against it. Man's sin is made the occasion for a more glorious display
of God's character and heart. It is on the storm-cloud that the sun
paints the rainbow. Each successive stage in man's departure from God
evoked a corresponding increase in the divine effort to attract him
back, till 'last of all He sent unto them His Son.' In nature,
attraction diminishes as distance increases; in the realms of grace,
it grows with distance. The one desire of God's heart is that sinners
would return from their evil ways, and He presses on them the solemn
thought of the abundant intimations of His will which have been given
from of old, and are pealed again into all ears by living voices. His
law for us is not merely an old story spoken centuries ago, but is
vocal in our consciences to-day, and fresh as when Sinai flamed and
thundered above the camp, and the trumpet thrilled each heart.

III. The heavier sin that followed the divine pleading. That divine
voice leaves no man as it finds him. If it does not sway him to
obedience, it deepens his guilt, and makes him more obstinate. Like
some perverse ox in the yoke, he stiffens his neck, and stands the
very picture of brute obduracy. There is an awful alternative involved
in our hearing of God's message, which never returns to Him void, but
ever does something to the hearer, either softening or hardening,
either scaling the eyes or adding another film on them, either being
the 'savour of life unto life or of death unto death.' The mission of
the prophets changed forgetfulness of God's 'statutes' into
'rejection' of them, and made idolatry self-conscious rebellion. Alas,
that men should make what is meant to be a bond to unite them to God
into a wedge to part them farther from Him! But how constantly that is
the effect of the gospel, and for the same reason as in Israel--that
they 'did not believe in the Lord their God'!