Use 2

USE. II.

For information in two particulars.

1. This tells us how admirable God's forbearance is towards unregenerate sinners under the Gospel. That he should wait so long from one year to another, and see how they neglect his grace, and dishonor his name, and yet still he holds his hand back, and not fall upon them in his fury, pluck them up and cast them out of his vineyard: are they such a cumber, do they do no good and withal do such a world of harm to others? It must needs be a matter of astonishment to think that God should not long ago have been weary with waiting upon them, that he has not rid himself of creatures so burdensome to him. No, it should commend the grace of God to his own children, who consider how little they bear, how short they come of answering God's just expectation, yes and how much their little fruitfulness does bring of dishonor to God, and offer of scandal to the Gospel.

2. Here see a reason why God sometimes takes away his Gospel, and the means of grace from a people. There is a parity of reason between a tree in the vineyard, and the vineyard itself; especially if we consider that it consists of individual trees: if then a fig-tree waited upon to no purpose, abiding barren after all, must come to cutting down at last, what may be expected concerning an orchard of trees, when they come to be all, or most part so? The whole ground that they grow in is lost, and cumbered by them. Well then may it be expected, that God will not long keep up the fence about such a piece of ground, so unprofitable to him. It may therefore put a people upon serious enquiry, when God begins to lay them waste by desolating judgments, whether it be not so with them: and it is an awful truth, that though God sometimes keeps up the pale, continues the Gospel, for the sake of a few that are precious to him, and do honor him by their fertility; yet when degeneracy overspreads, and those few can do no good, he plucks up the ledges, and lays open the vineyard; and if it be a thing so pernicious for a vineyard to be barren, God is to be justified, and his prudence to be acknowledged in such a dispensation of severity as this is.