Bible Commentaries

DIVINE PATIENCE EXHAUSTED

‘Till there was no remedy.’

2 Chronicles 36:16

These words contain three facts, and each one is of the greatest importance. (1) That there was—at least, at one time—a remedy. (2) That the remedy went on, and might have been used for a very long period. (3) That there came a time when the remedy ceased.

I. All life is remedy.—The condition of things requires it. Life is one great restorative process. (1) First comes that marvellous provision which God has made for our recovery in Jesus Christ. (2) Subordinate to this great remedy of the Cross of Christ, and working with it, all providences have a curative character. (3) Every one carries within himself an antidote to himself. Conscience, till it is silenced, is a sure antidote for evil.

II. Notice the word ‘till.’—It shows how slow God is to take away the remedy. His mercy still holds back the arm of justice. But we may sin ourselves into a state, not in which there is no forgiveness, but in which there will be no thought or desire to seek for forgiveness. There is the bourn—worse than any grave—from which no man has returned. ‘There is no remedy,’ not on God’s account, but on your own; not in God’s want of will to save you, but in your own incapacity to will your own salvation.

Rev. J. Vaughan.

Illustrations

(1) ‘We may say of our present state as God said of the Jewish nation: “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it.” Your soul is diseased. Your condition is out of order. Therefore God has ordered everything—as a good physician would—for your recovery. “Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? Why then is not the health of the daughter of My people recovered?” Many things that are vast have to be done away with; their bad effects have to be removed, or neutralised. A taint has to be got rid of—a poison has to be eliminated out of your constitution. And to effect this, everything in God’s government is planned. It would not be too much to say that, from the cradle to the grave, every moment of life is a corrective process.’

(2) ‘But is it not an awful revelation of the depravity of man’s heart to find that, in spite of the memories of Hezekiah, Manasseh, and Josiah on the one hand, and in the very shadow of the coming eclipse on the other, the king and people still perpetrated the worst abominations of Canaan? Zedekiah hardened his heart from turning to the Lord. Moreover, all the chiefs of the priests and the people trespassed very greatly after all the abominations of the heathen. Let us magnify His grace, which makes us differ.’