Isai. xlix. 14 — 16. But Zion said, The Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me. Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget : yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands ; thy ivalls are continually before me.
WERE the glorious truths of Christianity allowed their due operation on the hearts of men, this world would be a scene of universal peace and happiness : " the heavens and the earth, the mountains," and the valleys would form one harmonious concert, all sing- ing aloud for joy at the glad tidings of redemption through the sufferings of our incarnate God. But the great mass of mankind disregard the tidings as " a cunningly devised fable;" whilst multitudes who profess to believe them, derive no comfort from them, by reason of the corrupt state of their own minds, and the hard thoughts which they entertain of God. In the verse preceding our text, we see what reason there is for joy ; but in the text itself we are told, how lamentably the proper influence of the Gospel is counteracted by the mistakes and errors of God's professing people, which yet he is endeavouring by all possible means to rectify.
We here behold,
I. The Church's complaint against God —
The complaint, in its primary sense, may be under- stood as uttered by the Church in Babylon, where her state was indeed most disconsolate. Moreover, in the present dispersion of her members, which has now continued so many hundred years, we may find