An exposition with practical observations continued upon the thirty-eighth, thirty-ninth, fortieth, forty-first, and forty-second,…

Here the Lord speaks of the second state of the sea, according to one reading, though according to ours of the first.

When the Lord had said, Let the waters be gathered together into one place, he prepared a place to receive the waters; as when a man would have a place to hold water, he digs or makes an earthen vessel or receptacle for it. So when the waters issued out of the earth in their nativity, the Lord gathered them together into a sea, and prepared a stupendous pit; or as some follow the allusion here of a new-born infant wrapped in swaddling-bands, he provided a great bed or cradle to put it into. That vast concave into which the waters are put, is somewhat like a cradle; those channels (I say) which God made for the sea, are ⟨p. 104⟩as the cradle wherein it is laid. The banks and shores are those bars and doors with which the infant is kept in his cradle. What can be spoken more significantly than these similitudes, to express the greatness of God, who keeps in the sea by his power, and leads it forth gently into several creeks and bosoms, for the safety of Navigation, and represseth its fury and violence by the sands and shores? Thus saith the Lord, I brake up for it my decreed place, a hollow place, for the holding of the sea.

When the Lord had said, Let the waters be gathered together into one place, he prepared a place to receive the waters; as when a man would have a place to hold water, he digs or makes an earthen vessel or receptacle for it. So when the waters issued out of the earth in their nativity, the Lord gathered them together into a sea, and prepared a stupendious pit; or as some follow the allusion here of a new-born infant wrapt in swadling-bands, he provided a great bed or cradle to put it into. That vast concave into which the waters are put, is somewhat like a cradle; those channels (I say) which God made for the sea, are ⟨p. 104⟩as the cradle wherein it is laid. The banks and shores are those bars and doors with which the infant is kept in his cradle. What can be spoken more significantly than these similitudes, to express the greatness of God, who keeps in the sea by his power, and leads it forth gently into several creeks and bosoms, for the safety of Navigain, and represseth its fury and violence by the sands and shores? Thus saith the Lord, I brake up for it my decreed place, a hollow place, for the holding of the sea.