MAIN HOMILETICS OF Proverbs 28:26, AND LAST CLAUSE OF Proverbs 28:25
SELF-CONFIDENCE
I. He that trusts in his own heart is a fool, because he refuses to profit by the experience of others. If a man who has made a perilous voyage declares at the end of it that he has found his compass utterly untrustworthy, we should count him a madman who would set out upon a similar expedition with the same faulty guide; and if he went down in mid-ocean to rise no more, we should certainly say that it was his own fault. To trust to a guide which another man had proved to be unworthy of confidence when so much was at stake, would be universally condemned as obstinate foolhardiness. Yet this is what men do in the voyage of life. The testimony of most men who, rejecting the guidance of a higher wisdom, have shaped their lives according to their own ideas and inclinations, has been at the end that they have trusted a guide that had misled them. Solomon himself steered a good deal of his life by this deceiving compasss, and at the end confessed that he had acted foolishly in so doing (Ecclesiastes 1:2). It may be that the words of our text were the expression of his own bitter experience on the subject, and that he is here counselling others to avoid the error into which he had fallen.
II. He is a wise man who seeks guidance from God because he trusts in One who has proved Himself worthy of confidence. He who has declared that the human heart “is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9) has offered Himself as the object of man’s trust and as His infallible guide. Millions of the human family have assented to the truth of the Divine statement, and have testified to the blessedness of submission to Divine guidance, and have been manifestly delivered by their submission from the bondage of evil, and elevated into a region of moral purity and freedom to which other men are strangers. They are living proofs that He who exhorts men to trust in Him is not a deceiver, but can justify the demands He makes upon our confidence and submission. Human experience has set its seal to the inspired word:—“Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit” (Jeremiah 17:8). Surely, then, he is a wise man who makes the trial for himself.
OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS
The heart, indeed, has instrumentality to save us. We must trust everything to that. But it is the heart dwelt in by Christ. He that takes his heart and confides it to the Son of Man, receives for it an altered life, and will be able to trust that heart thus trusted to Christ as the instrument in the battle of deliverance.—Miller.
Though the mariner sees not the pole-star, yet the needle of his compass, which points to it, tells him which way he sails. Thus the heart that is touched with the loadstone of Divine love, trembling with godly fear, and yet still looking towards God with fixed believing, interprets the fear by the love in the fear, and tells the soul that its course is heavenward towards the haven of eternal rest.—Leighton.
Whoever trusts another for his guide must do it upon account of two qualifications to be found in him:—
1. That he is able to direct and lead him.
2. That he also faithfully will give the best directions.… There are two things which may make a trust foolish:—
1. The value of the thing which we commit to a trust.
2. The undue qualifications of the person to whose trust we commit it. In both respects the confidence reposed by men in their own hearts is exceeding foolish.
1. The honour of God is entrusted. So far as the manifestation of God’s honour depends upon the homage of His obedient creatures, so far is it at the mercy of our actions, which are at the command of the heart, as the motion of the wheels follows the disposition of the spring. God is never disobeyed but He is also dishonoured. II. Man trusts his heart with his happiness in this world, and this is two fold—spiritual and temporal. III. He entrusts his heart with the eternal concernment of his soul hereafter.… The heart of man will also be found to have eminently these two ill qualities utterly unfitted for such a trust. I. It is weak, and so cannot make good a trust. Its weakness is twofold.
1. In point of apprehension it cannot perceive and understand certainly what is good.
2. In point of election, it cannot choose and embrace it. II. The heart is deceitful, and so will not make good its trust.… The delusions of the heart may be reduced to three sorts.
1. Such as relate to the commission of sin.
2. Such as relate to the performance of duty.
3. Such as relate to a man’s conversion, or change of his spiritual estate.… The heart if it does not find sins small, has this notable faculty, that it can make them so … and in duty is willing to take up with the outside and superficies of things, and … it will persuade him that he is converted from a state of sin, when perhaps he is only converted from one sin to another; and that he has changed his heart when he has only changed his vice.—South.
On the subject of Proverbs 28:27, see on chap. Proverbs 11:24-26, page 234, and chap. Proverbs 14:31, page 389. The subject of Proverbs 28:28 has been treated in chap. Proverbs 11:10, page 206.