1. The goodness and mercy of God extend to heathens. He hath a care of them in their captivity, and after they have suffered His appointed time He will show kindness to them.
2. The afflictions of nations and persons may be long, yet not without end; they may suffer seven and seven years, yea, twenty, thirty, forty years together, which is a long time, and then see an end of their sufferings.
3. God sometimes deals more favourably with heathens than with His own people. “At the end of forty years will I gather the Egyptians,” but it was the end of seventy years before He gathered the Jews out of Babylon: His own people were thirty years, or near upon, longer under the Babylonish yoke than the Egyptians. There was just cause for this; God’s people had sinned worse than the heathens, and so provoked Him above them.
4. Nothing is too hard for God, or can hinder the fulfilling of His will. The Egyptians were scattered among the nations, here a family and there a family, and that forty years together; so mingled with the people of other countries that they had well nigh forgotten Egypt, and had so drunk in the manners and customs of the places where they lived that they were neutralised thereunto; they were so rooted among the nations that it seemed impossible to pluck them up, and plant them in their own countries; yet notwithstanding these things, saith God, “I will gather the Egyptians from the people whither they were scattered.” The Jews had lain longer n Babylon, and were like dry bones in the grave, without hope (Eze_37:11); but God made good His word; He brought them out with a strong hand, breaking in pieces gates of brass, and cutting in sunder bars of iron.
5. It is the same hand, the same God, that drives men out of their countries and comforts, into deep and long afflictions abroad, and brings them back out of the same, to enjoy their countries and comforts. (W. Greenhill, M. A.)
