+I. Divine Wisdom has spoken because God's silence would be human death.+ When a man is lying in prison awaiting the execution of the extreme penalty of the law, after he has petitioned the monarch for a reprieve, the silence of the monarch is a permission that the sentence is to be carried out. His silence is a death-knell to the criminal who has asked for pardon. It is an anticipation of the steel of the executioner, of the rope of the hangman. He longs for the word that would bring pardon. There is _death_ in the _silence._ In the history of men's lives there are many other instances when the silence of those whom they desire to speak embitters their life. There are many who keep silence whose speech would fall upon the heart of those who long for it, as the dew and gentle rain falls upon the parched earth. A word or a letter would be like a new lease of life, but the silence brings a sorrow which is akin to death, which perchance is the death of all that makes life to be desired. A parent who has no word from his absent son goes down in sorrow to the grave. Jacob was thus going down mourning when the words of Joseph reached him. Then "his spirit revived" (Gen. xlv. 27), and the aged, sorrowful patriarch renewed his youth. The life of man--all that is worth calling life--depends upon God's breaking the silence between earth and heaven. His silence is that which is most dreaded by those who have heard His voice. Hence their prayer is, "Be not _silent_ unto me; let, if Thou be silent unto me, I become _like them that go down into the pit_" (Psa. xxviii. 1). If a man had been left without any communication from God, he must have remained spiritually dead throughout his term of probation. For he is by nature what is called in Scripture, "carnally-minded," which "is death" (Rom. viii. 5). Every man, if left to himself, forms habits of thinking and of acting that cause him "to be tied and bound with the chain of his sins." And if God had not spoken he must have remained in this condition, which is spiritual death. Therefore, God has broken this silence with an "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead" (Ephes. v. 14). The nations were walking in the darkness and the shadow of death when the "light shined" upon them (Luke i. 79), in the person of Him who is the Word and the Wisdom of God, who, Himself, declared "_The words that I speak unto_ you, they are spirit, and they are _life;_" "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John vi. 63, x. 10).