A practical exposition on the 130th Psalm

Fourthly, Oppressing Apprehensions of temporal Judgements, concur herein also; for God will Judge his People. And Judgement often begins at the House of God. Though God, saith such a one, should not cast me off for ever, though he should pardon my iniquities, yet he may so take vengeance of my inventions, as to make me feed on gall and wormwood all my days Psal. 119. 120. faith David, My flesh trembleth for fear of thee, and I am afraid of thy Judgements. He knows not what the great God may bring upon him; and being full of a sense of the guilt of sin, which is the bottom of this whole condition, every Judgement of God is full of terror unto him. Sometimes he thinks, God may lay open the filth of his heart, and make him a scandal and a reproach in the world; Psal. 39. 8. Oh, saith he, make me not a reproach to the foolish. Sometimes he trembles lest God should strike him suddenly with some signal Judgement, and take him out of the world, in darkness and sorrow; so saith David, take me not away in thy wrath. Sometimes he fears lest he shall be ⟨p. 14⟩like Jonah, and raise a storm in his Family, in the Church whereof he is a Member, or in the whole Nation. Let them not be ashamed for my sake. These things make his heart soft as Job speaks, and to melt within him. When any Affliction or public Judgement of God, is fastened to a quick living sense of sin in the Conscience, it overwhelms the soul; whether it be only justly feared, or be actually inflicted; as was the case of Joseph's Brethren in Egypt. The soul is then rolled from one deep to another. Sense of sin, casts it on the consideration of its Affliction; and Affliction turns it back on a sense of sin. So deep calleth unto deep, and all Gods billows go over the soul. And they do each of them make the soul tender, and sharpen its sense unto the other. Affliction ••••ens the soul; so that the sense of sin cuts the deeper, and makes the larger wounds; and the sense of sin weakens the soul, and makes Affliction sit the heavier, and so increaseth its burden. In this case, that Affliction which a man in his usual state of spiritual peace, could have embraced as a sweet pledge of Love, is as goads and thorns in his side, depriving him of all rest and quietness; God makes it, as thorns and briars wherewith he will teach stubborn souls their duty, as Gideon did the Man of Succoth.