indications of his heavy displeasure. The flattering hope of " becoming as Gods," had led Adam and his wife to trans- gress the divine command. Now therefore God casts it, as it were, in their teeth, with holy indignation, in order that they might see what they had gained by their folly and presumption. And whereas they had hitherto enjoyed the liberty of eating all the fruits of Paradise, and especially that which was a pledge and earnest to them of God's eternal favour, he drives them out from the garden, to live in a far different manner by the sweat of their brow, and to feel that they were cut off from that life, which, had they main- tained their innocence, would have been consummated in glory.
Thus we behold them driven as outcasts from God and happiness, and doomed to a life of labour and sorrow which should issue in a painful death, and (if repentance intervened not) in everlasting misery.]
2. Partly in mercy —
[God's judgments in this world have always been tem- pered with mercy; yea so tempered, as to be capable of being turned into the richest blessings. Thus it was in the case before us. Our first parents had been accustomed to consider the tree of life as a pledge of the divine favour ; and would be likely to regard it in the same view after their fall, as they had done before. Under this delusion they would be ready to embrace these means of reconciliation with their offended God, and would be led thereby to neglect the means which God had prescribed. Persisting in this mistake, they would pacify their own consciences ; and having lulled them- selves asleep under the guilt of their transgressions, they would perish in the midst of all the mercy which God had offered them through the mediation of his Son. To prevent these fatal consequences, God cuts them off from all access to the tree of life, and thus necessitates them to seek for mercy in his appointed way. Precisely as, in destroying the Jewish nation and polity, God punished his people indeed, but at the same time consulted their truest interests, by rendering it im- possible for them to fulfil the righteousness of the Mosaic law, and thereby " shutting them up unto the faith of Christ1;" so did he expel our first parents from Paradise, that they might have nothing to divert their attention from that " Seed of the Woman who was in due time to bruise the Serpent's head."
Thus did God " in judgment remember mercy;" and, in the very hottest exercise of his anger, provide means for the richest display of his unmerited, unsought-for kindness.]
« Gal. hi. 23.