Category Archives: Church

BUT ONE MORNING IT BEGAN TO RAIN…

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Genesis 6:22 Thus did Noah; according to all that God commanded him, so did he.

Alexander MacLaren Commentary:

The far-off flood was more real to him than the shows of life around him. Therefore he could stand all the gibes, and gave himself to a course of life which was sheer folly unless that future was real. Perhaps a hundred and twenty years passed between the warning and the flood; and for all that time he held on his way, nor faltered in his faith. …

We may think, finally, of the vindication of his faith. For a hundred and twenty years the wits laughed, and the ‘common-sense’ people wondered, and the patient saint went on hammering and pitching at his ark.

But one morning it began to rain;

and by degrees, somehow, Noah did not seem quite such a fool. The jests would look rather different when the water was up to the knees of the jesters; and their sarcasms would stick in their throats as they drowned. So is it always. So it will be at the last great day.

The men who lived for the future, by faith in Christ, will be found out to have been the wise men when the future has become the present, and the present has become the past, and is gone for ever; while they who had no aims beyond the things of time, which are now sunk beneath the dreary horizon, will awake too late to the conviction that they are outside the ark of safety, and that their truest epitaph is ‘Thou fool!’

Learn about salvation… here.

The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble,….

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Psalm 20:1-2 The LORD hear thee in the day of trouble; the name of the God of Jacob defend thee; Send thee help from the sanctuary, and strengthen thee out of Zion;

Recently when going through a health trial I thought about Jesus and all he went through when he was on this earth. And I read the encouraging verses in Psalm 21. But this morning I read the commentary on those verses and that’s exactly what the commentator was saying!

John Gill Commentary:

The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble,…. All the days of Christ were days of trouble; he was a brother born for adversity; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with griefs; he had his own sorrows, and he bore the griefs of others;

he was persecuted by Herod in his infancy;

he was tempted by Satan in the wilderness;

he was harassed by the Scribes and Pharisees continually;

he was grieved at the hardness, impenitence, and unbelief, of that perverse and faithless generation of men, and was sometimes made uneasy by his own disciples:

at some particular seasons his soul or spirit is said to be troubled, as at the grave of Lazarus, and when in a view of his own death, and when he was about to acquaint his disciples that one of them should betray him;

but more particularly it was a day of trouble with him, when he was in the garden, heavy, and sore amazed, and his sweat was, as it were, drops of blood falling on the ground, and his soul was exceeding sorrowful, even unto death;

but more especially this was his case when he hung upon the cross, and is what seems to be principally respected here; when he was in great torture of body through the rack of the cross;

when he endured the cruel mockings of men, of the common people, of the chief priests, and even of the thieves that suffered with him;

when he had Satan, and all his principalities and powers, let loose upon him, and he was grappling with them;

when he bore all the sins of his people, endured the wrath of his Father, and was forsaken by him:

now in this day of trouble, both when in the garden and on the cross, he prayed unto his Father, as he had been used to do in other cases, and at other times;

and the church here prays, that God would hear and answer him, as he did:

he always heard him;

he heard him at the grave of Lazarus;

he heard him in the garden, and filled his human soul with courage and intrepidity, of which there were immediate instances;

he heard him on the cross, and helped him as man and Mediator;