Verse 30. There is not a word here of disability, it is all unwillingness. Point me to one passage in the Bible where sinners are represented as being condemned for not doing what they could not do. The blessed God is no such tantaliser. When, at any time inability is spoken of, it is inability all of a moral nature, and resolves itself into unwillingness.—Wardlaw.
Can it be that none of God’s counsel should be followed? Can it be that all his reproof should be despised? Yes; not to have a care of following all God’s counsel is to follow none: not to have a mind that regardeth all His reproof, is to despise all. . . . As the wings of the living creature which Ezekiel saw, were joined together, so is the joining together of God’s commandments, our desire of yielding a general obedience unto them, that must carry us up to heaven.—Jermin.
Verse 31. Their miserable end is the fruit—not of God’s way, but of their own. His plan, His device for them, was a plan of salvation.—Wardlaw.
If a man plants and dresses a poisonous tree in his garden, it is just that he should be obliged to eat the fruit. If our vine is the vine of Sodom, and our clusters the clusters of bitterness, we must leave our complaint on ourselves, if we drink till we are drunken, and fall, and rise no more.—Lawson.
The sinner’s sin is its own punishment (Isa. iii. 9–11.) Hell is not an arbitrary punishment, like human penalties, which have no necessary connection with the crimes, but a natural development of the seed and the bud (Isa. lix. 4; Gal. vi. 8). “Filled with their own devices”—i.e. filled even to loathing, which is the final result of the pleasures of sin. “They did eat, and were well filled; for He gave them their own desire; . . . but while the meat was yet in their mouths, the wrath of God came upon them” (Psa. lxxviii. 29). Men’s own desires fulfilled are made their sorest plagues (Psa. cvi. 11).—Fausset.
Bad will it be for them that shall eat of it; and yet due will it be to them to eat of it, because it is their own. . . . It is not said they shall gather the fruit of their ways, which were some expression of their misery, but they shall eat it, it shall enter into them, and be made, as it were, their very substance. This it is that filleth up the misery, filling is of their own devices, that it is, that maketh it be pressed down.—Jermin.
Verse 32. When Jeshurun waxed fat, he kicked (Deut. xxxii. 15). Thus the objection is met, that sinners often prosper now. Yes, replies wisdom; but that very prosperity proves their curse, and accelerates the judgment of God. It is they who are “settled on their lees that say in their heart, The Lord will not do good, neither will he do evil” (Zeph. i. 12).—Fausset.
Prosperity ever dangerous. 1. Because every foolish or vicious person is either ignorant or regardless of the proper ends and rules for which God designs the prosperity of those to whom He sends it. 2. Because prosperity, as the nature of man now stands, has a peculiar force and fitness to abate men’s virtues and heighten their corruptions. 3. Because it directly indisposes them to the proper means of amendment and recovery.—South.
Because they are fools, they turn God’s mercies to their own destruction; and because they prosper, they are confirmed in their folly.—Baxter.
When sinners are moved a little by wisdom and turn away, it is deadly; it is worse than if they had never listened. Prosperity or tranquillity (see [“Critical Notes”]). The mere doing nothing of impenitent men is carrying them downward.—Miller.