A]NPLICTIONS INTENDED TO DE3TROY Si\. 583 things of sense, his father thinks it needful for him to shake all things about him, that be may look upward to the things that cannot be shaken, and fix his hope there. 5. It teaches us continual dependance upon God for daily constant help and strength, peace and-piotection. It is too frequent with most, (if they look into their own hearts), to think that health is a continual attendant on their nature, and when they go to bed they expect to rise again daily as the sun rises, but when God has given us many sore nights, andl we have been waking all night longing for the morning, thereby we learn that health is not so necessary an attendant on human nature, as before we thought it to be, but a peculiar gift of the divine pro- vidence We are taught to depend Upon God, to ask every day our dailybread, but we are ready to expect it whether God hears or no ; but afflictions will teach us to add faith to this prayer that it should not be formal as it used to be. When God sometimes removes these mer- cies from us, he teaches-us who gives them. In the pie= cepts of his word we find plain and express rules to ma- nage ourselves' in every circumstance of life, and to per- form all our duty, according to the occasion that provi- dence gives us: but foolish creatures we are, we had need to be taught many things by experience, we find that the word and duty have little influence upon us, Unless we are made to feel what our duty is, by the absence of those good things that we thought were necessary to our na- tures. But now we are taught it is our duty to depend always upon Goc for them. Have we learned any of these duties by afflictions, or must we sáy God has wasted all his rods upon us ? If there be any thing more particu- lar under God's dispensations, let us suppose that to be the very lesson God would have us .learn, the duty he would have us practise, and never forget what and hew he taught us. Reason 4.. To destroy our sins and give testimony of his displeasure against sin even in his own people; God can be displeasedwith sin without hating the person ; and this is the most frequent cause of affliction : It is for some sin or other ; Isa. xxvii. 9. " This is all the fruit to take away your sins ;" and this seems to be especially de- signed in Job's desire in the text: He would fain know what secret sir} therewas for which he was then corrected.'
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