Verse 7. Uniformity and ubiquity of obedience are sure signs of sincerity; but as an unequal pulse argues a distempered body, so doth uneven walking a diseased soul. A wise man’s life is all of one colour, like itself, and godliness runs through it, as the woof runs through the warp. But if all the parts of the line of thy life be not straight before God, it is a crooked life. If thy tongue speak by the talent, but thine hands scarce work by the ounce, thou shalt pass for a Pharisee (Matt. xxiii. 3). They spake like angels, lived like devils; had heaven commonly at their tongue ends, but the earth continually at their finger ends.—Trapp.
Verse 9. When a drunkard carries and brandishes in his hand a sweet briar, he scratches more with it than he allows the roses to be smelled; so a fool with the Scriptures or a judicial maxim oft causes more harm than profit.—Luther.
Proverbs have sometimes been hurtful even in the mouths of wise men, through the imperfection of their wisdom. Job’s friends dealt much in parables, which they had learned by tradition from their wise ancestors, but they misapplied them in the case of Job; and although they meant to plead the cause of God, yet they displeased Him so much by their uncharitable speeches against Job, which they drew by unjust inference from undoubted truths, that He told them they had not spoken the thing that was right concerning Him as His servant Job had done. If Job had not been a strong believer, their management of truth must have sunk him into despondency.—Lawson.
Verse 11. The emblem is a loathsome and sickening one. It is meant to be so. It would not have been appropriate, had it been anything else. There are two ideas conveyed by the comparison. The disposition or tendency, on the part of the fool or vicious man, to return to his folly; and the loathsomeness—the vileness—of the thing itself, when it does take place. There are persons of great pretensions to refinement, who affect great disgust at the comparison. They wonder how anybody of ordinary delicacy can utter it. They would think their lips polluted by the very words. It were well for such persons to remember, that there is no comparison so odious as the thing itself which is represented by it. It were well if such persons would transfer their disgust and loathing at the figure to that which the figure represents:—if they would cherish a proper loathing of sin. That is what God holds in abhorrence:—that is what should be abhorred by us. Persons may affect to sicken at the comparison here used, and yet be themselves exemplifying the very conduct it so aptly represents. Folly and sin are incomparably more polluting and debasing to the nature of man, than the vilest and most disgusting practices in the inferior animals.—Wardlaw.
And is this the picture of man—“made a little lower than the angels” (Ps. viii. 5)—yea—“made in the likeness of God?” (Gen. i. 26). Who that saw Adam in his universal dominion, sitting as the monarch of creation; summoning all before him; giving to each his name, and receiving in turn his homage (Ib. ii. 20)—who would have conceived of his children sunk into such brutish degradation? The tempter’s promise was—“Ye shall be as gods” (Ib. iii. 5). The result of this promise was—“Ye shall be as beasts.” . . . Thus greedily did Pharaoh return from his momentary conviction; Ahab from his feigned repentance; Herod from his partial amendment; the drunkard from his brutish insensibility—all to take a more determinate course of sin; to take their final plunge into ruin.—Bridges.
According to the usual method of the Scriptures, a known thing is here employed to teach an unknown. The taste which inheres in nature is used as an instrument to implant the corresponding spiritual sensibility. The revulsion of the senses from a loathsome object is used as a lever power to press into the soul a dislike of sin. . . . The lines are strongly drawn, that the lesson may be clear and cutting. There must be a rude hearty blow, for there is a hard searing to be penetrated. Those who go back to suck at sins, which they once repudiated, may see in this terse proverb a picture of their pollution; only the Omniscient perfectly knows and loathes the vile original.—Arnot.
main homiletics of the paragraph.—Verses 12–16.
Self-Conceit and Indolence.
I. The ruinous effects of self-satisfaction. In the preceding verses Solomon has drawn a picture of the moral fool—of the man who seems to have no moral sensibility, and who is a slave to evil habits and degrading vices. At first sight it would seem that no one could be in a more hopeless condition, but a little consideration will convince us that the wise man is right when he declares that it is easier to convince a fool of his folly, than a self-conceited man of his ignorance and weakness. For there are many men who know that they are not what they ought to be, although they have not the moral courage to quit their sinful courses; and sometimes the very depth of degradation in which such men find themselves, and the strong contrast which exists in their outward life between themselves and more respectable citizens, startle them into a vigorous and successful effort to break their chains. But a man who is wise in his own eyes is generally outwardly decorous in his behaviour—is what has been called a respectable sinner—and it is this very outward propriety which lulls his conscience to sleep. Like the Pharisee in the temple, he thanks God that he is not as other men (Luke xviii. 11) who are outwardly immoral, and forgets that if he is not sensual he may be devilish (Jas. iii. 15), may be under the dominion on the sin that made the first and greatest sinner in the universe. It was men of this class, and not the openly profane and sensual, whom Christ declared to be in danger of committing the sin which should not be forgiven (Matt. xii. 31), and on another occasion he shows that their hopeless condition arose from the fact that they did not realise that they were in any spiritual need. “If ye were blind we should have no sin, but now ye say, we see; therefore your sin remaineth” (John ix. 41). This moral blindness is so hopeless because it is self-originated and self-sustained—because the subjects of it love darkness rather than light, and even call their darkness light, and their evil, good.
II. Self-conceit is both the child and the parent of indolence. If a man feels certain that he is far in advance of his competitors for any prize or position, his efforts to gain it will be very feeble and intermittent. And on the other hand, if he is indolent he will be content with very low intellectual and spiritual attainments, and inclined to place a very high estimate upon the very little mental or moral wealth that he possesses. Being unwilling to labour after more, he makes the most of what he has, and so his sloth keeps him ignorant, and his ignorance confirms him in his slothful habits.