“May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble. May the name of
the God of Jacob set you up on high, send you help from the
sanctuary, grant you support from Zion.” Psalm 20:1, 2
When the soul has to pass through the trying hour of temptation,
it needs help from the sanctuary. All other help leaves the soul
just where it found it. Help is sent from the sanctuary because his
name has been from all eternity, registered in the Lamb’s book of
life—engraved upon the palms of His hands—borne on His
shoulder—and worn on His heart. Communications of life and
grace from the sanctuary produce spirituality and heavenlymindedness.
The breath of heaven in his soul draws his affections
upward—weans him from earth—and makes him a pilgrim and a
sojourner here below, looking for a city with eternal
foundations—a city designed and built by God!

-J.C Philpot

It is our dim, scanty, and imperfect knowledge of the Lord Jesus
Christ in His eternal love—and in His grace and glory—which
leaves us so often cold, lifeless, and dead in our affections towards
Him. If there were more blessed revelations to our soul of the
Person and work, grace and glory, beauty and blessedness of the
Lord Jesus Christ—it is impossible but that we would more and
more warmly and tenderly fall in love with Him—for He is the
most glorious object that the eyes of faith can see! He fills heaven
with the resplendent beams of His glorious majesty—and has
ravished the hearts of thousands of His dear family upon earth by
the manifestations of His bleeding, dying love. Just in proportion
to our personal, spiritual, experimental knowledge of Him, will be
our love to Him.

-J.C Philpot

Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked? (Ecclesiastes 7:13)

It cannot be questioned but the crook in the lot, considered as a crook, is a penal evil, whatever it is for the matter of it; that is, whether the thing in itself, its immediate
cause and occasion, are sinful or not, it is certainly a punishment of affliction. Now, as it may be, as such, holily and justly brought on us, by our Sovereign Lord and Judge, so he
expressly claims the doing or making of it. “Shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord has not done it?” Wherefore, since there can be no penal evil but of God’s making, and the crook in the lot is such an evil, it is necessarily concluded to be of
God’s making.

Secondly, it is evident, from the Scripture doctrines of divine providence, that God brings about every man’s lot, and all the parts of it. He sits at the helm of human affairs, and turns them about in whatever way he lists. “Whatever the Lord pleased, that He did in heaven and in earth, in the seas and all deep places. ” There is not anything whatever befalls us without his overruling hand. The same providence that brought us out of the womb, brings us to, and fixes us in the condition and place allotted for us, by him who “has
determined the times and the bounds of our habitation. ” It overrules the smallest and most casual things about us, such as “hairs of our head being all numbered;” a “lot cast into the lap. ” Yea, the free acts of our will, by which we choose for ourselves: for even “the king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, as rivers of water. “And the whole steps we make, and which others make in reference to us; for “the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walks to direct his steps. ” And this, whether these steps causing the crook are deliberate and sinful ones, such as Joseph s brothers selling him into Egypt; or whether they are undesigned, such as manslaughter purely casual, as when one hewing wood kills his neighbor with “the head of the ax slipping from the helve. ” For there is a holy and wise providence that governs the sinful and the heedless actions of men, as a rider does a lame horse, of whose halting, not he, but the horse’s lameness is the true and proper cause; wherefore in the former of these cases, God is said to have sent Joseph into Egypt, and in the latter, to deliver one into his neighbor’s hand.
Lastly, God has, by an eternal decree, immovable as mountains of brass appointed the whole of every one’s lot, the crooked part of it, as well as the straight. By the same eternal
decree, by which the high and low parts of the earth, the mountains and the valleys, were appointed, are the heights and the depths, the prosperity and adversity, in the lot of the
inhabitants of there determined; and they are brought about, in time, in a perfect agreeableness there.

-Thomas Boston

A friend of mine once asked a certain divine in London what he thought of the law as the believer’s only rule of life? He replied, “The believer must look with one eye to Christ, and with the other to the law.” But he brought no more proof from the word of God than this author has, who attempts to prove it by the fitness of things. My friend replied, “Then every believer must squint.” However, there is no call for squinting in this matter; Christ says, “Look unto me, and be saved, all ye ends of the earth;” and adds, “I will keep that man in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on me ” and Paul tells us to “run the race set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.” Looking with one eye to the law, and with the other to Christ, is erring from wisdom’s rule of direction; which is, “Let thine eyes look right on, and let thine eyelids look straight before thee. Ponder the path of thy feet, and let all thy ways be established.”

William Huntington