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Abimelech knew not that the thing he intended was sin; and therefore he pleads that in the * integrity of his heart and in- nocency of his hands ' he did it, ver. 5. God turned about his will and thoughts, that he should not accomplish his in- tention ; but by what ways or means is not revealed. Nor is it evident what course he took in the change of Esau's heart, when he came out against his brother to destroy him. Gen. xxxiii. 4. Whether he stirred up in him a fresh spring of natural affections, or caused him to consider what grief by this means he should bring to his aged father, who loved him so tenderly ; or whether, being now grown great and wealthy, he more and more despised the matter of difference between him and his brother, and so utterly slighted it, is not known. It may be God did it by an immediate powerful act of his Spirit upon his heart, without any actual inter- vening of these or any of the like considerations. Now, though the things mentioned are in themselves at other times feeble and weak, yet when they are managed by the Spirit of God to such an end and purpose, they certainly become ef- fectual, and are the matter of his preventing grace.
2dly. God prevents the bringing forth of conceived sin by real spiritual saving grace, and that either in the first conversion of sinners, or in the following supplies of it.
(1st.) This is one part of the mystery of his grace and love. He meets men sometimes in their highest resolutions for sin, with the highest efficacy of his grace. Hereby he manifests the power of his own grace, and gives the soul a farther experi- ence of the law of sin, when it takes such a farewell of it, as to be changed in the midst of its resolutions to serve the lusts thereof. By this he melts down the lusts of men, causeth them to wither at the root, that they shall no more strive to bring forth what they have conceived, but be filled with shame and sorrow at their conception. An example and instance of this proceeding of God, for the use and instruc- tion of all generations, we have in Paul. His heart was ful of wickedness, blasphemy, and persecution; his conceptior of them was come unto rage and madness, and a full purpos( of exercising them all to the utmost; so the story relates it Acts ix. so himself declares the state to have been with him. Acts xxvi. 9—12. 1 Tim. i. 13. In the midst of all this violent pursuit of sin, a voice from heaven shuts up the womb
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and dries the breasts of it, and he cries, 'Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ?' Acts ix. 6. The same person seems to in- timate, that this is the way of God's procedure with others, even to meet them with his converting grace in the height of their sin and folly, 1 Tim. i. 16. For he himself, he says, was a pattern of God's dealing with others ; as he dealt with him, so also would he do with some such-like sinners. ' For this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might shew forth all long-suffering, as a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him to life everlasting.' And we have not a few examples of it in our own days. Sundry persons on set purpose going to this or that place to deride and scoff at the dispensation of the word, have been met withal in the very place wherein they designed to serve their lusts and Satan, and have been cast down at the foot of God. This way of God's dealing with sinners is at large set forth. Job xxxiii. 15—18. Dionysius the Areopagite is another instance of this work of God's grace and love. Paul is dragged either by him or before him, to plead for his life, as a setter forth of strange gods, which at Athens was death by the law- In the midst of this frame of spirit God meets with him by converting grace, sin withers in the w^omb, and he cleaves to Paul and his doctrine ; Acts xvii. 18 — 34. The like dispensation towards Israel we have, Hos. xi. 7 — 10. But there is no need to insist on more instances of this ob- servation. God is pleased to leave no generation unconvinced of this truth, if they do but attend to their own experiences, and the examples of this work of his mercy amongst them. Every day, one or other is taken in the fulness of the purpose of his heart to go on in sin, in this or that sin, and is stopped in his course by the power of converting grace.
(2dly.) God doth it by the same grace in the renewed communications of it, that is, by special assisting grace. This is the common way of his dealing with believers in this case. That they also, through the deceitfulness of sin, may be carried on to the conceiving of this or that sin, was be- fore declared. God puts a stop to their progress, or rather, to the prevalency of the law of sin in them, and that by giving in unto them special assistances needful for their preservation and deliverance. As David says of himself, Psal. IxxJii. 2. His ' feet were almost gone, his steps had