Your own wickedness shall correct you, and your backslidings shall reprove you: know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that you have forsaken the LORD your God, and that my fear is not in you,
says the Lord GOD of hosts.
Read Chapter 2
Irenaeus of Lyons
AD 202
The Lord has therefore endured all these things on our behalf, in order that we, having been instructed by means of them all, may be in all respects judicious for the time to come. He endured that, having been rationally taught to love God, we may continue in his perfect love. God has displayed patience in the case of humankind’s apostasy. While humankind has been instructed by means of it, as also the prophet says, “Your own apostasy shall heal you.” God thus determined all things beforehand in order to bring people to perfection, to edify them and to reveal God’s dispensations, that goodness may both be made apparent, and that righteousness be perfected, and that the church may be fashioned after the image of his Son and that humankind may finally be brought to maturity at some future time, becoming mature through such privileges to see and comprehend God. - "Against Heresies 4.37.7"
This then is that body of death from which we cannot escape, confined in those who are perfect, who have tested “how gracious the Lord is,” daily feel with the prophet “how bad for himself and bitter it is for a man to depart from the Lord his God.” - "Conference 3.23.16"
So also that unwearied goodness of God and his unchanging nature hurt no one indeed, but we ourselves by falling from on high and tending to the depths are the authors of our own death, or rather the very fall becomes death to the one who falls.… For “your own wickedness shall reprove you, and your apostasy shall rebuke you. Know and see that it is an evil and a bitter thing for you to have left the Lord your God”; for “everyone is bound by the cords of his sins.” - "Conference 3.23.9"
When he does not convince with his word, God many times permits the experience of things to be the teaching, something that he also said to the Jews. When he expended myriads of words though the prophets, he neither persuaded nor embraced the Jews. Allowing them to be educated through punishment, he said to them, “Your apostasy shall correct you, and wickedness shall reprove you.” - "Homilies on Repentance and Almsgiving 1.4.27"
