Isaiah 57:1,2
The righteous perisheth, and no man layeth it to heart: and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He shall enter into peace: they shall rest in their beds, each one walking in his uprightness.
C. H. SPURGEON (1834-1892): When a storm is coming on, you may see the shepherds among the hills, gathering their sheep and taking them home, and when good men die in large numbers, and the Church’s ranks are thinned, it is sometimes a token that bad times are coming on, and so God takes away the righteous from the evil to come.
JOHN TRAPP (1601-1699): “And no man layeth it to heart,” that it may sink and soak into it, so as to be soundly sensible of God’s holy hand and purpose in such a providence.
MATTHEW HENRY (1662-1714): There are very few that lament it as a public loss, very few that take notice of it as a public warning. The death of good men is to be laid to heart and considered more than common deaths. Serious enquiries ought to be made, wherefore God contends with us, what good lessons are to be learned by such providences, what we may do to help to make up the breach and to fill up the room of those that are removed. God is justly displeased when such events are not laid to heart, when the voice of the rod is not heard nor the intentions of it answered.
C. H. SPURGEON: Oh! did men know what the world loses when a good man dies, they would regret it far more than the death of emperors and kings who fear not God. But as for those who are made righteous by the grace of God, they need not fear to die. To them it will be a rest—a sleep with Jesus—till the trump of the resurrection, and all the evil that will come upon the world will not touch them. They shall rest till the Master comes.
JOHN CALVIN (1509-1564): This doctrine is highly appropriate to every age. It frequently happens that God takes good men out of this world, when he intends to punish severely the iniquities of the ungodly; for the Lord, having a peculiar regard to His own people, takes compassion upon them, and snatches them from the burning.
JOHN TRAPP: As was Methuselah a year before the flood; Jeroboam’s best son, before the downfall of his father’s family, 1 Kings 14:12,13; Josiah before the captivity and first destruction of Jerusalem, 2 Kings 22:20; James before the second, Acts 12:2; Augustine a little before the sack of his city Hippo by the Vandals.
THE EDITOR: Augustine died in August, 430 A.D.; Hippo was sacked in August, 431.
MATTHEW HENRY: Good men are taken away from the evil to come, rather then when it is just coming, in compassion to them, that they may not “see the evil,” 2 Kings 22:20, nor share in it, nor be in temptation by it. When the deluge is coming they are called into the ark, and have a hiding-place and rest in heaven when there was none for them under heaven. And in wrath to the world, to punish them for all the injuries they have done to the righteous and merciful ones. When those are taken away that stood in the gap to turn away the judgments of God, then what can be expected but a deluge of them? It is a sign that God intends war when He calls Home his ambassadors.
JOHN CALVIN: A remarkable instance of this was given in the death of Martin Luther, who was snatched from the world a short time before that terrible calamity befell Germany, which he had foretold many years before, when he exclaimed loudly against that contempt of the Gospel, and that wickedness and licentiousness which everywhere prevailed. Frequently had he entreated the Lord to call him out of this life before he beheld that dreadful punishment, the anticipation of which filled him with trembling and horror. And he obtained it from the Lord. Soon after his death, lo, a sudden and unforeseen war sprang up, by which Germany was terribly afflicted, when nothing was farther from her thoughts than the dread of such a calamity.
JOHN TRAPP: Howbeit this is not generally so; for Jeremiah lived to see the first destruction of Jerusalem, John the Evangelist the last…But usually God taketh away his most eminent servants from the evil to come. As when there is a fire in a house men carry out their jewels; “The best die first, commonly,” saith an ancient man. The comfort is, that though as grapes they be gathered before they are ripe, and as lambs, slain before they be grown, yet this benefit they have, that they are freed from the violence of the winepress that others fall into, and they escape many storms that others live to taste of.
THE EDITOR: There is, spiritually speaking, no such thing as an untimely death, or an accidental death.
C. H. SPURGEON: No saint dies otherwise than by the act of God! It is always according to the King’s own will—it is the King’s own doing. Every ripe ear in His field is gathered by His own hand, cut down by His own golden sickle and by none other.
CHARLES WESLEY (1707-1788): When mortal man resigns his breath,
’Tis God directs the stroke of death.
THE EDITOR: Indeed, God is sovereign in all things concerning life and death; all souls are born into this world in the time of His choosing, according to His purpose, as Paul implicitly states in Galatians 1:15,16. So also in death, whether men be good or bad, for that matter; they depart this life when the purpose for which God created them has been accomplished, and His timings and dispositions are always right. For bad men, death is the beginning of eternal misery. But for those in Christ, it is the beginning of eternal life.
THOMAS BROOKS (1608-1680): A Christian knows that death shall be the funeral of all his sins, his sorrows, his afflictions, his temptations, his vexations, his oppressions, his persecutions. He knows that death shall be the resurrection of all his hopes, his joys, his delights, his comforts, his contentments.
JOHN BUNYAN (1628-1688): Death is but a passage out of a prison into a palace.
THOMAS GOODWIN (1600-1679): “He shall enter into peace.” He, to be sure, shall be blessed. The prophet Isaiah speaks of it as of a new state or condition succeeding the former, for death is entering into it; and it holds with that of Christ words, “Enter into thy Master’s joy,” Matthew 25:23; and agrees also with another phrase of “entering into life,” Matthew 18:8. And the words of Isaiah answer in another place, “Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise,” Isaiah 26:19. And this entrance into peace is therefore meant of the soul’s entering into joy and peace, during that time that the body rests in its bed, namely, the grave. Nor is it spoken of martyrs only, that die in evil times by persecution, but, on the contrary, of those that die before such times approach.
ROBERT BOLTON (1572-1631): This is the privilege of saints, that they shall not die until the best time—not until when, if they were but rightly informed, they would desire to die.
J. C. RYLE (1816-1900): Let us ever rest our souls on the thought, that our times are in God’s hand, Psalm 31:15.
