What a verse is the eighth! We cannot even now read it without quailing under the awful representation--“For Jerusalem is ruined.
” We thought Jerusalem never could be ruined: the mountains were round about her, and to the old psalmists those mountains signified the security of the righteous. Is beauty no protection? is ancient history of no account? will not the dead kings of Judah speak for her in the time of her trial? We cannot live upon our past, upon our forefathers, upon our vanished glories; morality must be as fresh as the dew of the morning; our righteousness must be as clear, personal, and definite as the action which we perform at the living moment. A man cannot lay up a character and fall back upon it if his present conduct is out of keeping with it; he himself takes the juice and sap out of the character which he once lived. (J. Parker, D. D.)
“The eyes of His glory”
The glory of God is that eternal manifestation of His holy nature in its splendour which man pictures to himself anthropomorphically, because he cannot conceive of anything more sublime than the human form. It is in this glorious form that Jehovah looks upon His people. In this is mirrored His condescending yet jealous love, His holy love, which breaks forth into wrath against all who requite His love with hate. (F. Delitzsch.)
The fall of the Campanile at St. Mark’s, Venice
Latterly it had been ignobly used as an office for the State lotteries which are demoralising Italy. In cutting the wall for the purposes of that office, the whole building had been weakened. The event spoke as a parable whose meaning could not be missed. That great, stately tower, with its history of a thousand years, fell, because of the little lottery office which cut into it and weakened it. There is an application of the parable to our own national life. Is it possible that a great empire like ours can fall through the gambling habit--the lowest and meanest of the vices--insidiously spreading through all classes of the community? Is it possible to conceive that such a vice should so undermine the character of the people, that the stately structure, built by heroic men in the past, shall crash down in swift ruin at the end? (R. F. Horton, D. D.)
Ruinous effect of sin
Its is just like what happens sometimes in a forest. In a calm day, when all else is silent, something crashes heavily through the branches, and we know a tree has fallen, No axe was lifted, no white lightning streamed, there was only a passing breeze. The wind that did but gently sway the little flower, shook down that towering tree, because long before the catastrophe, its vital progress had been disturbed, and millions of foul insects had entered it, which, leaving its bark untouched, and its boughs unshorn of their glory, had slowly, silently, withered its strong fibres and hollowed its core. (C. Stanford.)
