This wisdom, which they pretended so much to, who so criticized on other men's actions, and inveighed against them, and which was accompanied with strife and envy. Descendeth not from above; i.e. from God the author of wisdom, from whom, though every good and perfect gift descends, James 1:17, and even knowledge and skill in natural things, Isaiah 28:26,29; yet this wisdom, being sinful, is not from him, because it is earthly, of the earth, of no higher original than from the first Adam, who was of the earth, and earthly, 1 Corinthians 15:47; and likewise because it is employed, and fixeth men's minds, on earthly things. Sensual; this may be understood either:
1. According to the reading in the text, the word here used being so rendered, Judges 1:19, agreeable to 1 Thessalonians 5:23, where soul, from whence the word is derived, is opposed to spirit, and taken for the sensitive powers, which men have in common with brutes, in distinction from the intellectual, which go under the name of spirit, and are proper to men: mere reason, without the Divine grace, being apt to degenerate into brutishness, and easily brought to serve the ends of sensual appetite, this wisdom may well be called sensual. Or:
2. According to Judges 1:19, natural, in opposition to spiritual. The natural man \1 Corinthians 2:14, where the same word, in the Greek, is used as here\ is one that lives under the conduct of his own carnal reason, not enlightened, nor regenerated by the Spirit of God; a man of soul, (as the word imports), or that hath no better, no higher principle in him than his own soul. Accordingly, this wisdom here mentioned, is such as proceeds merely from a man's own soul, in its natural state, destitute of the light and grace of God's Spirit, and therefore may be termed natural. Devilish; because it is of the devil, or such as is in him, and makes men like him, who is a proud spirit, and envious, a liar and slanderer, 1 Thessalonians 8:44, and who observes men's faults, not to amend them, but accuse them for them.