CRITICAL NOTES.—
Proverbs 25:16. Filled. Rather “Surfeited.”
MAIN HOMILETICS OF Proverbs 25:16
USE AND ABUSE
I. The good gifts of God are to be enjoyed by men. “Every creature of God is good,” says the apostle, “and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4). God has filled the world with gifts to minister pleasure to the bodily senses as well as to the spiritual aspirations, and the first are given to us “richly to enjoy” (1 Timothy 6:17), as much as the last. Our Great and Beneficent Father, has not omitted to provide even for the gratification of our palate, but has furnished us with an almost infinite variety of natural productions, pleasant to the taste. His kindness in this matter is not to be overlooked, and these good gifts are not to be treated as though they were beneath our grateful appreciation. The asceticism which refuses to partake of them is not in accordance with the spirit of either the Old or New Testament.
II. There is no material and temporal good which cannot be misused by man. Honey may here stand for any or all the lower sweets of life—for every blessing which is not of a purely spiritual nature—and the greatest temptation to misuse of these lies in the direction of over-use—of indulging in them to the neglect of other and more precious good, and so to the injury of the higher nature. Honey is a delicious article of food, and wholesome and nutritious to a certain extent, but if a man attempted to live upon it to the exclusion of plainer fare he would find that his bodily health would suffer. In like manner is there danger to spiritual health from an undue indulgence of even the gifts of God, which minister only or chiefly to the senses, or which belong to this life alone.
III. The misuse of what is good in itself puts an end to all real enjoyment of it. If a man eats immoderately of honey it soon ceases to be pleasant to his taste, and the very sweetness that at first attracted him produces loathing. The same nausea of spirit follows immoderate indulgence in any merely temporal or material good—that which, used lawfully, would always afford true and real enjoyment, cloys upon the man who abuses it by over-use.
OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS
The figure varies. In a former sentence we are commanded to eat honey because it is good (chap. Proverbs 24:13), and that was very carefully explained. It meant that piety was itself good, and we were to taste and see (Psalms 34:8) that before we could be Christians. But now the figure varies. There is a sweetness of eternal hope, even when we have not got down to the sweetness of a saving piety. We are to put on the helmet of hope. So the Apostle tells us (1 Thessalonians 5:8). But Solomon cautions us that we are to put on no more than is “sufficient.” We are eating more than enough honey when we have no right to eat any, and so we may be eating too much when we ought to be getting more. There is such a thing as having more hope than evidence. And if a man has too much confident hope of heaven for the amount he has of piety, there certainly is a case of eating more than is sufficient.… Blessed is the man that has “found honey.” Let him eat so much as is sufficient for him in this dismal pilgrimage. But, when he is once refreshed like Jonathan, let him sound for an advance.—Miller.