Stephen Charnock (Works, vol. 5, pp. 357–358):
The time of the church’s depression is the time of God’s exaltation.... His right hand then becomes ‘glorious in power,’ Exod. 15:6. He loves to appear in his dress as a Creator, when there is no fitness in the subject to answer his end but what he bestows upon it. When Jerusalem becomes ‘a rejoicing, and her people a joy,’ it is an act of creating power: Isa. 65:18, ‘For, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing.’ When the creature can give them not the least assistance, then will they be sensible of God’s unbounded sufficiency, and their own necessary dependence. God never had too little help from his creature in a deliverance; he hath sometimes complained of too much, and disbanded some of the church’s forces, as in the case of Gideon, Judges 7. As Christ rules in the midst of his enemies, so doth God’s power most visibly in the midst of distresses. A physician’s skill is most conspicuous when the disease is most dangerous and most complicated, and nature at the lowest ebb. It is more glory to God to quench the fire in its fullest rage than to extinguish it in its first smoke and sparkles. God loves the fairest mark to shoot at, and will rather down with Goliath than with the ordinary Philistines, grapple with the great rather than with a light danger, that the Lord may appear to be ‘a man of war,’ Exod. 15:3. As God shews his mercy in his people’s redemption, he will shew his strength in their conduct, Exod. 15:13. He that made this deliverance a standing monument of his power, entitles himself by it: Isa. 43:16, ‘Thus saith the Lord, which makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters.’
