B36604:65
Preparation for sufferings. Or The best work in the worst times Wherein the necessity,…
Preparation for sufferings. Or The best work in the worst times Wherein the necessity, excellency, and means of our readiness for sufferings are evinced and prescribed; our call to suffering cleared, and the great unreadiness of many professors bewailed. By John Flavel minister of Christ in Devon.Preparation for sufferings. Or The best work in the worst times Wherein the necessity, excellency, and means of our readiness for sufferings are evinced and prescribed; our call to suffering cleared, and the great unreadiness of many profesours bewailed. By John Flavel minister of Christ in Devon.
London: printed for Robert Boulter, 1681
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
And when the Storm was just ready to fall, 1their own Historian tells us a Voice was heard in the Temple, saying, Migremus hinc, Let us go hence: Which Voice Tacitus also mentions in his Annals, affirming it to be more than a Humane Voice, telling them God was departing, and that it was accompanied with a rushing noise, as of persons going out; these were extraordinary warnings. The like Signs have been given to divers other Nations, by dreadful Eclipses of the Heavenly Bodies, Portentous Comets, Earthquakes, and other Signs of Judgment.
- 1Josephus de bello Jud. lib. 7. cap. 2. Audita major humanae vox, excedere Deos, simul ingens motus excedentium. Tacitus lib. 21.
Now though we have no ground to expect such extraordinary warnings; yet we have the most apparent and certain signs of approaching calamities, after which if they surprise us, the fault must lie in our own inexcusable negligence; for we have a standing Rule to govern ⟨p. 16⟩our selves in this matter, and that is this: When the same sins are found in one Nation, which have brought down the wrath of God upon another Nation, it is an evident sign of Judgment at the door; for God is unchangeable, just and holy, and will not favour that in one people which he hath punished in another, nor bless that in one Age which he hath cursed in another. Upon this very ground it was that the Apostle warned the Corinthians by the example of the Israelites, whose sins had ruined them in the Wilderness, 1 Cor. 10.6. Now these things were our examples, to the intent we should not lust after evil things, as they also lusted: as if he should say, look upon those dead bodies which are as it were cast up upon the Scripture shore for a warning to you; follow not the same course, lest you meet in the same curse; if you tread the same paths, expect the same punishment; God is as righteous now as he was then, he hates, and will punish sin in you, as much as he did in them.