with a determination througli grace to obey liis voice ; " Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep ; let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy into heaviness: humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God ; and he shall hft you up ^" The very Gospel itself, with all that Christ has done and suf- fered for us, will do us no good, if we remain impenitent. The command is, " Repent, and beheve the gospel." We must " sow in tears, if ever we would reap in joy."]
8 Jam. iv. 9, 10.
Isai. xxii. 24. They shall hang upon him all the glory of his
Father s house.
IN the various changes that take place in human governments, or in the persons who are to be en- trusted with the supreme authority, the hand of God ought to be continually acknowledged : whoever be the instruments, or whatever be the means, of effecting those changes, we must look through the second causes to God, as the first great Cause, who ordereth all things after the counsel of his own will, and makes use of men as his agents, to convey blessings to a nation, or to inflict his just judgments upon it. But, in his dispensations towards the Jews, there was often some mystery concealed, where we should have ob- served nothing but an ordinary occurrence. This was the case with respect to the deposition of Shebna, and the substitution of Eliakim in his place, as first minister of state under Hezekiah. Eliakim seems to have been raised as a type of Christ : the agreement between him and Christ is strongly marked in the passage before us,
I. In the authority committed to him —
[The appointment of both was of God ^ Shebna was a proud, vain-glorious man, far more intent on aggrandizing him- self and his family, than on executing the arduous duties of his station. God therefore moved Hezekiah to dismiss him, and inspired Isaiah, not only to predict his degradation, but to
^ To put the audience in full possession of the subject, read dis- tinctly from ver. 15. to the end ; and observe that ver. 25. refers, not to Eliakim, but to Shebna.