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###### Advantage: Decays Help Make Heavenly Things Sweeter

{Since the Heavenly Trade Is the Best Trade…

Exhortation and Counsel to Earthly Traders

Counsel Five: Get Advantage from Decays to Further Heavenly Trade

Advantage: Decays Help Make Heavenly Things Sweeter}

For believers, an outcome of the world’s bitterness may be a sweeter relishing of heavenly things. Harsh providences against earthly comforts make heavenly things more pleasant. People sometimes graft branches bearing sweet fruit on crab tree stocks. God gives honey to his children at the top of the rod (Psalm 94:19).1264 According to Rutherford, the thorn is one of the most cursed, vexatious, and unpleasant weeds, and yet out of it springs the rose. The sweet foods of this world too often build up a learned preference for sweetness, making more wholesome food seem bad tasting. To cure this, the Lord supplies His daintiest food with sour sauce. Heavenly things never taste better than when there is less sweetness in created things. Of what value David considered spiritual things when he was stripped of everything (Psalm 63:1)!1265 Gospel comforts will not go down throats that are choked with the world’s delicacies. But when saints are emptied of the world by adverse providences, then Christ is precious, and is not this a help to heavenly traders? Oh, then, the more adversity you encounter in the world, the more haste do you make to your crown! Does the world fly away from you? Pursue Heaven faster. Does earthly gain retreat? Then advance godliness. And if you get little from earth, lay out greatly for Heaven. And thus ends the exhortation and counsel to earthly traders who encounter disasters on their earthly concerns.

1264“In the multitude of my anxieties within me, Your comforts delight my soul” (Psalm 94:19 NKJV).

1265“O God, You are my God; I shall seek You earnestly; My soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, In a dry and weary land where there is no water” (Psalm 63:1 NASB).

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