and him in this particular ! His official reports have been one continued boast from beginning to end. Never once has God been acknowledged by him as the disposer of the different events. We wonder not that a heathen should vaunt himself in this manner : but that a man professing himself a Christian should do it, and that too in the face of the whole Christian world, only shews to what a height his pride and impiety have risen. Well is the folly, as well as the impiety of such con- duct exposed in our text: it is, in fact, " the axe boasting itself against him that heweth with it ; and the saw magnifying itself against him that shaketh it : it is the rod shaking itself against him that lifts it up, and the staff lifting itself up against its Master\" Presumptuous man ! " Know that the Lord is greater than all gods ; and that whereinsoever they deal proudly, he is, and will be, above them*."]
His sudden fall —
[In one single night was Sennacherib overthrown. So completely was that prediction verified, " The Light of Israel shall be for a fire, and his Holy One for a flame ; and it shall burn and devour his thorns and his briers in one day." And taking the day for a prophetic day, it has been almost as literally accomplished in our great adversary. It was very little more than a year, between the time when he was in the plenitude of his power, and the time when he was reduced to his present state of weakness and degradation. There is a remarkable correspondence too in the very terms in which the destruction of the Assyrian monarch was foretold, and the means by which the destruction of the modern Sennacherib was effected. " God himself was for a fire and a flame," to burn him out of that city, where he had hoped to rest his army during the winter season. God put it into the heart of the people themselves to reduce their own houses to ashes, rather than to let them prove an asylum to their barbarous invader. This it was that necessitated him to measure back his steps " hy the way he had come^ ;" and this retreat was attended with the loss of all his army. Another desperate effort has he made to retrieve his fortunes ; but that also was defeated in one single battle ; which has left him more naked and destitute than Sennacherib himself; his owni more immediate territory, which he had proudly deemed inviolable, being now invaded on every side, and his regal power being probably near the close of its existence. We pretend not our- selves to prophesy : but the time is probably very near at hand, when Ezekiel's description of the character and end of the Tyrian monarch will be accomplished in him in all its parts : " Will he then say before him that slayeth him, I am God?
s ver. 15, t Exod. xviii. 11. "2 Kings xviii. 28, 33.