Isaiah 9:11

Therefore the Lord shall set up the adversaries of Rezin against him

Oppositions

“The Lord shall set up the adversaries.

” This accounts for many oppositions which otherwise would be without explanation. We wonder why such and such people should be opposed to us. Ask them questions about this opposition, and they will confess themselves bewildered; they daily look round for causes, and find none; yet they say they cannot restrain the dislike, and they must force it into forms of opposition about whose urgency and determinateness there can be no mistake. How is all this? Is it not the Lord reigning even here? God means to chasten us, to make us feel that there are other people in the world beside ourselves, and that we have no right to all the room, and no claim that can be maintained to all the property. Thus we teach one another by sometimes opposing one another. We are brought to chastening and sobriety and refinement by attritions and oppositions that are, from a human point of view, utterly unaccountable. The Bible never hesitates to trace the whole set and meaning of providence to the Lord Himself: He sends the plague, the pestilence, the darkness, all the flies and frogs that desolated old Egypt; He still is the Author of gale., and flood, and famine, and pestilence We have amused ourselves by deceiving ourselves, by discovering a thousand secondary causes, and seeking, piously or impiously, to relieve providence of the responsibility of the great epidemic. Within given limits all we say may be perfectly true; we are great in phenomena, we have a genius in the arrangement of detail; but, after all, above all, and beneath all, is the mysterious life, the omnipotence of God, the judgment between right and wrong that plays upon the universe as upon an obedient instrument,--now evoking from It black frowning thunder, and now making it tremble with music that children love, and that sweetest mothers want all their canes to hear. (J. Parker, D. D.)