2 Chronicles 14:15

REFLECTIONS

It is hardly possible to read the character here given of Asa, and the blessed eventual consequences of his piety, as it concerned the people of Judah, without having our minds led out in delightful contemplation on the happiness of a church, and nation, and people, under the blessings of princes which set up true religion in the land, and adorn the gospel of Jesus, not only by precept, but example. The imagination can hardly calculate the extensiveness of such a blessing, in the innumerable happy consequences, which spring out of it. Who shall indeed say to what auspicious blessings, even in generations yet to come, it may reach.

And while we exercise the mind in contemplating the mercy as it is found in a land at large, under the eye of a reforming prince, like Asa; if we carry the thought into the narrower circle of churches and private families, the blessing is immense, even here, in the eventual gracious effects which must follow. Let the Reader figure to himself a church, an house, a family, all living in the faith, and love, and fear of God. They are closely allied in the strictest and most durable of all bonds, of reverence and faith in Jesus to a covenant God in Christ, and in real amity and Christian union to one another. Jesus is their glorious head, and they are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. Let the enemies of their salvation, like the Ethiopians against Asa, come forth with an army of a thousand thousand, yet the battle is the Lord's, and he will eventually come forth to their deliverance. The graces of his Spirit will be their support, and confidence in the promises of redemption by Jesus their strong hold. They will be exercised indeed in resisting sin and Satan, but more is he that is with them than all that are against them. It is nothing to our God to help, whether with many or with few. They shall overcome, as the armies of heaven have done, by the blood of the Lamb, and be made more than conquerors through his grace helping them.