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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Be joyful; enjoy God’s favours with cheerfulness and thankfulness.
Consider, to wit, God’s work, which is easily understood out of the foregoing verse. Consider that it is God’s hand, and therefore submit to it; humble thyself under his hand, be sensible of it, and duly affected with it; consider also why God sends it, for what sins, and with what design. This is a proper season for serious consideration, whereas prosperity relaxeth the mind, and calls it forth to outward things. But this clause may be, and is by some, rendered thus, and look for a day of adversity. In prosperity rejoice with trembling, and so as to expect a change.
God also hath set the one over against the other; God hath wisely ordained these vicissitudes that prosperity and adversity should succeed one another in the course of men’s lives. After him; either,
1. After man himself, or, as it may be rendered, after it, i.e. after his present condition, whether it be prosperous or afflictive. So the sense is, that no man might be able to foresee or find out what shall certainly befall him afterwards, and therefore might live in a constant dependence upon God, and might nether despair in trouble, nor be secure or presumptuous in prosperity, because of the frequent and sudden changes from one to the other. Or,
2. After God, that no man might come after God, and review his works, and find any fault in them, or pretend that he could have managed things better, because this mixture of prosperity and adversity is most convenient both for the glory of God’s wisdom, and justice, and goodness and for the benefit of mankind, who have all absolute need of this vicissitude, lest they should be either corrupted and ruined by perpetual prosperity, as many have been, or overwhelmed with uninterrupted adversity.