In Jeremiah, chapter two, verse nineteen, “Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee: know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the LORD thy God, and that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord GOD of hosts.” Sin often brings its own punishment. When believers forsake the Lord, they lose God’s protection and blessing and open themselves up to destructive temptations. Sin enslaves them, and many evils and bitter things may happen to them.
Is Israel a servant? No, they are the seed of Abraham. We may apply this spiritually: Is the soul of a person a slave? No, it is not; but has sold its own liberty, and enslaved itself to divers lusts and passions.
The Assyrian princes prevailed against Israel. People from Egypt destroyed their glory and strength. They brought these calamities on themselves by departing from God. The use and application of this is, Repent of thy sin, that thy correction may not be thy ruin. What has a Christian to do in the ways of forbidden pleasure or vain sinful mirth, or with the pursuits of covetousness and ambition?
This is not so much a charge of isolated open acts as the departure from God. That departure, itself a sin, is the fountain of all other sins. Every morally wrong act is religiously a departure from God; it could not be done unless the heart and will had moved away from their allegiance to Him. So the solemn mystery of right and wrong becomes yet more solemn when our personal relation to the personal God is brought in. How strange and awful is that power which a creature possesses of closing his heart against God, and setting up a virtual independence!