If God laugh, thou hast good cause to cry.—Trapp.
There is, as has been said, a Divine irony in the Nemesis of history. It is, however, significant that in the fuller revelation of the mind and will of the Father in the person of the Son, no such language meets us. Sadness, sternness, severity there may be, but from first to last no word of mere derision.—Plumptre.
Even I, not, “I also,” I, who have warned you so often, so tenderly, so earnestly.—Stuart.
Verse 27. Cataline was wont to be afraid at any sudden noise, as being haunted with the furies of his own evil conscience. So was our Richard the Third after the murder of his two innocent nephews, and Charles the Ninth of France after the Parisian massacre. These tyrants became more terrible to themselves than ever they had been to others.—Trapp.
You cannot paint an angel upon light: so mercy could not be represented—mercy could not be, unless there were judgment without mercy, a ground of deep darkness lying beneath, to sustain and reveal it.—Arnot.
Here also the parallelism which we have traced before holds good. The “coming of the Son of Man” shall be as “the lightning” in its instantaneous flashing. And at that coming He will have to utter the same doom. “Many shall seek to enter in, and shall not be able.”—Plumptre.
Verse 28. Does the sinner ever cry, and not get answered? Does he ever seek diligently, and God laugh at him? The passage is the profoundest Gospel. A man has two ways of seeking, before he becomes a Christian, and after he becomes a Christian. Before he becomes a Christian he seeks from natural motives, otherwise he would be already spiritual. We cannot say that natural seeking has no promise. We think it has. A man can only start outside the camp to get in. The man who out of a deep sense of terror flies toward the wicket-gate under that schoolmaster the law, will reach it if he keep on, and that by promise. If he begs God to make him spiritual and to give him the true motives of the kingdom with even a proper common spirit though it be under the terrors of escape, he draws nearer all the time to being spiritual. The light will at last break. If he keeps on in that way he will emerge some day into the light of the blessed. The action of common grace will merge into that which is saving. But if his motives are too carnal; if his state is mere terror; if his moral part has been so abused that it has passed the boundary which our text suggests; if there be the mere terror of the lost, and the mere selfishness, such as wakes up at the judgment day, we could easily understand that oceans of such tears would drift a man only further off. They are only a more insidious carnality. The sum of the doctrine is, that natural motives may become instruments of conversion if we seek God early, but if we sin away the day of grace, no terror, however selfishly and therefore passionately expressed, can become a saving prayer to bring us any nearer to the Redeemer.—Miller.
This was Saul’s misery: “The Philistines are upon me, and God will not answer me.” This was Moab’s curse (Isa. xvi. 12). This was the case of David’s enemies (Ps. xviii. 41). Even if God answer him at all, it is according to the idols of his heart (Ezek. xiv. 3, 4) with bitter answers, as in Judges x. 13, 14. Or, if better, it is but as He answered the Israelites for quails and afterwards for a king; better have been without. Giftless gifts God gives sometimes.—Trapp.
Verse 29. Those who do not choose the fear of the Lord are condemned no less than those who hate it. Not to choose is virtually to dislike, and ends in positive hatred. (Matt. xii. 30.) Men are free in choosing destruction, so that the blame rests wholly on themselves. “Ye judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life.” (Acts xiii. 46.)—Fausset.
God will give them a reason of their punishment. No marvel if they who hate knowledge do not choose the fear of the Lord. For knowledge is the guide of election, and if the guide be bad the choice cannot be good. And to show the badness of the choice, there being many fears proposed to man’s choice to which man’s life is subject; to choose the fear of the Lord, freeth from all the rest; not to choose that, is to be a slave to all the rest.—Jermin.