Even David''s house was the house of mourning ; " Although my " house be not so with God, though he make it not to grow." All sorts of outward afflictions are incident to all sorts of men, " All " things (saith Solomon) come alike to all : There is one event to " the righteous, and to the wicked ; to the clean, and unclean ; to " him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not." The provi- dences seem one and the same, though the subject on whom they fall be vastly different. Estates and children, health and liberty will still be like themselves, vanishing comforts, whoever be the owners of them. No man's spiritual estate can be known by the view of his temporal estate. A godly family cannot be a miserable^ but it may be a mournful family. Religion secures us from the lorath, but it does not secure us from the rod of God. The Lord hath chosen another way of expressing his love to his people, than by temporal and ex- ternal things : Therefore all things come alike to all. The cove- nant excludes the curse^ but includes the cross^ " If his children " forsake my law, he. then will I visit their iniquity with the rod> " and their sin with stripes : nevertheless my loving-kindness will I " not utterly take away."
Nor indeed would it be the privilege of God's covenanted people, to be exempt from the rod ; a mark of bastardy can be no man's felicity, Heb. xii. 8. to go without the chastising discipline of the rod, were to go without the needful instructions and blessed fruits that accompany and result from the rod, Psalm xciv. 1^.
Let us not therefore say as those iiTeligious persons did in Mai. iii. 14. " It is in vain to serve God, and what profit is it that we have " kept his ordinances, and walked mournfully before him 'f Surely none serve him in vain but those that serve him vainly. Godlinees cannot secure you from affliction, but it can and will secure you from hell, and sanctify your afflictions to help you to heaven. But I stay not here.
Observation 2. A de dining family is a sore strolcefrom the hand- of God, and so to be acknoidedged wherever it falls.
It was a growing sorrow to David, that his house did not grow ; and he eyed the hand of God in it. He made it not to grow, as he speaks in the text. He felt as many deaths as he had dead children. It is God that builds and destroys families; hcenlargeth and strait- eneth them again. A family may d^chne two ways, viz. either,
1. J^y the death: or,
2. By the degeneracy of its offspring.
1. By their death, when God lops off the hopeful springing branches thereof; especially the last and only prop of it, in whom not only all the care and love, but all the hope and expectation of the parents is contracted and bound up. For,
The hearts of tender parents are usually bound up in the life of an only son *. As a man's wife is but himself divided, so his children * Omnis in asca/iio stat chari cura pareiUis. Vivgil.
9^ THE BALM OF THE COVENANT
are but himself multiplied : and v,hen all love and delight, hope and expectation, is reduced to one, the affection is strong, and that makes the affliction so too. If it were not an unparalleled grief among all earthly griefs and sorrows, the Spirit of God would never have cho- sen and singled it out from among all other sorrows, to illustrate sor- row for sin by it, yea, sorrows for that special sin of piercing Christ, as he doth, Zech. xii. 10. " They shall look upon him whom they " have pierced, and shall mourn for him, as one that mourneth for an " only son/' How naked are these walls, and how unfurnished is that house, where the children (its best ornaments) are taken down and removed by death ? It is natural to all men to desire the conti- nuance of their names and families on the earth ; and therefore when God cuts off their expectations in that kind, they look upon them- selves as dry trees, or as the withering stalks in the fields, when the flowers are fallen off, and blown away from them.
2. Or, which is yet much worse, a family may decline by the de- generacy of its offspring. "When the piety, probity, and virtues of ancestors descend not with their lands to their posterity, here the true line of honour is cut off, and the glory of a family dies, though its children live ; the family is ruined, though there be a numerous offspring. Surely it were better mourn for ten dead children, than for one such living child.
How many such wretched families can England shew this day ! How hath Atlieism and debauchery ruined and subverted many great and once famous families ! O it were better the arms of those fami- lies had been reversed, and their hands alienated, yea, better had it been a succession had failed, and that tlieir names had been blotted out, than that Satan should rule by profaneness in the places where God was once so seriousl}^ and sweetly worshipped.
Whensoever therefore God shall either of these ways subvert a family, it becomes them that are concerned in the stroke, not only to own and acknowledge the hand of God in it, but to search their hearts and houses to find out the sins which have so provoked him ; yet not so as to fall into an unbecoming despondency of spirit, but withal to relieve themselves, as David here doth, from the covenant of God ; " Yet hath he made with me an everlasting covenant."" Which brings us to the third and principal point I shall insist on.
Observ. 3. That the everlasting, iceJUordered, and sure covenant of grace ^ ajfords everlasting, well-ordered, and sure relief to all that are within the bonds of if, how many or how great soever their per- sonal or domestic trials and afflictions are.
This point will be cleared to your understandings, and prepared for your use, by clearing and opening three propositions, which or- derly take up the sum and substance of it, viz.
Proposition 1. That the minds of men, yea, the best men, are weak and feeble things under the heavy pressures of affliction, and will reel and sink under them, eoccept they be strongly relieved and under- projjped.
APPLIED TO AFFLTCTEl-> SAT^'TS. 93
A bowing wall doth not more need a strong shore or hutlress^ than the mind of a man needs a strong support and stay from heaven, when the weight of affliction makes it incline and lean all one way, " Unless the law had been my delights, I should then have perished '^ in my affliction," Psal. cxix. 92. q. d. What sliift other men make to stand the shock of their afflictions, I know not ; but this I know, that if God had not seasonably sent me the relief of a promise, I had certainly gone away in a faint fit of despondency. O how season- ably did God administer the cordials of his word to my drooping, sinking soul !
This weakness in the mind to support the burdens of affliction, proceeds from a double cause, viz.
1. From the sinking weight of the affliction.
S. From the irregular and inordinate workings of the thoughts of it.