I. Groundless excuses can be of no avail as made to God, because, in the first place, He is a Being who considers everything. If God considers, if He be a God who searcheth the spirits, a God by whom actions are weighed, then I instantly learn, if there be vanity in an excuse, it must be detected, and if there be falsehood, it must be exposed. There is an overwhelming weight of condemnation in the question, "Doth not He that pondereth the heart consider it?"
II. But Solomon is not content with pointing out to the self-apologist that God considers everything: he goes on to remind him that God knows everything. It is the necessary property of the Divine Being that He should be acquainted with whatsoever was, or is, or is to come, so that to suppose Him ignorant or forgetful of the minutest thing is to charge Him with imperfection; and this, in other words, is to deny the Divinity. Throughout the circuits of immensity there cannot be the motion of a will nor the throb of an affection which escapes God's observation. His is that omniscience to which there has never been an addition, from which there has never been an abstraction; His is that prodigious mind to which prophecy is history, and to which history is observation, which embraces everything at once, so that it can be said to foreknow or to recollect only in accommodation to our limited faculties, foreknowledge having to do with our future, recollection with our past, but both equally with the interminable present of Him who can describe Himself as "I am that I am." The question, "Doth not He that pondereth the heart consider it?" is followed with the yet more startling and the yet more overcoming one, "He that keepeth thy soul, doth not He know it?"
III. "Shall He not render to every man according to his works?" Man may be unmoved by our declaration of God as a God who considers and knows; but we have exhausted our resources and are forced to regard him as morally invulnerable if we find him unmoved by the startling interrogation, "and shall not He render to every man according to his works?"
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2658.
References: Proverbs 24:11; Proverbs 24:12. W. Arnot, Laws from Heaven,2nd series, p. 273.Proverbs 24:13-22. R. Wardlaw, Lectures on Proverbs,vol. iii., p. 115.Proverbs 24:16. F. Tholuck, Hours of Devotion,p. 281.Proverbs 24:17. J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,8th series, pp. 266, 272, 279, 286. Proverbs 24:21. W. Arnot, Laws from Heaven,2nd series, p. 282.Proverbs 24:23-34. R. Wardlaw, Lectures on Proverbs,vol. iii., p. 129.