Observation 2. A declining family is a sore stroke from the hand of God
him in vain but those that serve him vainly. Godliness cannot secure you from affliction, but it can and will secure you from hell, and sanctify your afflictions to help you to heaven. But I stay not here.
Observation 2. A declining family is a sore stroke from the hand of God, and so to be acknowledged wherever it falls.
It was a growing sorrow to David, that his house did not grow; and he eyed the hand of God in it, He made it not to grow, as he speaks in the text. He felt as many deaths as he had dead children. It is God that builds and destroys families; he enlargeth and straiteneth them again. A family may decline two ways, viz. either,
1. By the death: or, 2. By the degeneracy of its offspring.
1. By their death, when God lops off the hopeful springing branches thereof; especially the last and only prop of it, in whom not only all the care and love, but all the hope and expectation of the parents is contracted and bound up. For, The hearts of tender parents are usually bound up in the life of an only son*. As a man's wife is but himself divided, so his children are but himself multiplied: and when all love and delight, hope and expectation, is reduced to one, the affection is strong, and that makes the affliction so too. If it were not an unparalleled grief among all earthly griefs and sorrows, the Spirit of God would never have chosen and singled it out from among all other sorrows, to illustrate sorrow for sin by it, yea, sorrows for that special sin of piercing
Christ, as he doth, Zech. 12:10. "They shall look upon him whom they have pierced, and shall mourn for him, as one that mourneth for an only son." How naked are those walls, and how unfurnished is that
house, where the children (its best ornaments) are taken down and removed by death? It is natural to all men to desire the continuance of their names and families on the earth; and therefore when God cuts off their expectations in that kind, they look upon themselves as dry trees, or as the withering stalks in the fields, when the flowers are fallen off, and blown away from them.
2. Or, which is yet much worse, a family may decline by the degeneracy of its offspring. When the piety, probity, and virtues of ancestors descend not with their lands to their posterity, here the true line of honour is cut off, and the glory of a family dies, though its children live; the family is ruined, though there be a numerous offspring. Surely it were better mourn for ten dead children, than for one such living child.
How many such wretched families can England shew this day! How hath Atheism and debauchery ruined and subverted many great and once famous families! O it were better the arms of those families had been reversed, and their hands alienated, yea, better had it been a succession had failed, and that their names had been blotted out, than that Satan should rule by profaneness in the places where God was once so seriously and sweetly worshipped.
Whensoever therefore God shall either of these ways subvert a family, it becomes them that are concerned in the stroke, not only to own and acknowledge the hand of God in it, but to search their hearts and houses to find out the sins which have so provoked him; yet not so as to fall into an unbecoming despondency of spirit, but withal to relieve themselves, as David here doth, from the covenant of God; "Yet hath he made with me an everlasting covenant." Which brings us to the third and principal point I shall insist on.