432 THE VATS REFUGE OF SINNERS. [DISC. V$, of nature resolves to destroy : When he, who is higher than the highest, and stronger than the strongest, shall pronounce destruction upon rebels, what creature can speak deliverance ? The rocks and the mountains obey their Maker, they shiver in pieces at the word of his wrath, and will yield no relief to criminals : But man, rebellious man, disobeys his Maker, and calls to the rocks and mountains to pro- tect him. Vain hope, Oh sinner ! tomake the most ex- alted creatures your friends, when God, the Creator, is your enemy. These inanimate things have never learned disobedience to their Maker, and, rather than screen a rebel from his deserved judgments, theywill offer them selves as instruments of divine vengeance. 2. Rocks and mountains, in their clefts and dens and caverns, are sometimes considered as places of secrecy and concealment. "My text tells us, that kings, and mighty men, the rich and the free -man, as well as the poor and the slave, hid themselves in dens, and in the rocks of the mountains." Theyhoped there might be some secret corner, whose thick shadows and darkness were sufficient to hide them, where the judge might not spyor find them out. Vain hope for sinners to hide in the holes of the rocks, and the deepest caverns of the mountains, to escape the notice of that God, who is all eye and all ear, and present at once in every place of earth and heaven ! Eoolish expectation indeed, to avoid the notice of the Son of God, " whose eyes are as a flameof fire ;'' Rev.' i. 14. and shoot through the earth;, and its darkest caves ! Read the cxxxix. PMlm, Oh sinner ! and then think, ifit.be possible to flee from the eye of G.od, and to hide thyself in the clefts of the rock, where his hand shall not find thee IIehas already "beset thee behind and be- fore, and his hand already compasses thee round about in all thy paths. Darkness.itself cannot cover thee : The night shines as the day before him, and scatters light round about the criminal, that would hide himself from the wrath of God. Ask Jeremy the prophet, and he shall tell thee, that " none can hide himself in secret places, where God shall not see him, the God who fills- heaven and earth ;" Jer. xxiii. 24. He shall hunt ob- satiate sinners from every mountain, and out of the holes
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