The appropriateness of God's punishments.
Many of the punishments of sin follow in the way of natural consequence, and these are generally acknowledged to be fitting and appropriate; e.g.—
I. IDLENESS IS PUNISHED BY WANT. "If a man will not work, neither shall he eat" (2 Thessalonians 3:10). Labor naturally produces wealth, or at any rate value of some kind; and those who work the hardest naturally acquire the most. The idle cannot complain if they have few of this world's goods, since they have made no efforts to obtain them. They are fitly punished for their waste of time in sloth by the want of those good things which they might have procured by diligence in toil. The wise man will not give indiscriminate relief to the poor and needy. There is much poverty which is the simple natural result and suitable punishment of idle "loafing" habits.
II. DRUNKENNESS IS PUNISHED BY LOSS OF MENTAL POWER, AND IN SOME CASES BY A TERRIBLE MALADY. The drunkard voluntarily confuses his mental faculties, and suspends their healthy operation, each time that he indulges in the sin whereto he is addicted. What can be more appropriate than that he should be punished by a permanent diminution of his intellectual vigor, a loss of nerve, promptitude, and decision? He also deranges his bodily functions by causing an undue flow of blood to the brain, and an undue excitement of the nerves whose connection is so close with the cerebral tissues. It is most natural and most fitting that such ill treatment of these delicate tissues should result in permanent injury to them, and cause the dreadful malady known to medical science as delirium tremens. The drunkard "receives within himself" a most appropriate "recompense of his error" (Romans 1:27).
III. LUST IS PUNISHED BY A LOATHSOME DISEASE. The nature of the subject here is such as to preclude much illustration. But what can be more appropriate than the punishment of the most foul and filthy of sins by a disease which is foul and filthy and loathsome, alike to others and to the object of it? The body marred and scarred, the blood infected, the whole constitution undermined, form not only a just, but a most fitting, punishment of one, the peculiarity of whose sin is that he "sins against his own body" (1 Corinthians 6:18).
In the case of Israel special national sins were punished by special judgments, also peculiarly appropriate; e.g.—
I. THE GREED WHICH JOINED HOUSE TO HOUSE AND FIELD TO FIELD was punished by an invasion which caused the destruction and ruin of the annexed houses (Isaiah 5:9), and the desolation of the annexed estates. The ruin of the vineyards was such that it was scarcely worth while to gather the produce, the continued devastation of the corn lands such that the harvest did not nearly equal the seed corn. Nomad tribes pastured their flocks on the over-large estates, and the so-called owners derived little or no benefit from their acquisitions (Isaiah 5:10, Isaiah 5:17).
II. DRUNKEN REVELRY was punished by the captivity of the revelers, who were carried off as slaves into a strange land, and there experienced the usual fate of slaves, which included bitter experience of hunger and thirst (Isaiah 5:13). The dole allowed the slave was seldom more than sufficient to keep body and soul together. His drink was water. Kept to hard labor on imperial palaces and other "great works," he lost all cheerfulness, all lightness of heart, all love of song or music. Asked by his taskmasters to "sing them one of the songs of Zion," he declined sadly; the harp of his revels was "hung upon the willows" of Babylon (Psalms 137:2-4). God's judgments upon other nations have often had the same character of appropriateness. Egypt, whose great sin had been pride (Ezekiel 29:4), was condemned to be "the basest of the kingdoms" (Isaiah 5:15); never destroyed, but always subject to one people or another—Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks. Rome, the most cruel and bloody of conquering states, was made a prey, first to bloody tyrants of her own race, and then to a succession of fierce and savage northern hordes—Goths, Huns, Vandals, Burgundians, Heruli, Lombards—who spared neither age nor sex, and delighted in carnage and massacre. Macedonia, raised to greatness by her military system, and using it unsparingly to crush all her rivals, is ruined by being brought into contact with a military system superior to her own. Spain, elevated to the first position in Europe by her colonial greatness, is corrupted by her colonial wealth, and sinks faster than she had risen. States formed by conquest usually perish by conquest; governments founded on revolution are, for the most part, destroyed by revolution. The retributive justice which shows itself in the world's history does not consist in the mere fact that sin is punished, but rather in the remarkable adaptation of the punishment which is dealt out to the sin that has provoked it.