2 Chronicles 6:26-31

When the heaven is shut up, and there is no rain.

Perils to agriculture

I. A rebuke to rationalism in natural evils. All meteorological phenomena are under God’s control. In all afflictive events God speaks to cities and nations.

II. A moral design in the infliction of natural evils.

1. To requite justice.

2. To lead to God.

III. A place for prayer in the removing natural evils. This denied by many. Prayer may be necessary for man’s highest culture. We do not classify with powers in physical nature. It is not a natural but a moral power. The ordination of God leaves room for prayer. Prayer may be one of the laws of the universe as certain in its sphere as the laws of heat or of gravitation in their peculiar realms. Neither history, Scripture, nor experience forbid us to pray in times of national distress. (J. Wolfendale.)

Pardon and punishment

(2 Chronicles 6:27, with 2 Samuel 7:14 and 1 Corinthians 11:32):--I take these passages in a group because they all set forth a similar view of a great subject. They all take a natural and what we may can an untechnical view of the subject of Divine forgiveness. The prophet Nathan and Solomon and the apostle Paul all saw that sin produced its natural consequences of pain and penalty in good men and bad men alike, and though all believed in the reality and triumph of mercy, and were quite sure of God’s readiness to forgive, yet they perceived that Divine forgiveness did not remove those consequences, at least in this life. Pardon does not mean immunity from punishment.

I. What is punishment?

1. “Behold,” says the apostle Paul, “the goodness and severity of God.” That there is an element of righteous indignation in God the whole frame of Nature testifies; the Scriptures frequently declare; and our own moral sense demands that it should be so. We cannot conceive of a perfect Being without the capacity of such indignation. The very methods of the Divine rule absolutely involve pain. But there are things in the world more to be dreaded than pain. There are evils so great--so great in themselves--that it is worth while enduring all the pain we can conceive in order to get rid of them. Righteousness is the one ruling principle of all life. In the interests of righteousness the universe is governed. Character, now and always, owes all its moral worth to the acknowledgment of the supreme majesty of the law of righteousness.

2. Now perhaps we can understand something of the meaning of punishment. It is--

(1) The expression of the indignation of a perfectly holy God. It is not an act of vengeance, nor anger which is excited by the thwarting of the Divine will. To God there is nothing so dear as justice, truth, love; and when men, from selfish love of pleasure, or equally selfish wilfulness, violate these, and become cruel, unjust, false, the holy indignation of the holiest of all beings springs forth in punishment, and God becomes a “consuming fire.”

(2) Punishment is the very guardian of life. If a man takes poison, or if he thrusts his hand into the fire, he suffers pain. Pain is not the evil to be feared, but the effect of the act upon the whole frame. The poison saps the life--the pain is the mere symptom of the fact. The fire is destroying the tissues of the body--the pain is the evidence of it. Pain is like the beacon which warns the mariner of the dangerous reef or the sunken rock.

(3) Punishment and pain are the means of healing. To any one ignorant of medical science, a surgeon performing an operation would seem cruel and unfeeling. But he cuts down into the living flesh with his keen knife and inflicts the sharpest pain because he knows that in no other way can the life be saved. In the hands of a benevolent God suffering is surgical.

II. When we have sought pardon and found mercy we may still have to suffer the consequences of past sin. Pardon consists of two parts--

1. The cessation of resentment.

2. The removal of consequences. These two parts are not always united in time. I may cease from anger, cease to feel resentment against my erring, disobedient child when he repents, and yet may allow him to suffer the natural consequences of his wrong doing. My love may be so deep and tender that I suffer in his suffering, and even more poignantly than he, but I let it go on. And God does so. Our duty is to bow submissively, to recognise Divine love, and to endure patiently the chastisement that seeks to cure us of our faults. (Philip W. Darnton, B.A.)