INSIGHTS & NOTES FROM
CHAPTER 1
"God's ministers must expect to pass through honour & dishonour, evil report & good report, & must resolve in both to hold fast their integrity & keep close to their work." "Giving that glory to any creature which is due to God alone is such an injury & affront to God as for a wife to embrace the bosom of a stranger is to her husband." "Idolatry is great whoredom, worse than any other; it is departing from the Lord" "Gomer signifies corruption..." "Neither the pomp of kings nor the power of kingdoms can secure them from God's destroying judgments, if they continue to rebel against him." "It intimates that God had shown them great mercy, but they had abused his favours, & forfeited them, & now he would show them favour no more." "Those that forsake their own mercies for lying vanities have reason to expect that their own mercies should forsake them, & that they should be left to their lying vanities." "Those whom God will no more have mercy upon shall be utterly taken away, as dross & dung." "Though some are justly cast off for their disobedience, yet God will always secure to himself a remnant that shall be the vessels & monuments of mercy." "...our being cast out of covenant is owing purely to ourselves & our own folly. The breach is on man's side: You are not my people, & therefore I will not be your God; if God hate any, it is because they first hated him." "It is the unspeakable privilege of all believers that they have the living God for their Father, the ever-living God, & may look upon themselves as his children by grace & adoption." "Jesus Christ is the head of the church, the one only head of it, not only a head of government, as of the body politic, but a head of vital influence, as of the natural body. To believe in Christ is to appoint him to ourselves for our head, that is, to consent to God's appointment, & willingly commit ourselves to his guidance & government;" CHAPTER 2 "No consideration can be more powerful to awaken us to repentance than the provocation we have by sin given to God to disown & cast us off. It is time to look about us, & to think what course we must take, when God threatens to reject us; for woe unto us if he be not our husband." "Many are hardened in sin by their worldly prosperity." "Our pleading with sinners must be to drive them to repentance, not to drive them to despair." "Every sinful course, persisted in, is an adulterous departure from God." "God waits to show mercy to sinners, if they would but qualify themselves for that mercy." "Crosses & obstacles in an evil course are great blessings, & are so to be accounted. They are God's hedges, to keep us from transgressing, to restrain us from wandering out of the green pastures, to withdraw man from his purpose, to make the way of sin difficult, that we may not go on in it, & to keep us from it whether we will or not. We have reason to bless God both for restraining grace & for restraining providences." "The disappointments we meet with in our pursuits of satisfaction in the creature should, if nothing else will do it, drive us at length to the Creator, in whom alone it is to be had." "It is a very great dishonour to the God of heaven to make those gifts of his providence the food & fuel of our lusts which he gave us for our support in his service, & to be oil to the wheels of our obedience." "Those that abuse the mercies God gives them, to his dishonour, cannot expect to enjoy them long." "Sin will have shame; let those expect it that have done shamefully." "Those who will not deliver themselves into the hand of God's mercy cannot be delivered out of the hand of his justice." "The destruction of the vines & the fig-trees causes all the mirth of a carnal heart to cease" "Our treacherous departures from God are owing to our forgetfulness of him, of his nature & attributes, his relation to us & our obligations to him." "God's thoughts & ways of mercy are infinitely above ours" "Those whom God has mercy in store for he first brings into a wilderness - into solitude & retirement, that they may the more freely converse with him out of the noise of this world" "God has vineyards of consolation ready to bestow on those who repent & return to him; & he can give vineyards out of a wilderness, which are of all others the most welcome, as rest to the weary." "When God repeats former mercies we must repeat former praises" "All that are sincerely devoted to God are betrothed to him: God gives them the most sacred & inviolable security imaginable that he will love them, protect them, & provide for them, that he will do the part of a husband to them" "Believing souls are espoused to Christ." "The gospel-church is the bride, the Lamb's wife" "The separation begins on our side; we alienate ourselves from God. The coalition begins on his side; he betroths us to himself." "Faithful is he that has called them, who also will do it; he cannot deny himself." "God's mercy... He took those into a covenant-relation to himself who had been strangers & foreigners." "We have not chosen him, but he has chosen us." CHAPTER 3 "For the conviction & reduction of sinners it is necessary that precept be upon precept, & line upon line." "Those whom God designs honour & comfort for he first makes sensible of their own worthlessness, & brings them to acknowledge, with the prodigal, I am no more worthy to be called thy son." "Poverty & disgrace sometimes prove a happy means of making great sinners true penitents." "Those whom God designs mercy for he will first bring to abase themselves & to put a high value upon his favours." "It is not enough to take shame to ourselves, for the sins we have committed, & to justify God in correcting us for them, but we must resolve, in the strength of God's grace, that we will not offend any more, that we will not again go a whoring from God, after the world & the flesh." "If we be faithful & constant to God in a way of duty, & will never leave nor forsake him, he will be so to us in a way of mercy, & will never leave nor forsake us." "Those that would find God, & find favour with him, must seek him, must ask after him, covet acquaintance with him, desire to be reconciled to him, set their love on him, & labour in this that they may be accepted of him." "We must be afraid of offending his goodness, of making any ungrateful returns for it, & so forfeiting it." "We must rejoice with trembling in the goodness of God, must not be high-minded, but fear." Matthew Henry's Commentary: Isaiah to Malachi, Mac Donald, pgs. 1117 - 1139.
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AuthorCross Preaching Pentecostal Pastor. Husband to Tonia, Father to 3 beautiful girls, Monica, Zoe & Briana, & Grandfather to Wesley & Elliott Archives
September 2023
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