Note 1 — ISAIAH. (continued 11)

In this parable the mystery of the Divine Providence is laid open, its secret disclosed. All ploughing is for sowing; all threshing is intended for the preservation of the grain. When God chastens us, it is not that He means to destroy us, but because He has set His heart on saving us, because He has appointed us to life and not to death. He works with discrimination. He employs various methods, sends sorrows of all sorts and sizes, that He may adapt Himself to every man’s needs, and to all our varieties of place, time, and circumstances. Just as the husbandman varies his treatment of the soil, and allots to each kind of seed a soil and place suitable to its kind; just as, after the harvest has been gathered in, he employs only such instruments as are best adapted for separating the different kinds of grain from the straw and the chaff. With like wisdom and discretion God deals with us, assigning to each of us our proper station and lot, and, when we sin against Him, adapting His judgments to our several needs. The sorrows, losses, bereavements which befall us are but as the sharp edge of the share, or the keen teeth of the harrow, and are intended to prepare us to receive the good seed, and to bring forth much fruit. Or again, they are like the stroke of the flail, or the keen pressure of the sledge, or the ponderous oppression of the waggon-wheel, or the swift rattle of the horses’ hoofs; and are designed to separate the chaff from the grain, the worthless from the worthy, the evil from the good in us, that we may be made meet for the garner of God. “Cure sin and you cure sorry,” say the reason and conscience of the world: and the sorrow comes that the sin may be cured, adds the prophet; the very miseries that spring from evil are intended to eradicate the evil from which they spring. The weeds call for the plough; and the plough comes at their call; but it comes and cuts up the weeds and the ground to which they have taken root, only that the seeds of wholesome herbs and the herbs of grace may be sown in the furrows. The chaff calls for the flail, and the flail is sent, but sent only to beat out the nourishing grain. Would that this conception were as assured, and as familiar to us as to the old Hebrew prophets! For, sooner or later, we shall all have to endure sorrows, which rend our hearts as the ploughshare rends the ground, or which bruise our hearts as the flail bruises the corn.—S. Cox, D.D.: Expositor, vol. i. pp. 89–98.