1. The amount of freedom with which man is endowed. How free is man compared to everything about him.
2. The wonderful forbearance of God.
3. The existence of an extraordinary element in the Divine government of this world. We know that in heaven beings live and are happy because they are holy; we are taught that in hell there is inexpressible misery because there is such awful sin. But here are men living often to a good old age, often possessing all they can wish of earthly comfort, and yet rebels against God, without repentance, without faith, without love, and we wonder why this world is thus an exception. Earth is under a mediatorial government. This great mystery of Christ’s suffering for man, and prolonging his probation, can alone explain the other great mystery, that men of debased spirit and godless life are permitted to live here instead of being banished to hell.
II. As instruments to discipline.
1. In calling out resistance. “Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; when he is tried he shall receive a crown of life.” The wicked are often as the chisel by which God carves out the good man’s character, the fires by which it is purified.
2. By calling out the Christian’s benevolence. Our compassion, prayers, self-sacrifice, work, are all called forth by the existence of the wicked.
III. As beacons to warn.
1. As to the progress of sin.
2. As to the effects of sin.
IV. As criminals to reform. This is the grand end of their prolonged life. The world is a great reformatory. (Urijah R. Thomas.)
Why do the live
?--
1. That they may have the opportunity of being reconciled to God.
2. That they may be the instruments of good to others.
3. That they may display the long suffering and forbearance of God.
4. That they may furnish an argument for a future state of retribution.
5. That they may demonstrate the equity of their own everlasting condemnation. (G. Brooks.)
Why do the wicked live
They build up fortunes that overshadow the earth, and confound all the life insurance tables on the subject of longevity, some of them dying octogenarians, or perhaps nonagenarians, or possibly centenarians. Ahab in the palace, and Elijah in the loft. Unclean Herod on the throne, and Paul, the consecrated, twisting ropes for tent making. Manasseh, the worst of all the kings of Judah, lives the longest. While the general rule is that the wicked do not live out half their days, there are instances where they live to a great age in paradises of beauty and luxury, with a whole college of physicians expending its skill in the attempt for further prolongation, and then have a funeral with coffin under mountains of calla lily and a procession with all the finest equipages of the city flashing and jingling into hue, taking the poor angleworm of the dust out to its hole in the ground with a pomp that might make the passing spirit from some other world think that the archangel Michael was dead. Go up among the great residences of our cities and read the door plates and see how many of them hold the names of men mighty for commercial or social iniquity, vampires of the century, Gorgons of the ages. Every wheel of their carriage is a Juggernaut wet with the blood of those sacrificed to their avarice and evil design. Men who are like Caligula, who wished that all people were in one neck that he might cut it off at one blow. Oh, the slain! the slain! what a procession of libertines, of usurers, of infamous quacks, of legal charlatans, of world-grabbing monsters. What apostles of despoliation! what demons incarnate thousands of men who have concentrated all their energies of body, mind, and soul into one prolonged and ever-intensified and unrelenting effort to sacrifice and blast and consume the world! I do not blame you for asking the quivering, throbbing, burning, resounding, appalling question of the text: “Why do the wicked live?”(T. De Witt Talmage.)
