Fools have sometimes received correction and made a good use of it, but they were fools no longer, for the rod and reproof gave them wisdom; but it is a sign that folly is deeply ingrained when an hundred rods leave men as great fools as they found them.—Lawson.
A look from Christ brake Peter’s heart and dissolved it into tears. . . . But Jeroboam’s withered hand works nothing upon his heart.—Trapp.
The folly of simplicity is a softness of nature; the folly of sin is a hardness of heart; the folly of conceit is a stiffness of will, and little doth a rod enter into any of them. For though the first be soft, it is hard to work upon it, although it be with hard and many strokes of the stick. The woolliness of a sheep’s skin keeps back the force of the beating rod. . . . The rock in the wilderness first denied water to the Israelites, as, withstanding nature’s force and the first stroke of Moses, it resisted as opposing the infidelity of sin, to the second stroke it yielded as submitting to God’s power. But it is not the power of God’s rod that enters into a fool.—Jermin.
A needle pierces deeper into flesh than a sword into stone.—Bridges.
David is softened with Thou art the man; but Pharaoh remains hardened under all the plagues of Egypt.—Henry.
Even amongst the children of God themselves there are great diversities of temper; some requiring harder dealing than others to bring them down, and to reclaim them from their follies, as is the case often with children in the same family. A word, or a look, will go with melting and heart-breaking power to the very soul of one, while the severest correction, and oft-repeated, will fail to bring down the stubborn and fractious spirit of another. O for more of the spirit of Job and less of the spirit of Jonah!—for more of that truly child-like disposition which gives way before every Divine admonition, which melts into penitence under the eye of an offended God, and looks up with a child’s submission at the slightest touch of His corrective rod!—Wardlaw.
main homiletics of the paragraph.—Verses 11–13.
Phases of Evil.
I. The main characteristic of a sinner is that he is a rebel against the moral order of the universe. “He seeketh only rebellion.” The planets in their courses describe their orbits in obedience to the law of gravitation, and because they do so the order of the heavens is preserved. God is the sun of the moral universe, and before sin entered it all His creatures kept the path of obedience to His will, held to their allegiance by the love and confidence which they bore to their Lawgiver. But sin snapped the bond, and the word sinner stands for one who has broken away from the moral law of God; every sinner seeketh rebellion.
II. A sinner is a restless being. He seeks rebellion. These words seem to depict the restless character of the ungodly man. When a soul has lost its centre of gravity—when the will of God is not the polestar of life—it drifts about in obedience first to one lawless passion and then another, following in the footsteps of the great leader of rebellion, the first sinner, who, by his own confession, is continually going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it (Job i. 7).