the religion of the Son of Mary. If it had required them only to believe, or to profess to believe, and not also to amend their lives according to God's holy word, it would have experienced but little opposition. It is not requiring men to believe mysteries, but to crucify every corrupt affection, and inordinate desire, that sets them against the gospel. They love darkness rather than light, because they love their sins more than they love holiness. This was the case with the Jew and heathen of old. It is also the case with us. Our hearts are by nature as much opposed as theirs were, to being crossed in their desires by the law of God. None of our minds are subject to his law, till they are spiritually renewed. Till so renewed, they are enmity against God. We may not join hands with the revilers and persecutors of the religion of the Lord and of his Anointed, still if we fail to render its laws a loving obedience, the language of our hearts, in the ear of God, is, "Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us."

VERSE 4. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.

We can conceive of no feeling in the Divine mind toward any of his creatures that would lead him to literally laugh at and deride them. His feelings towards even those whom he dooms, are still feelings of pity. It was with tears that " God manifested in the flesh" exclaimed, “Behold, your house is left unto you desolate!" We may, therefore, understand by his laughing at and deriding the kings and rulers taking counsel together against him and his Anoint

ed, only his infinite consciousness of being able at any moment to defeat all their machinations. As a man who was conscious of being able to deal in this way with his enemies would be likely to laugh at and deride them, till the time came for punishing them, so God, in order to our more vivid conception of the greatness of his own power and the utter impotence of his enemies, is said to do the same, though without any of the feelings that would, under similar circumstances, find their way into a human breast. Omniscient to plan, and omnipotent to execute, he can afford, till the right time comes for punishing them, to treat his enemies as if with supreme indifference. He can look, unmoved, upon their utmost opposition, as the opposition of worms. He is, therefore, never, by the fury of his enemies, hurried out of himself to take vengeance at once, but often leaves them to work out his own designs by their very wickedness, thus making their very wrath praise him. It was thus that he made the wrath of those crucifying his Son praise him. They thought they were destroying Messiah's kingdom. How mistaken! They were laying its foundation! It had its life and beginning in the blood which they thought would utterly extinguish it. Hence Luther's saying, "Who thought, when Christ suffered, and the Jews triumphed, that God was laughing all the time!" It was even so; for he saw them accomplishing-what they thought they were defeating-his own purposes of mercy toward a guilty world. He, therefore, still sat at ease upon his throne in the heavens, content to let the tide of human wrath roll on unchecked, till the time came

for him to say, "Thus far-and no farther-here shall thy proud waves be stayed." This time is sure to come at the last: for He that sitteth in the heavens will not always act as if he ignored and derided the wickedness of the wicked. This has its bounds,

beyond which God will not suffer it to pass; and when it reaches those bounds, then he visits for it.

VERSE 5. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.

When God can no longer overrule the wrath of man to work out his own great purposes of truth and goodness, he restrains and punishes it. He dealt in this way with the Jews. As if contemptuously indifferent to what they were doing, he allowed them to go on until they had, as his death was necessary to the salvation of the world, crucified his Son: but when they pushed their hostility beyond, and aimed to drive the religion of Christ also out of the world, then, having laid aside his former apparent indifference, God spake unto them in his wrath, and vexed them in his sore displeasure. He sent the Roman legions against them, who besieged them till they endured horrors that shock the mind to relate, laid their city in ruins, levelled their beautiful temple to the ground, leaving not one stone upon another that was not thrown down; indeed ploughing up its very foundations, and then leading its former lovers and defenders away into hopeless captivity. And as he dealt with the Jews, so God at last dealt with the Romans also. He suffered them to take part in crucifying his Son, and punishing the Jews: but when they would have gone farther, he sent

same.

upon them a destruction even more sweeping than that sent upon the Jews. He subverted not only their political and military power, but gradually obliterated their very name. The history of other nations to whom God has spoken in his anger, is the So easily, when the time comes for him to do it, does He who who sitteth in the heavens discomfit his enemies. He frowns-and they are not! The places that knew them once, know them no more. Do what they may to overthrow the kingdom of his Son, God's never-failing answer to the fiercest and most formidable of its assailants is evermore the same.

VERSE 6. Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Zion.

Zion was the seat of Jewish royalty, but this King, against whom human malice would spend itself in vain, was a greater than David. He is the King of Zion; he is Head over all things to the Church; and hath all power given unto him in heaven and upon earth. earth. Hence God calls him his King; that is, a King who shares the government of the universe with himself. Hence he says, “I have set my King upon my holy hill of Zion"-my King, not a king elected and consecrated to the office by man, but elected and consecrated by me. Who then is this divinely elected and divinely consecrated King, enthroned upon God's holy hill of Zion? The

next verse answers,

VERSE 7. I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son: this day have I begotten thee.

These are the King's own words, that the Lord himself had said unto him, "Thou art my Son."

His Son, too, in a sense which, as all approved commentators tell us, makes him equal with the Father Almighty. "Thou art my Son." words similar to these elsewhere?

Do we meet with
We do-once on

the banks of the Jordan, at the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth. There came a voice from heaven, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Matt. ii. 17. And so again, on the mount of transfiguration, issuing from the bright overshadowing cloud, there came a voice, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him." Matt. xvii. 5. This divine Son-King then, enthroned upon God's holy hill of Zion, is he who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary. "This day have I begotten thee." These words refer not alone to our Lord's miraculous conception, but to all the great acts of the Father Almighty-such as his raising Jesus from the dead, and exalting him to the right hand of power on high, whereby it was demonstrated that he was indeed the Son and equal of the Most High.

VERSE 8. Ask of me, and I will give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.

This is the price that Messiah was to receive for pouring out his soul unto death for us men and our salvation. The whole earth was in consequence to become his spiritual inheritance and possession—an inheritance and possession upon which he began to enter when the preaching of the gospel spread from the Jews to the Gentiles. Then began to be fulfilled that which will have been realized when the