ren and children's children for whole
generations after generations suffer for their parents' sins, and
become unhealthy, or superstitious, or profligate, or poor, or
slavish, because their parents sinned, and dragged down their
children with them in their fall. It is a law of the world; and
therefore it is a law of God. And it is reasonable to be believed
that God might choose to teach the Israelites, once and for all,
that it WAS a law of his world. For by swallowing up those women
and children with the men, God said to the Israelites, it seems to
me in a way which could not be mistaken, 'This is the consequence of
lawlessness and disorder--that you not only injure yourselves, but
your children after you, and involve your families in the same ruin
as yourselves.'
But there was another lesson, and a deep lesson, in the earthquake
and in the fire. And what was this? that the earthquake and the
fire came out from the Lord.
Earthquakes have swallowed up not hundreds merely, but many
thousands, in many countries, and at many times.
Fire has come forth, and still comes forth from the ground, from the
clouds, from the consequences of man's own carelessness, and
destroys beast and man, and the works of man's hands. Then men ask
in terror and doubt, 'Who sends the earthquake and the fire? Do
they come from the devil--the destroyer? Do they come by chance,
from some brute and blind powers of nature?'
This chapter answers, 'No. They come from the Lord, from whom all
good things do come; from the Lord who delivered the Israelites out
of Egypt; who so loved the world that he spared not his only
begotten Son, but freely gave him for us.'
Now I say that is a gospel, and good news, which we want now as much
as ever men did; which the children of Israel wanted then, though
not one whit more than we.
Many hundreds of years had these Israelites been in Egypt. Storm,
lightning, earthquake, the fires of the burning mountains, were
things unknown to them. They were going into Canaan--a good land
and fruitful, but a land of storms and thunders; a land, too, of
earthquakes and subterranean fires. The deepest earthquake-crack in
the world is the valley of the Jordan, ending in the Dead Sea--a
long valley, through which at different points the nether fires of
the earth even now burst up at times. In Abraham's time they had
destroyed the five cities of the plain. The prophets mention them,
especially Isaiah and Micah
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