Page:Visions and Prophecies of Zechariah (Baron, David).djvu/166

 And the punishment which these transgressions often bring down upon man, even in this life, must be regarded as " mere premonitory droppings of the tempest of wrath which will one day overwhelm the ungodly."

(c) But there is yet a climax in the train of calamities which the curse will bring to the house of the wicked. It shall not only " dwell " there, but it " shall consume it with the timber thereof, and the stones thereof" Here we see the terribleness of the punishment which sin brings down upon itself. It shall be utterly " cleansed away," or " consumed " from the midst of God's congregation, together with those sinners who are no longer separable from it.

The terms in the last sentence are almost identical with those used of the house stricken with leprosy in Lev. xiv. 45, which, too, had to be destroyed, "both the stones thereof and the timber thereof"; and this undoubted allusion supplies another hint of the fact that already in the Old Testament leprosy was regarded as a type of sin, and that what that terrible and loathsome disease did for men's bodies and their earthly habitations, sin does for men's souls, not only in relation to the life that now is, but also in relation to that which is to come. There is only one way by which we can escape the curse of a broken law, and that is, instead of being " cleansed away " with our sins by God's wrath into perdition, to be cleansed from our sins in that fountain which God has opened in the pierced side of Messiah for sin and uncleanness, and which makes the