Verse 3. Such was the foolishness of Adam! First he perverted his way; then he charged upon God its bitter fruit. “God, making him upright,” made him happy. Had he been ruled by his will, he would have continued so. But, “seeking out his own inventions” (Eccles. vii. 29), he made himself miserable. As the author of his own misery, it was reasonable that he should fret against himself, but such was his pride and baseness, that his heart fretted against the Lord, as if He, and not himself, was responsible (Gen. iii. 6–12). This his first-born, when his own sin had brought “punishment” on him, fretted, as if “it were greater than he could bear” (Ib. iv. 8–13). This has been the foolishness of Adam’s children ever since God has linked together moral and penal evil, sin and sorrow. The fool rushes into the sin and most unreasonably frets for the sorrow; as if he could “gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles” (Matt. vii. 16). He charges his crosses, not on his own perverseness, but on the injustice of God (Ezek. xviii. 25). But God is clear from all the blame (James i. 13, 14): He had shown the better; man chooses the worse. He had warned by His Word and by conscience. Man, deaf to the warning, plunges into the misery; and, while “eating the fruit of his own ways,” his heart frets against the Lord. “It is hard to have passions, and to be punished for indulging them. I could not help it. Why did He not give me grace to avoid it?” (See Jer. vii. 10). Such is the pride and blasphemy of an unhumbled spirit. The malefactor blames the judge for his righteous sentence (Isa. viii. 21, 22; Rev. xvi. 9–11, 21).—Bridges.
This was the case in Greece as well as in Judea; for Homer observed that “men lay those evils upon the gods, which they have incurred through their own folly and perverseness.”. . . This is often the case with regard—1. To men’s health. By intemperance . . . indolence . . . or too close application to business . . . or unruly passions, they injure their frame . . . and then censure the providence of God. 2. To their circumstances in life. . . . Men complain that providence frowns on them . . . when they have chosen a wrong profession, despising the advice of others . . . or when they have brought themselves into straits by their own negligence. 3. To their relations in life. They complain of being unequally yoked . . . when they chose by the sight of the eye, or the vanity and lusts of the heart. . . . They complain that their children are undutiful . . . when they have neglected their government. 4. To their religious concerns. They complain that they want inward peace when . . . they neglect the appointed means of grace . . . and that God giveth Satan power over them when by neglect they tempt the tempter.—Job Orton.
For Homiletics on the main thought of verse 4 see on chapter [xiv. 20], page 370.
suggestive comment.
They are friends to the wealth, not the wealthy. They regard not qualis sis, but quantus—not how thou art, but how great. . . . These flatter a rich man, as we feed beasts, till he be fat, and then fall on him. . . . These friends love not thy soul’s good, but thy body’s goods.—T. Adams.
main homiletics of verses 5 and 9.
The End of a False Tongue.
We have before had proverbs dealing with the evil of lying (see Homiletics on chap. [xii. 17–19], [xiv. 25], pages 274 and 379), and the constant recurrence of the subject, together with the repetition of the verses here, shows us the vast importance which the inspired writer attached to truth, and the many and great evils which flow from a disregard of it. Again and again he holds up the liar to view as a monster of iniquity, and seeks, both by the threatening of the retribution which awaits it and by the misery which it causes to others, to deter men from yielding to this sin. If we consider what mischief a false man can do, we shall not be surprised at the prominence which the wise man gives to this subject (see [ch. xii. 17–19, 22], page 274). But the most dangerous element of the lying tongue is the fact that in nine cases out of ten no human tribunal can bring to justice, and perhaps few human tribunals would care to do so. “The world,” says Dr. David Thomas (“Practical Philosopher,” page 414) “abounds in falsehood. Lies swarm in every department of life. They are in the market, on the hustings, in courts of justice, in the senate house, in the sanctuaries of religion; and they crowd the very pages of modern literature. They infest the social atmosphere. Men on all hands live in fiction and by fiction.” If we allow that this picture is a true one, and alas! we cannot deny that it is, we can see that the evil is one with which no human hand can deal. A tiger may come down from a neighbouring forest and enter the city, and spread terror and dismay all round, and even kill a dozen of its inhabitants. But he is a tangible creature, he can be faced and attacked with weapons which can pierce his skin and make him powerless to do any further mischief. But into the same city may enter upon the summer wind impalpable particles of matter charged with a poison which may slay not ten men but ten thousand, and no weapon that has ever been forged by human hand can slay these destroyers. The plague will keep numbering its victims until the poison has spent itself or until a pure and healthful breeze scatters the deadly atmosphere. So with lying in comparison with more palpable and gross crimes. The thief can be caught and imprisoned, the murderer is generally traced and hanged; but the sin of lying so permeates the whole social atmosphere that nothing but the diffusion of heavenly truth can rid the world of the poison. But the liar, however he escapes some forms of retribution, “shall not go unpunished.” 1. He shall be self-punished. His own conscience will be his judge and executioner in one. The fear of discovery here will generally haunt him as a shadow does the substance, but if this ghost is laid there will be times, however hardened he may be, when that witness for truth that is within him will scourge him in the present and fill him with forebodings concerning the future. 2. Men will punish him by not believing him when he speaks the truth. In proportion as a man’s veracity is doubted will be the suspicion with which his word is received. He may tell the truth on two occasions out of three, but if his falsehood on the third is found out, his truth-telling on the first and second will not avail him much. It is a terrible thing to live always in an atmosphere of distrust, but it is one of the punishments of a liar. 3. God will punish him after he leaves this world. Concerning him and some other great transgressors it is written that—“they shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death” (Rev. xxi. 8). Whatever may be the precise meaning of these terrible words, we know that they were spoken by one whose every word was “true and faithful” (see verse 5 of the same chapter), and they are but an intensified form of the last clause of our texts—“He that speaketh lies shall perish.”
outlines and suggestive comments.
Falsehood is like fire in stubble. It likewise turns all around it into its own substance for a moment—one crackling, blazing moment, and then dies. And all its contents are scattered in the wind without place or evidence of their existence, as viewless as the wind which scatters them.—Coleridge.