In this interview of Isaiah with Ahaz we have an instance--+I. Of God's efforts to turn men from ruinous courses.+ God is the great Lawgiver, and the Judge before whose bar all impenitent transgressors of His law will have to stand. Absolute inflexibility is necessarily His characteristic in both these capacities. But these are not the only capacities He seeks to sustain to us. It is His ambition to be the Saviour of men from sin and ruin. Consequently, He does not merely lay down His law and stand coldly by, to see whether men will keep it or not. He plies them with inducements to keep it. When He sees them bent on transgression, He endeavours to arrest them in their foolish and fatal purpose. Short of that destruction of the freedom of their will, which would be the destruction also of their responsibility and of their possibilities of virtue, He leaves nothing undone to turn them from the broad road that leads to death.[1] By adverse providences, by the strivings of His Holy Spirit, by awakening conscience to an active exercise of its functions, He works upon and in them to will and to do His good pleasure. No sinner has ever gone down to perdition unheeded, unpitied, without attempts to rescue him. Your own experience attests the truth of these statements: you know you had to fight your way through to those transgressions of which you are now ashamed. God's "preventing grace" is a great fact of which we should take reverent heed, and for which we should give fervent thanks.[2] +II. Of the manner in which sinners, by insincere pretences, resist God's saving purposes.+ The stubbornness and insincerity of Ahaz are obvious.[3] But in neither of these is he singular. Sinners who are bent on their sins not seldom go on to the under pretexts of righteousness, with which they endeavour to deceive themselves and others. The greatest crime ever committed was done under a pretext of righteousness (Matt. xxvi. 65). So has it been with countless crimes since. Let us be on our guard against our own hearts (Jer. xvi. 9; Prov. xiv. 12) Let us not act upon any reason which we do not really believe will bear the scrutiny of God. +III. Of the twofold result which always follows such resistance to the Divine purposes.+ 1. _The sinner is, ere long, compelled to confess that the counsels he set aside were counsels of truth and wisdom._ In less than three years, Ahaz had cause to acknowledge the soundness of the advice to which on this memorable day he refused to listen.[4] A typical case. 2. _The obstinate sinner is left to the ruin from which he would not permit God to deliver him._ There is no salvation by force. God acts upon our will, but He will not save us against our will. Neither shall those who refused to be saved from sin be saved from its consequences. If we choose evil, no act of omnipotence will render the choice harmless (chap. iii. 11). Ahaz chose the help of Assyria rather than the help of