This prophecy may allude to the first captivity, by Nebuchadnezzar, which was a very desolating siege, but more particularly to the destruction of the city and temple of Jerusalem, by the Roman armies, for their rejection of the Gospel, the murder of the Son of God, and their persecution of the apostles and ministers of Christ. The Jews were all wedded to their own works, and trusting in them, is idolatry. This was their base conduct, both rich and poor, therefore the Lord was determined to break up house-keeping with them, and devote the whole land to destruction; and such should be the terrors of the siege, that the prophet is commanded to direct the attention of many to the holes of the rocks and caves of the earth—such should be horrors experienced by all the inhabitants of Judea, from the terrible majesty of Jehovah, when he should shake the earth with his awful vengeance. This subject is again and again repeated, to shew its certainty and its horror, a faint shadow of the last great day, when our God shall appear in grandeur, our world shall be in flames, when consternation shall turn every unprepared heart pale as the second death, 24th Matthew; and the 6th of Revelations should be read with this chapter, but I humbly conceive this address in the 10th verse, may be applied to God’s children, who should live to see these awful times, and indeed, viewed in a gospel sense, there is no period when the exhortation is needless. We are sinners, guilty, polluted, undone, and hell-deserving. God, as viewed in the law, is truly awful. He appears, and every truly awakened soul sees him, and dreads him as a sin-avenging God, who will by no means of man’s devising, clear the guilty. The sinner who is under the hand of the law, feels the intolerable burden of his own sins, views the holiness of God, the extent and spirituality of the commandments, and groans under fearful apprehensions of eternal woe, and who finds he can do nothing but sin in thought, word, and deed, notwithstanding all his vows, watchings, and care; yet his mind apprehending the faithfulness and unchangeableness of God, who has declared, The soul that sinneth, it shall die. This awful perfection dwells on his mind, and the horrors, real and imaginary, seize his spirits. Here he feels the evil of sin, the terrors of the Almighty, the nature of the law, the impossibility of being saved by it, the awful state of all who are out of Christ, however moral their deportment, or clear their doctrinal views. Here a soul sees his need of a surety, his need of a better righteousness than his own, his need of an atonement, and a Saviour, who is God-Man Mediator. This is learning the subject from real heart felt experience; and this explains many passages in the Bible, descriptive of the feelings of many who were brought into this state. This is being planted into the likeness of Christ’s death, and when such souls are brought into the liberty of the gospel, they know,