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268 illustrations
This text diagnoses humanity's universal condition: all are liable to sin and under its dominion.
This original uprightness required five distinct faculties working in harmony: an understanding perfectly acquainted with God's law; a memory retaining all its precepts faithfully; a conscience applying it without compromise; a heart loving that law completely; and a will obedient...
A son honors his father; a servant fears his master—yet Israel, the son of Yahweh, offers Him what it would not dare present to an earthly ruler.
The last king of David's line was captured on the very ground where Israel first entered its inheritance—at Jericho, where unarmed men trusting in Elohim watched the walls collapse.
The human mind's finite grasp of the Infinite does not account for our blindness to Yahweh; rather, our sinful moral nature darkens His countenance and dulls our spiritual perception.
God does not pronounce judgment until men have first abused His benevolence and provoked His intervention.
Keil and Delitzsch note that moths destroy garments (Isaiah 51:8; Psalm 39:12), while worms corrupt both wood and flesh—figures of insidious decay working without announcement.
Gilgal held three layers of sacred memory: the renewal of circumcision's covenant after Egypt, the first Passover celebrated in the promised land, and the appearance of the Captain of Yahweh's host to Joshua—divine assurance of deliverance itself.
The natural instinct binds us: enmity answers enmity, kindness answers kindness. A dog stretches its neck to be patted and snaps at a raised stick. We are creatures of reciprocal reaction. Yet Christian morality requires us to master this instinct...
Exell, in *The Biblical Illustrator* (1887), grounded this doctrine in Scripture itself—Jude 14, Job 19:26, Psalm 9:7–8, Daniel 7:9–10, Matthew 25:31–46, and Revelation 20:11–13 all testify to a Day of Judgment.
God's anger burns hotter against His covenant people because they sin beneath a greater light.
There is a time for the divine decree to be issued against a nation; a time when, though Noah, Job, and Daniel should stand before Him, yet He will not be entreated; though they cry early, cry aloud, cry with...
This guilt universally carries a sense of demerit.
He does not merely condemn; He first enumerates the favours which He had shown Israel, recalling the conditions of the covenant: no entangling alliances with the inhabitants, no tolerance for their idolatry.
Judah had forsaken their Rock, their *Elohim* of salvation, and in that abandonment rushed to cultivate 'gardens of pleasures' and 'vine slips of a stranger.' They nursed these alliances with Damascus with frantic care, as Maclaren observes: 'In a day...
Under the Levitical dispensation, tithes, firstfruits, and firstlings were consecrated to the Lord.
When the prophet confronted Israel's transgressions, they protested their innocence, citing their diligent worship attendance.
Yet a great intellect dissociated from moral control becomes a scourge and terror.
A godly person cannot maintain spiritual vitality while dwelling among those who mock the ways of Adonai.
Yet his refusal revealed his true allegiance: he regarded Jehovah not as his covenant God, but merely as Judaea's territorial deity, inferior to Assyria's gods.
Consider the varieties of mischief-making: some men deliberately pursue evil and delight in tempting others.
Jesus hung 'in the midst' of two robbers—a placement orchestrated by Pilate's mockery, yet divine in its symbolism.
The Biblical Illustrator identifies this legion as anger, malice, intemperance, murder, impurity, unfaithfulness, dishonesty, hypocrisy, ingratitude, disobedience, envy, covetousness, blasphemy, and atheism.
No kingdom—evil or good—consciously engineers its own destruction.