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###### Advantage: Decays Help Uncover the Sins That Caused the Losses

{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 Uncover the Sins That Caused the Loss}

Divine rebukes on people’s earthly concerns help people to see the sins that caused the losses (Deuteronomy 31:17).1256 Afflictions are Christ’s clay and saliva (John 9:6)1257 to open His people’s eyes and bring them to see the evils that have brought disaster on their comforts and bred the worms that have destroyed their substance. Times of correction are times of instruction (Job 36:8–9).1258 When Jacob’s sons were short of provisions and plunged into sore danger, then they pondered their sin and the wrong done to their brother Joseph. “Then they said to one another, ‘Truly we are guilty concerning our brother, because we saw the distress of his soul when he pleaded with us, yet we would not listen; therefore this distress has come upon us’” (Genesis 42:21 NASB). From this passage, we have this lesson: affliction is a dark condition, but it brings much light into the soul. People read their transgressions best by the firelight of affliction. “When he prayed to Him, He was moved by his entreaty and heard his supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem to his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord was God” (2 Chronicles 33:13 NASB). Now the soul comes to see his abuse of the mercies he had lost, his inordinate love of them, and that he had wandered from God. This gives wisdom of hindsight and greater freedom from those entanglements in the future, which is no small advantage to future godliness.

1256“Then my anger will be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be devoured. And many evils and troubles will come upon them, so that they will say in that day, ‘Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?’” (Deuteronomy 31:17 ESV).

1257“When He had said these things, He spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva; and He anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay” (John 9:6 NKJV).

1258“And if they are bound in chains and caught in the cords of affliction, then he declares to them their work and their transgressions, that they are behaving arrogantly” (Job 36:8–9 ESV).

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