men, on their deathbeds, say to their sins, as Charles V did of his honours, victories, riches, Abite hinc, abite longe, Go, go, get you out of my sight (Mornaeus); or as Cornelius Agrippa, the conjuror, did to his familiar that used to accompany him in the shape of a dog, Abi a me perdita bestia, quae me perdidisti, Begone, thou wretched beast that hast wrought my ruin (Joh. Manl.). Petrius Sutorius speaks of one that, preaching a funeral sermon on a religious man (as he calls him), and giving him large commendations, heard at the same time a voice in the church, mortuus sum, iudicatus sum, damnatus sum, I am dead, judged, and damned. The devil preached Saul's funeral, 1 Samuel 28:19, though David made his epitaph, 2 Samuel 1:19,27 .
And do the prophets live for ever?] Those false prophets (so Jerome senseth it) that cried peace, peace, to your fathers, and made all fair weather before them, when the fierce wrath of God was even ready to burst out upon them as an overflowing scourge. But they do better that understand it of God's true prophets, who are dead indeed (for wise men die as well as fools, Psalms 44:10, good men die as well as bad, Ezekiel 21:4, yea, good men often before the bad, Isa 57:1), but their words died not with them; the truth of their prophecies not only lived for ever (for ever, O Lord, thy word is stablished in heaven, Psa 119:89), but struck in the hearts and flesh of their perverse hearers like the envenomed arrows of the Almighty throughout all eternity. Wicked men may, as the wounded hart, frisk and skip up and down when the deadly arrow sticks in their ribs, but not so easily shake it off, Haeret lateri lethalis arundo.