1. The glory of his patience. We wonder when we see a notorious
their flesh? Will a person ever try to run away from those lords which they serve with affection? They have as much delight in being bound a slave to these desires as the devil has in binding them. Therefore, when you see a person cast away their pleasures, deprive themselves of those pleasures to which their soul was once attached, and walk in paths contrary to their corrupt nature, you may search for the cause anywhere, rather than in nature itself. No piece of dirty muddy clay can form itself into a neat and handsome vessel; no plain piece of timber can fit itself for the building, much less a crooked one; nor can a person who is born blind give themselves eyes.
God deals with people in this case as He did with Abraham. He did not give Isaac when Sarah's womb, in a natural probability, could have borne him. But when her womb was dead, and age had taken away all natural strength of conception, then God gave him. This was so it might be apparent that Isaac was not a child of nature but a child of promise. I have gone into detail on these two topics, which I present more as things that need to be established than as reasons, because these two principles of common honesty and self-sufficiency are the great obstacles to conversion and are natural to most people.
PART II God's Regard for His Own Glory 1. The glory of his patience. We wonder when we see a notorious sinner how God can still withhold his thunders and allow his sword to rust in his sheath. And in fact, when such sinners are converted, they themselves marvel that God did not draw his sword and pierce their bowels or shoot one of his arrows into their hearts all this while.
But by displaying such forbearance, God shows himself to be truly God, and infinitely superior to such a weak creature as man: "I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger, I will not return to destroy
Ephraim; for I am God, and not man," Hosea 11:9. When God had
listed their sins before, and they might have expected judgment after hearing the charges, God tells them he would not destroy them, he would not execute them, because he was God. If he were not God, he could not refrain from pouring out just vengeance upon them. Even if a man inherited all the meekness of all the angels and all the men that ever were in the world, he would not be able to bear with patience the excesses and injustices committed in the world in the space of a single day; for only a God, that is, one who is infinitely patient, can bear with them.
Not a sin passed in the world before the coming of Christ in the flesh, but was a commendatory letter of God's forbearance, "To declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God," Rom 3:25. And not a sin passed before the coming of Christ into the soul, but gives the same testimony and bears the same record. And the greater number of sins and great sins are passed, the more trophies there are erected to God's longsuffering. The reason why the grace of the gospel appeared so late in the world was to testify God's patience. Our apostle takes notice of this long-suffering towards himself in bearing with such a persecutor: "However, for this cause I obtained mercy, that in me first Jesus Christ might show forth all long-suffering, for a pattern to them which should hereafter believe on him," 1 Tim. 1:16. This was
Christ's end in letting him run so far, that he might show forth not a few mites, grains, or ounces of patience, but all longsuffering, longsuffering without measure or weight, by wholesale. And this as a pattern to all ages of the world; ὑποτύπωσιν, for a type: a type is but a shadow in respect of the substance. To show that all the ages of the world should not waste that patience, whereof he had then manifested but a pattern. A pattern, we know, is less than the whole piece of cloth from whence it is cut; and as an essay is but a short taste of a person's skill, and does not discover all their art, as the first miracle Christ wrought, of turning water into wine, as a sample of what power he had, was less than those miracles which succeeded; and the first miracle God wrought in Egypt, in turning Aaron's rod into a serpent, was but a sample of his power which would produce