Israel’s destruction arose from the fact of Israel having turned against God, its Help.  Sin is suicide.  God is our Help, and only Help.  His will is love and blessing.  His only relation to our sin is to hate it, and fight against it.  In conflict of love with lovelessness one of His chiefest weapons is to drive home to our consciousness the conviction of our sin.  When He is driven to punish, it is our wrongdoing that forces Him to what Isaiah calls, ‘His strange act.’  The Heavenly Father is impelled by His love not to spare the rod, lest the sparing spoil the child.  An earthly father suffers more punishment than he inflicts upon the little rebel whom, unwillingly and with tears, he may chastise; and God’s love is more tender, as it is more wise, than that of the fathers of our flesh who corrected us.  ’He doth not willingly afflict nor is soon angry’; and of all the mercies which He bestows upon us, none is more laden with His love than the discipline by which He would make us know, through our painful experience, that it is ’an evil and bitter thing to forsake the Lord, and that His fear is not in us.’  In its essence and depth, separation from God is death to the creature that wrenches itself away from the source of life; and all the weariness and pains of a godless life are, if we take them as He meant them, the very angels of His presence.

Just as the sole reason for our sorrows lies in our wrongdoing, the sole cause of our wrongdoing is in ourselves.  It is because ’Israel is against Me’ that Israel’s destruction rushes down upon it.  It could have defended its hankering after Assyria and idols, by wise talk about political exigencies and the wisdom of trying to turn possibly powerful enemies into powerful allies, and the folly of a little nation, on a narrow strip of territory between the desert and the sea, fancying itself able to sustain itself uncrushed between the upper millstone of Assyria on the north, and the under one, Egypt, on the south.  But circumstances are never the cause, though they may afford the excuse of rebellion against our Helper, God; and all the modern talk about environments and the like, is merely a cloak cast round, but too scanty to conceal the ugly fact of the alienated will.  All the excuses for sin, which either modern scientific jargon about ‘laws,’ or hyper-Calvinistic talk about ‘divine decrees,’ alleges, are alike shattered against the plain fact of conscience, which proclaims to every evil-doer, ’Thou art the man!’ We shall get no further and no deeper than the truth of our text:  ‘It is thy destruction that thou art against Me.’