The application of redemption

To the like purpose is that of Job, Job, 23. 16. when the Armies of Gods indignation had encamped against him, and the terrors of the Lord had drunk up his spirit; says he, God makes my heart soft, or hath melted my soul; the word signifies a severing and separation of one thing from another, and is opposite to settling and fastening, making firm, stiff, and hard, as that of Pharaoh, Exod. 9. last, Pharaoh hardened his heart, his soul fastened by an invincible resolution to the sinful purpose of his malicious detaining and oppression of the Jews. When the fierceness of Gods displeasure brought home by the breathings of the Spirit of God upon the soul, it makes it melt like Wax before the fire, makes it easy to give way to the impression of the pleasure of the Lord, that his Spirit may take away any of those lusts that have been of […] league with the heart. Hence lastly it is, that in the Phrase of Scripture, the sinner is said to be in […], ¹or the soul to be embittered by God, when he is brought and held under the sense of the loathsomeness of his ins, and himself by reason thereof; so that all the sweet that his liquorish heart takes in any pleasing lust, is wholly taken away. The Physician observes, and reason teacheth, that sweet things only nourish, but bitter things cleanse, the Nature of the stomach abhors the presence of them, expels them, takes no pleasure therein, receives no nourishment therefrom. So with the sinner in his condition, when the Lord […] out the bitterness of sin upon him, he can find no food relish, no delight in his former distempers, ⟨p. 362⟩which he followed with that violence, and fed so eagerly upon, even unto surfeiting in former times, they will not down with him now. It's a dreadful thing now to him, to take the least taste of them by any serious consideration or remembrance, when formerly he could have made a meal of them by daily meditation, When ²wickedness was sweet in his mouth, and he hid it under his tongue, but now it's turned to the gall of Asps, and he is not able to endure the poison and bitterness of it, but it makes him heart-sick, in the sight and sense of it.