But God was not going to cast off His people whom He loved. He deals not with mankind after their sins, neither rewards them according to their iniquities; and so he chose out for them a king after His own heart—a true king of God’s making, not a mere sham one of man’s making. You may think it strange why God should have given them a second king; why, as soon as Saul died, He did not let them return back to their old freedom. But that is not God’s way. He brings good out of evil in His great mercy. But it is always by strange winding paths. His ways are not as our ways. First, God gives man what is perfectly proper for him at that time; sets man in his right place; and then when man falls from that, God brings him, not back to the place from which he fell, but on forward into something far higher and better than what he fell from. He put Adam into Paradise. Adam fell from it, and God made use of the fall to bring him into a state far better than Paradise—into the kingdom of God—into everlasting life—into the likeness of Christ, the new Adam, who is a quickening, life-giving spirit, while the old Adam was, at best, only a living soul. So with the church of Christian men. After the apostles’ time, and even during the apostles’ time, as we read from the Epistle to the Galatians, they fell away, step by step, from the liberty of the gospel, till they sunk entirely into popish superstition. And yet God brought good out of that evil. He made that very popery a means of bringing them back at the Reformation into clearer light than any of the first Christians ever had had. He is going on step by step still, bringing Christians into a clearer knowledge of the gospel than even the Reformers had. And so with the Jews. They fell from their liberty and chose a king. And yet God made use of those kings of theirs, of David, of Solomon, of Josiah, and Hezekiah, to teach them more and more about Himself and His law, and to teach all nations, by their example, what a nation should be, and how He deals with one.