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###### Many Bankruptcies Show That Commerce Has Decayed

{Since the Heavenly Trade Is the Best Trade…

Cause for Lamentation, Repentance, and Labor

Symptoms of the Decay of the Heavenly Trade

Many Bankruptcies Show That Commerce Has Decayed}

Bankruptcies and closed businesses show that commerce has decayed. People can hang on no longer, but are forced to give up. They go backwards and lose money so fast that at last they close up shop and are gone. The times we live in are a clear evidence of this truth. Stores are frequently going out of business, now one, then another. This plainly shows that trading is bad. And thus it is with wisdom’s merchants these days. There are many who have pursued an honorable trade of Christian profession, made a great show of Christianity, and were famous in their generation for gifts and seeming piety. But they have now come to nothing and are quite fallen and gone. There are great apostasies from the truth and sad shipwrecks of faith and conscience. How much there is of this in our times. There were people who seemed to be like stars and shone brightly for a while, but proved to be only meteors in the end. They were as the sun when it rises in splendor but sets in a cloud. The visible apostasy and gross debauchery of people professing God in these latter times is great, but there is much more secret degeneracy and backsliding of heart. Many break, but more bend. It is far easier to observe than to take to heart people’s great declines in Christianity, some wholly, but most in practice. Some, with the fallen angels, have left their abode (Jude 6)316 and fallen from their first state, but others falter in their profession and are fallen in their station. Some are shaken down by stormy winds (Matthew 7:26–27),317 and others, fully ripe and at the height of their profession, loosen by degrees and drop away. Some fall from the tree and others rot where they hang. Some trees have lost their fruit and others their very leaves and have become twice dead (Revelation 20:14).318 Can you look anywhere and not see people falling away, either from faith or from faithfulness? People take up various opinions and as easily leave them. Most people build on the sand with tiny foundations in the truth. How easy it is to draw people away from their opinions. There is little steadfastness in love, and labors of love soon cease. A little trouble makes people let go of their profession and others lose their strictness in Christianity and grow more remiss and lame in duty, leaving their first love and close walk with God. And are not these obvious symptoms of decaying godliness such that anyone may evaluate the situation and see that the heavenly trade has come to almost nothing these days?

316“And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6 NASB).

317“Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall” (Matthew 7:26–27 NASB).

318“Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:14 ESV).

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