Now, it is sin that brings those calamities upon the earth.
Judgment 133 mind, afflictions in relations, and the like. There is one event to those of very different stations, time and chance happens to them all.
It is in a special manner true of the destroying judgments which God sometimes brings upon sinful nations. When He pleases He can make them universal, so that none shall escape them or be exempt from them. Whether these have little or much, they shall lose it all. Those of the meaner rank smart first by famine; but those of higher rank go first into captivity, while the poor of the land are left. It shall be all alike with high and low.
There are judgments short of the great day of judgment, in which rich and poor meet together. Let not those that are advanced in the world set their inferiors at too great a distance, because they know not how soon they may be set upon a level with them. The rich man's wealth is his strong city in his own conceit; but it does not always prove so.
2. THE OCCASION OF JUDGMENT Now, it is sin that brings those calamities upon the earth. Therefore the earth is '""made empty', and ''fadeth away"' because "'it is defiled under the inhabitants thereof'. It is polluted by the sins of men; and therefore it is made desolate by the judgments of God. Such is the filthy nature of sin. The earth never spues out its inhabitants till they have first defiled it by their sins. What is this sin of which they have been guilty?
(a) " They have transgressed the laws'' of their creation. The bonds of the law of nature have been broken by them. They have cast from them the cords of their obligations to the God of nature.
(b) They have '"'changed the ordinances"? of revealed religion. They have passed over the laws in the commission of sin, and have passed by the ordinance in the omission of duty.
(c) They have "broken the everlasting covenant", which is a perpetual bond and will be to those that keep it a perpetual blessing.
When God's judgments are fulfilled, when the proud enemies of God's Church are humbled and brought down, then it shall appear beyond contradiction that the Lord reigns, which is always true but not always evident. When the kings of the