My friends, we do not know that a single woman or child died then for whom it was not better that he or she should die. That is one of the deep things which we must leave to the perfect justice and mercy of God.
And next—what is it after all, but what we see going on round us all the day long? God does visit the sins of the fathers on the children. There is no denying it. Wives do suffer for their husbands’ sins; children and children’s children for whole generations after generations suffer for their parents’ sins, and become unhealthy, or superstitious, or profligate, or poor, or slavish, because their parents sinned, and dragged down their children with them in their fall. It is a law of the world; and therefore it is a law of God. And it is reasonable to be believed that God might choose to teach the Israelites, once and for all, that it was a law of his world. For by swallowing up those women and children with the men, God said to the Israelites, it seems to me in a way which could not be mistaken, ‘This is the consequence of lawlessness and disorder—that you not only injure yourselves, but your children after you, and involve your families in the same ruin as yourselves.’
But there was another lesson, and a deep lesson, in the earthquake and in the fire. And what was this? that the earthquake and the fire came out from the Lord.
Earthquakes have swallowed up not hundreds merely, but many thousands, in many countries, and at many times.
Fire has come forth, and still comes forth from the ground, from the clouds, from the consequences of man’s own carelessness, and destroys beast and man, and the works of man’s hands. Then men ask in terror and doubt, ‘Who sends the earthquake and the fire? Do they come from the devil—the destroyer? Do they come by chance, from some brute and blind powers of nature?’
This chapter answers, ‘No. They come from the Lord, from whom all good things do come; from the Lord who delivered the Israelites out of Egypt; who so loved the world that he spared not his only begotten Son, but freely gave him for us.’
Now I say that is a gospel, and good news, which we want now as much as ever men did; which the children of Israel wanted then, though not one whit more than we.
Many hundreds of years had these Israelites been in Egypt. Storm, lightning, earthquake, the fires of the burning mountains, were things unknown to them. They were going into Canaan—a good land and fruitful, but a land of storms and thunders; a land, too, of earthquakes and subterranean fires. The deepest earthquake-crack in the world is the valley of the Jordan, ending in the Dead Sea—a long valley, through which at different points the nether fires of the earth even now burst up at times. In Abraham’s time they had destroyed the five cities of the plain. The prophets mention them, especially Isaiah and Micah, as breaking out again in their own times; and in our own lifetime earthquake and fire have done fearful destruction in the north part of the Holy Land.
Now what was to prevent the Israelites worshipping the earthquake and the fire as gods?
Nothing. Conceive the terror and horror of the Jews coming out of that quiet land of Egypt, the first time they felt the ground rocking and rolling; the first time they heard the roar of the earthquake beneath their feet; the first time they saw, in the magnificent words of Micah, the mountains molten and the valleys cleft as wax before the fire, like water poured down a steep place; and discovered that beneath their very feet was Tophet, the pit of fire and brimstone, ready to burst up and overwhelm them they knew not when.