Isaiah 14:1-23

For an act to be sinful the quality of voluntariness must also be present. Sin is the voluntary commission of an act known to be contrary to the will of God. Where there is no moral knowledge or where there is no voluntary choice, the act is not sinful; it cannot be, for sin is the transgression of the law and transgression must be voluntary. Lucifer became Satan when he made his fateful choice: "I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High" (

What must be the apostate professor's doom when his naked soul appears before God? How will he bear that voice, "Depart, ye cursed; thou hast rejected me, and I reject thee; thou hast played the harlot, and departed from me: I also have banished thee for ever from my presence, and will not have mercy upon thee." What will be this wretch's shame at the last great day when, before assembled multitudes, the apostate shall be unmasked? See the profane, and sinners who never professed religion,...

Thus early and thus distinctly do we find the gospel emancipated, and the Spirit of God breaking away from his prison house, from Judea, to utter a premonitory invitation in the ears of distant nations, occupied with their idols. We should never allow ourselves to suppose that when God was bestowing so much labor of love upon the Jewish nation, that he was then unmindful of the rest of mankind. God took nothing away from the other nations of the earth, when he made the Jewish people the...

An incontestable truth, one would say. "Who will dare to deny that God speaks things which are right? That were at once the height of folly and of guilt.

Is it so? Then do all men dwell upon the heights of folly and of guilt. They have built for themselves permanent habitations there. There are innumerable things that men declare to be right; they do them and repent not at the remembrance of them; they commend them in others; yet these things are diametrically opposite to the things...