Sermon 11. - Danger of the Wicked.

righteous but sinners to repentance. Only let thy heart close with his heart, thy soul with his soul, thy sins with his blood, and thou shalt find that thy life is bound up in his life; and that where he is, there shall his servant, his spouse, his member be. Thus shut up safe in the true ark, thou shalt outride all the storms of sin, temptation, death, and judgment, which will soon overwhelm a Christless world.

SERMON 11. - DANGER OF THE WICKED.

“O son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore thou shalt hear the word at my mouth and warn them from me. When I say unto the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt surely die; if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thy hand. Nevertheless, if thou warn the wicked of his way to turn from it; if he do not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul,” Ezekiel 33:7 - 9. THE king, by his pious proclamation, the Church, throughout the service we have performed, and God himself, in the solemn words of the text, call upon all preachers to shake off the dust of indolence, and put on the armour of God, on this mournful day.f10 At all times we are bound to be instant in preaching the word, both in season and out of season; but on such a day as this, we are especially commanded to cry aloud and spare not, to draw the sword of the Spirit, the keenest word of God, and sheath it in the very bowels of profaneness. We must attack, unmask, and overthrow vice, with a holy violence, and strike at the heart of sin with the boldness of John the Baptist, and in the spirit of Elijah. You see, by the words of the text, that God has set us as watchmen unto the house of Israel; and bids us say to the wicked, “Thou shalt surely die.” He adds, that if we do not warn the wicked from his way, he shall die in his iniquity, but his blood shall be required at our hands; and after so express a commission, who can be offended, if, superior to the frowns or smiles of sinners, we obey our heavenly, yea, and our earthly king’s commands, and deliver our own souls by warning the wicked of impending ruin.

Without any apology for my plainness, I shall therefore endeavour, first, to convince the wicked man both of his wickedness and danger: and then conclude by giving such directions as will be a means (through Divine mercy) either to save his soul, or deliver my own.

I. I shall endeavour to convince the wicked man both of his wickedness and danger.

It is agreed by all divines that the wicked man never repents till he is convinced of his wickedness; and David tells us that “he flattereth himself in his own eyes, until his iniquity be found to be hateful,” Psalm 36:2. For, till then, he thinks it is delightful, fashionable, profitable, and not very perilous. The preacher has then but one way to take in order to convince him, and that is, to lay before him, out of the word of God, the picture of his wickedness in such true colours, that he may be constrained to say, “I am the man.” Then, and not till then, will he loath himself, discover his imminent danger, and begin to flee from the wrath to come. Therefore, that each may know whether he is the man, let him attentively consider whether his conscience does not plead guilty to one of the eight following marks of “wickedness;” for if but one of these be seen upon him, he is the man.

1. A numerous tribe, among which the wicked man is often found, is that of practical Atheists. Thousands there are, (it is to be feared,) who, by gross ignorance, shameful neglect of instruction, and abominable contempt of godliness, open the way for all those that go the downward road, and are, as it were, in the front of the battle, and next to the prince of darkness. Their heart is darkened by the mists of pride and the clouds of presumption, and they are such utter strangers to their want of spiritual light and Divine grace, that they seldom or never call upon God for help with any solemnity. The unhappy heathenish families who are of this stamp meet regularly every day to eat, drink, and make provision for the flesh; but how seldom do they meet to read and pray, to seek, and partake together of the bread of angels, and the water of life. You will find almost as much godliness among the wild Indians as among these practical Atheists. But why should I call them Atheists? They have many gods. The world is their god, pleasure is their god, vanity is their god, money is their god, their belly is their god: to some or other of these idols they sacrifice their hearts and their time. As for the God of heaven, the great and eternal Jehovah, they put him off with a careless attendance on his public worship on Sunday morning, if the weather suits them; and it is well if to this they add sometimes the babbling over of the Lord’s prayer and the creed, which, after all, in the manner in which they do it, is no better than a solemn mockery of the Saviour, whom they constantly crucify afresh. Do you belong to such a heathenish, prayerless family, and are you hurried down the stream of its profaneness? If you do, suffer me to deliver my soul by telling you that you are the very first person to whom I am bound to say, “Thou shalt surely die.” Read your sentence in Psalm 79:6: the Lord will “pour out his wrath upon the heathen that have not known him, and upon the kingdoms that call not upon his name.” What! Shall the indignation of the Lord fall upon prayerless families among the heathens, and shall it pass by the nominally Christian, but prayerless family to which you belong? No, no: the Judge of all the earth will do right, he will repay you to your face. “Verily,” says the Son of God himself to those who call themselves Israelites or Christians, and are not: “Verily, verily, it shall be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for you,” Matthew 11:21. O repent and turn; turn and live; for why should you fall into the hands of the living God, and know him a consuming fire to the profane?

2. The wicked is often known to others and to himself, by his injustice, oppression, cruelty, deceit, and unfair dealing. Did you ever make a prey of the poor and helpless, as the stronger beasts used to do of the weaker? Are you like the horse leech, crying, “Give, give,” still wanting more profit, and never thinking you have enough? Do you take more care to lay up treasures upon earth than in heaven? Have you got the unhappy secret of distilling silver out of the poor man’s brows, and gold out of the tears of helpless widows, and friendless orphans? Or, which is rather worse, do you directly or indirectly live by poisoning others, by encouraging the immoderate use of those refreshments, which, taken to excess, disorder the reason, ruin the soul, and prove no better than slow poison to the body? If your business calls you to buy or sell, do you use falsehood, do you equivocate, do you exaggerate or conceal the truth, in order to impose upon your neighbour, and make your profit of his necessity or credulity? If any one of these marks be found upon you, it is enough; God’s word singles you out, and draws you to the bar of Divine justice to hear your doom in the text: “The wicked shall surely die;” or that more particular sentence in Isaiah 30:12: “Because you trust in oppression, perverseness, and deceit,” saith the Lord, “this iniquity shall be as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly at an instant.” O see your danger, repent, and make restitution! Why should you meet the unjust steward in hell, when you may yet follow Zaccheus into heaven?

3. But if you have always been free from these two marks of a wicked man, are you equally free from another, that is not less sure than either of the former? There is a fearful sin, which has in it no profit, no pleasure, no, not sensual sweetness enough to bait the hook of temptation. The only enticement to it is the diabolical disposition of the wicked man, and the horrid pride he takes in cutting a figure among the children of Belial. I speak of oaths and curses, - those arrows shot from the string of a hellish heart, and the bow of a Luciferian tongue, against heaven itself. Those are some of the sparks of hell fire, which now and then come out of the throat of the wicked man. Do they ever come out of thine? A year ago I laid before you the horror of that sin, and besought you by the tender mercies of the Lord Jesus Christ, to leave it to Satan and his angels, and to act no more the part, I shall not say of a wicked man, but of an incarnate devil. But have you strictly complied with the solemn request? Has not heaven been pierced with another fiery dart? Have not good men, or good angels, (if any attend you still,) shuddered at those imprecations which you have used, perhaps without remorse? Has not the prince of darkness smiled, and hell exulted, to hear that some of their hideous sounds proceed yet out of your ungodly mouth? If your conscience pleads guilty here, and you have not wept bitterly, and obtained pardon for the black transgression, you are the “wicked;” you “shall surely die,” unless tears of repentance speedily flow, and the blood of a dying Saviour wash out the hellish stain. To you it is that David speaks in Psalm 109:18: “As he clothed himself with cursing as with a garment, it shall come into his bowels like water, and like oil into his bones.” O, will you still pull down this fearful curse upon your head, and entail the Almighty’s judgments upon this guilty land? Will you die for the mere pleasure of cursing and dying? Merciful Saviour, forbid it! Pluck these brands out of the fire, and quench them in thy blood.

4. But perhaps your conscience bears you witness that you are not a swearing Christian, or rather a swearing infidel. Well, but does not the threatening of the text light upon you on some other account? To instance in a fourth particular: are you clear in the point of adultery, fornication, or uncleanness? Does not the guilt of some vile sin, which you have wickedly indulged in time past, and perhaps are still indulging from time to time, mark you for the member of a harlot, and not the member of Christ; for a child of Belial, and not for a child of the God of purity? Do not you kindle the wrath of Heaven against yourself and your country, as the men and women of Gomorrah did against themselves and the other cities of the plain? If you cherish the sparks of wantonness, as they did, how can you but be made with them to suffer the vengeance of eternal fire? And do not flatter yourself with the vain hope that your sin is not so heinous as theirs. If it be less in degree, is it not infinitely greater in its aggravating circumstances? Were these poor Canaanites Christians? Had they Bibles and ministers? Had they sermons and sacraments? Did they ever vow, as you have done, to renounce the devil, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh? Did they ever hear of the Son of God sweating great drops of blood, in an agony of prayer, to quench the fire of human corruption? Now, you have heard of this; you profess to believe it; and yet you sin on, both against the heavenly light and the heavenly blood. O what horrible guilt do you bring upon yourself, and upon the whole land! “Know you not that your body is,” or ought to be, “the temple of God? Now if any defile the temple of God, him will God destroy,” 1 Corinthians 6:18. O acknowledge your guilt and danger, and by deep repentance prevent infallible destruction.

5. Some will, perhaps, secretly triumph here, as the Pharisee once did, because they are “not as other” wicked “men, unjust, extortioners, adulterers,” and unclean: but, suppose the dart of sin has not wounded their breasts, are they in a better case if they rim the sword of intemperance through their own bowels? Gluttony and drunkenness are the two idols to which many sacrifice the marrow and fatness of the land, together with their time and strength. He is a glutton who eats barely for the pleasure of eating: he is a drunkard who drinks for the bare pleasure of drinking, though he should be so “mighty to mingle strong drink,” as not to discompose either his reason or constitution. The men of the old world were “eating and drinking,” says our Lord, (as if that had been the end of their creation,) when God swept them away by the flood: the Israelites had yet in their teeth the meat which they had wantonly desired, when God arose and slew the wealthier of them. “The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play,” says St. Paul, “and there fell of them that day about three thousand men,” by a fearful judgment of God. Yea, the very sin of Sodom is said to have been indulgence and fulness of bread at first, - epicurism naturally leading into all debauchery and excess. Whether, therefore, you dig your grave with your teeth, and entomb in your own bowels that which should be the support of your family and of the poor; or whether, to indulge the lust of the flesh, or only to please and countenance your carnal acquaintance, you can spend the best part of a day in pouring drink offerings into the shrine of Belial which you carry about you; St. Paul describes your sins, and tells you your danger in Philippians 3:18: “For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.” Observe the words, “whose end is destruction.” Walk on then, O man, according to the desire of thy heart, the lust of thy eye, and the way of the world; pull down the judgments of a righteous God upon the land, upon thy family, and thyself, by the cords of surfeiting! drunkenness, or indulgence; “but remember, that for all these things God will bring thee to judgment.” O might we all, on this grand day of humiliation, humble ourselves, call for the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, and be washed from this iniquity, before it be our eternal ruin of body and soul.

6. I cannot pass in silence the detestable, though fashionable sin, which, joined to the last I spoke against, has brought down the curse of Heaven, and poured desolation and ruin upon the most flourishing kingdoms: I mean, pride in apparel. After the fall, God gave our first parents coats to cover their shame, but their children use them to declare their pride: and even in this place, where poverty, hard labour, and drudgery would, one should think, prevent a sin which Christianity cannot tolerate even in kings’ houses, there are not wanting foolish virgins who draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and betray the levity of their hearts by that of their dress. Yea, some women that should be mothers in Israel, and that should adorn themselves with good works as holy and godly matrons, openly affect the opposite character. You may see them offer themselves first to the idol vanity, and then sacrifice their children upon the same altar. As some sons of Belial teach their little ones to curse, before they can well speak; so these daughters of Jezebel drag their unhappy offspring (before they can well walk) to the haunts of vanity and pride. They complain, perhaps, of evening lectures, but run to midnight dancings. If you believe them, it is almost abominable to meet a minister, to seek the Lord, and sing his praises; but they can, with a good conscience, meet a harper, and, at the sound of his harp, make their children go through the fire of vanity, that Moloch of our days! O that such persons would let the prophet’s words sink into their frothy minds, and fasten upon their careless hearts: “Because the daughters of Sion are haughty,” says the Lord, “and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, the Lord will smite with a sore the crown of their head, and discover their shame: instead of well - set hair there shall be baldness, and burning instead of beauty.” Nor will the punishment stop here; for this abominable sin of vanity and pride calls for the judgments of God upon the whole nation that indulge it; and therefore the prophet adds immediately: “Thy men shall fall by the sword, and thy gates shall lament and mourn,” Isaiah 3:25. Thus this fashionable sin, which the god of this world represents as a piece of good breeding, according to God’s words, will end in burning for those who commit and encourage it, and in destruction for the city or kingdom that suffers it, if speedy reformation, and the intercession of Christ, do not prevent the operations of the avenging sword.

7. Will you give me leave, my brethren, to lay before you another mark which shows that the man on whom it is found is certainly “wicked” before God, though in the account of men he may be religious and upright; I mean no less a sin than that of perjury, which implies, first taking an oath rashly, and then breaking it wickedly. I question whether any thing under heaven can be more solemn than taking an oath, and any thing on this side hell more abominable than falsifying it. And yet, what is more common! How many perjured persons do the flaming eyes of almighty God see throughout the kingdom! “Because of swearing the land mourneth,” said a prophet of old; but had he lived in our degenerate days, he would have added, “because of perjury the land groaneth.” To go no farther than that spot which we inhabit; how many of us, who have been from time to time entrusted with public offices, have wilfully broken the oaths administered unto us; I shall not say in one, but perhaps in a hundred instances! How many open and notorious drunkards, fighters, Sabbath breakers, blasphemers of God’s word, cursers of men, and other notorious sinners have escaped deserved censure, I shall not say by the accidental neglect, but by the downright perjury of officers! And if those that should repress wickedness make no conscience of breaking their oath, that is, of committing themselves the greatest piece of wickedness under heaven, how will they make conscience of repressing lesser abominations in others! Nor does the generality of this Atheistical and damnable sin make it more excusable in the sight of God. It would have been no excuse for Satan, or for the inhabitants of Sodom, to say that they hoped their rebellion was trifling, because thousands of wicked angels, or wicked men, shared in it. And it will be no cloak for the forsworn person to say, “I am not alone, and, if perjury be a damning sin, God help us all!” The very heathen have punished perjury with death; and how the righteous God will punish it in professed Christians, I leave vou to infer from these words of the prophet, “I turned and lifted up my eyes,” says he, “and behold a flying roll. And he said unto me, What seest thou? And I answered, I see a flying roll, the length whereof is twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof ten cubits. Then said he unto me, This is the curse that goeth forth over the face of the whole earth; for every one that sweareth shall be cut off according to it. I will bring it forth, saith the Lord: it shall enter into the house of him that sweareth falsely by my name, and it shall remain in the midst of his house, and shall consume it, with the timber thereof and the stones thereof.” If you want to know what that roll of cursing is, according to which the perjured sinner shall be cut off, I answer, that it includes all the plagues written in the book of God. “So help me God,” says he who takes an oath; and then he bows and kisses the Bible: that is to say, “Let God so truly help me, according to the promises of this book, as I will be true to my oath;” which implies, that if he falsify it, he prays that all the lamentations, curses, and woes, written in that book, may fall upon his perjured head: and the angry God will answer his horrible prayer, if the perjurer do not speedily repent of his sin, and seek shelter in the wounds of a crucified Saviour.

8. For the sake of brevity, I shall crowd into another article many classes of wicked men; as the day would be too short to give you a particular account of their guilt and danger.

At the head of these I would put the hypocrites; they that appear, or try to appear to be godly, out of vain glory and for private interest, or some selfish and sordid end. These are the very spawn of the crooked serpent, and, like him, attempt to transform themselves into angels of light, in order more effectually to promote the interests of the kingdom of darkness. From these pests may God deliver our Church and state! These bring a curse upon us, as Nathan did upon the Israelites of old. If any such be here, may the dagger of conviction make a wound in their seared consciences, and pierce their callous hearts!

Next to these I would put enthusiasts; that is to say, those people who dare to talk of the workings of the Spirit of God on their minds and hearts, when yet, by their words or works, they show that they are possessed by the spirit of pride and malice, or of covetousness and lust, in short, by the spirit of the devil. Wherever God begins to work, Satan will counterwork; and he does it often by dressing up some of his children as Christians, teaching them something of the language of Canaan, and then putting them upon doing the works of darkness, that the children of the world may conclude that all pretenders to the workings of God’s Spirit are either fools or knaves, mere enthusiasts, and no better than these deceived ones. O let none of us countenance these first born of Satan: let us try to detect them, and turn out the wicked from among us, lest they make spiritual Christians stink for ever in the nostrils of them that are without, and bring a curse upon us and our Church.

Next to these I would place the followers of Judas and Demas - people who make profession of Christianity, come to church, are strict in some points, and regularly receive the bread and cup at the altar. They kiss our Saviour with their lips, as Judas; but they hug the bag in their hearts. They call themselves Churchmen, as Demas; but they love this present world. These “wicked” persons, though they do not pretend to spiritual Christianity, yet because they pretend to Christianity in general, shall have their portion appointed them with hypocrites, unless their hearts be wounded by true repentance, and healed by the balmy blood of the Saviour.

In the fourth rank you may place all the busy agents of the devil. And who are these? I answer,

(1.) All lying, envious, spiteful, wrathful, revengeful people:

(2.) All those who speak evil of any one, unless in order to give necessary cautions and useful information to magistrates, ministers, and officers:

(3.) All those that fight, quarrel, or willingly live at variance with any one. The Christian has many enemies; but is himself an enemy to none. If at any time he speaks of the evil that is in his neighbour, it is out of love and compassion, not out of malice or envy. Universal benevolence, a constant disposition to forgive and oblige, to make peace, and to suffer rather than to do wrong, are his peculiar characteristics. But how many are destitute of such characteristics, and yet think and call themselves Christians! Now all these are “wicked” men; and these I called the devil’s agents; because, as they do his work, so they deserve his name. “Satan,” in Hebrew, means an opposer, and Diabolov, devil, in Greek, means a slanderer: because that unhappy spirit delights in opposing and slandering mankind in general, and good men in particular: so that those who oppose and slander their neighbours, and much more those who hurt and persecute them, show plainly what spirit they are of, what master they serve, and what wages they shall have; if, on their reformation and conversion, Divine mercy do not speedily reverse the sentence gone forth against them. Thus, under the eight foregoing particulars, I have showed you who are the “wicked” that “shall surely die:” and I hope that in whichever class of them your particular case was touched, you have suffered conscience to make the application.

II. I now proceed to lay before you such directions as may, through Divine mercy, save your precious souls, notwithstanding all this great wickedness; or, at least, deliver my own.

1. Let us all humble ourselves before almighty God; not transiently, like bulrushes, which bend to the storm for an hour, and then return again to their former state; but for all the days of our life. No unhumbled, no stout hearted sinner can be in a state of salvation. “Except ye repent,” says our Saviour, “ye shall all perish.” The unhumbled sinner is, then, in double danger of perishing; first, on account of his sins, and secondly, on account of the stoutness of his heart, which makes his lip repentance entirely ineffectual.

2. To prove the sincerity of our humiliation and repentance, instead of cloaking and extenuating our manifold sins, let us confess them with deep sorrow, and return to the Lord with mourning and prayer, as well as with fasting; bearing, each of us, the load of our own private iniquities, the additional load of the iniquities of our families, and the immensely accumulated load of the iniquities of our country at large.

3. Let us meditate, with redoubled sorrow, on all the aggravating circumstances of our sins; for instance,

(1.) Let us meditate on their universality. From the gilded palace to the thatched cottage, our guilt cries to heaven for vengeance; as if the blood of Abel were found on the door posts of almost all the houses in the land!

(2.) Let us dwell on the commonness and frequency of our sins, which add a prodigious weight to our guilt. They are not sins committed but once in all our life; but they return every year, perhaps every month, or week; and, in too many cases, alas! every day, and every hour; as often as temptation urges; yea, sometimes before any temptation solicits.

(3.) Let us not conceal a third aggravation of our guilt, still more heinous than the former; I mean, our having sinned with an uncommon boldness, and boasted of our sins. Wickedness is become so fashionable, that he who refuses to run with others into vanity, intemperance, or profaneness, is in danger of losing his character, on one hand; while, on the others the son of Belial prides himself in excesses, glories in diabolical practices, and scoffs with impunity at religion and virtue. O how unconceivably provoking is this in the sight of a holy God!

(4.) But this is not all. Where have we committed these abominations? Is it in a land of the shadow of death, in some dark, unhappy corner of the earth, where God never manifested himself, either by any choice blessing, or by the light of his Gospel? No! Just the reverse! These scenes of wickedness, profaneness, and vanity, are transacted in the most favoured spot of the universe; in a country where Divine goodness seems to have endeavoured to soften every heart by showers of temporal and spiritual blessings. O, England! England! happy, yet ungrateful island! Dost thou repay fruitfulness by profaneness, plenty by vanity, liberty by impiety, and the light of Christianity by excesses of immorality?

After such aggravations of our guilt, how justly might God have scourged us by those that have risen up in arms against us; how justly might he have said to the sword, “Go through the very heart of this land,” or to the pestilence, “Arise, and devour.” Let us acknowledge this, and confess that “it is of the Lord’s mercy that we are not consumed,” as a nation, and that each of us is not cast as a Jonah into the sea of God’s judgments, for the sport of Satan, that great leviathan.

4. But, above all, let our humiliation and confession, our acknowledgement of our aggravated guilt, and condemnation of ourselves, be attended with a visible reformation. We cannot mend the whole land, I grant; but let each of us, through the grace offered us this day, mend one at least; and let every head of a family vow before God, that, let others do as they will, yet “he and his house will serve the Lord.” Fasting without reformation is but abomination. Turning from our wicked way, and doing that which is lawful and right, through the grace of Jesus Christ, that we may save our souls alive, is the very soul of repentance; and repentance is the very soul of fasting. So that take repentance from fasting, or take reformation from repentance, and there remains nothing but detestable formality and abominable hypocrisy.

5. Not only cease to do evil, but learn to do good. You never will, you never can, leave off serving mammon and the flesh, unless you give yourselves up wholly to the service of the living God. You may have good desires, yea, and good resolutions too; but till you come to make it the main business of your life to seek and serve the Lord, in spite of the world, the flesh, and the devil, I take heaven and your conscience to witness, that I warn you this day of the consequence. Your resolutions will never come to any thing, and you shall surely die in the iniquity you have committed. Therefore, that this may not be your lamentable case, give all for all; the praise of men for the praise of God; earth for heaven. Sell all, to buy the pearl of Divine love. Sell all to get the knowledge of Him who says, “Except a man deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me, he is not worthy of me; he cannot be my disciple.”

6. Lastly: as you tender the prosperity of the king, the good of our Church, and the welfare of our country; as you would not bring a private curse upon yourself; your house, and your dearest friends; as you value the honour of almighty God, and dread his awakened wrath; as you would not force him to make our land a field of blood, or to break the staff of our bread, and send famine, pestilence, Popery, or some other fearful judgment among us; I pray, I beseech, I entreat each of you, my dear brethren! as upon my bended knees, - in the name of our Lord Jesus, and by those bowels of Divine mercy, against which we have madly kicked in times past, and which, nevertheless, still yearn over us, - I entreat you not to rest in outward humiliation and reformation. Christians must go one step beyond the Ninevites. O seek then, with all true Christians, a righteousness superior to that of the scribes and Pharisees. Seek it in Christ. Never rest, till you are sure of your interest in him, till you feel the virtue of his blood applied to your heart by the power of his Spirit. Without this all the rest will stand you in little stead. It is the blood of the true paschal Lamb, sprinkled upon our souls, that makes the destroyer sheath his flaming sword, and pass over the protected heads of true believers. O get an application of this blood; get this seal of the living God upon your heart; and then, marked unto the day of redemption, safe in your Saviour’s wounds, and rejoicing even in the midst of tribulation, you will experience the truth of what David says, Psalm cxii: “Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness. Surely he shall not be moved for ever. He shall not be afraid of evil tidings. His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord. His heart is established; he shall not be afraid, until he see his desire upon his enemies,” - sin, death, hell, and the grave. May this be our happy lot, for Christ’s sake! Amen!