15. Not thus would Jesus pray, but the rough soldier David so poured out
the anguish of his spirit, under treachery and malice altogether unprovoked.
The soldier desires the overthrow of his foes; for this very end he fights;
David was waging a just, defensive war against men utterly regardless of truth
and justice. Read the words as a warrior’s imprecation. Let death seize upon them. Traitors such as these deserve to die. Let them go down quick into hell. Let them suddenly exchange the enjoyment of the quick or living for
the sepulchres of the dead. There is, however, no need to read this verse as an
imprecation; it is rather a confident expectation or prophecy: God would, he
was sure, cast them out of the land of the living into the regions of the dead.
For wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them. They are too bad
to be spared, for their houses are dens of infamy, and their hearts fountains
of mischief. They are a pest to the commonwealth, a moral plague, a spiritual
pestilence, to be stamped out by human laws and the divine providence. Both
Ahithophel and Judas soon ended their own lives; Absalom was hanged in the oak,
and the rebels perished in the wood in great numbers. There is justice in the
universe; love itself demands it; pity to rebels against God, as such, is no
virtue—we pray for them as creatures, we abhor them as enemies of God. We need
in these days far more to guard against the disguised iniquity which
sympathizes with evil and counts punishment to be cruelty, than against the
harshness of a former age.
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