I. The Bible has nothing to say against a man's getting rich by just and honourable means. The need of money, and a moderate desire for it, form a most valuable incentive to industry. We would not be assured that the blessing of the Lord maketh rich, if wealth were necessarily an evil. To be altogether indifferent to material profit, so far from being a recommendation, betokens an unmanly and defective character. You ought to wish to increase your substance, if God will give you grace to use it well.
II. We learn from the text that riches unrighteously gotten are no blessing. It is our Maker's design that wealth should be begotten of industry: real hard work. There is no royal road to opulence; and, as Solomon said nearly three thousand years ago, "he that maketh haste to be rich shall not be innocent." To make money rapidly, even by honest means, is perilous; how much more so by questionable methods?
III. As the text teaches, the penalty on the acquisition of unrighteous gain generally follows even in this life. Perhaps this does not hold so markedly in our times as under the Old Dispensation, because immortality with its just retribution is now more clearly revealed. Still, no thoughtful person can fail to see how often a terrible Nemesis pursues the fraudulent man even in "the midst of his day," and how, at his end, even the world styles him a fool. Some unexpected time comes, some monetary crisis, some commercial disaster, and all his hoarded gains take wing and fly away; the unprincipled man is left, like the silly partridge, to sit disconsolate in an empty nest.
J. Thain Davidson, Forewarned Forearmed,p. 61.
References: Jeremiah 17:12-14. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxx., No. 1786. Jeremiah 17:14. G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 26; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxviii., No. 1658.