The prosperity of fools shall destroy them.
Prosperity dangerous to virtue
By “fools” are here represented all wicked and vicious persons. The misery of such persons is, that when God gives them what they most love, they perish in the embraces of it. The reasons for this are three.
I. Because every foolish or vicious person is either ignorant or regardless of the proper ends and uses for which God designs the prosperity of those to whom He sends it. Which ends are--
1. To try and discover what is in a man.
2. To encourage men in a constant, humble expression of their gratitude to the bounty of their Maker, who deals forth such rich and plentiful provisions to His undeserving creatures.
3. To make them helpful in society. No man holds the abundance of wealth as a proprietor.
II. Because prosperity (as the nature of man now stands) has a peculiar force and fitness to abate men’s virtues and to heighten their corruptions. For its abating their virtues. Virtue is such a plant as grows upon no ground save that which is tilled and cultivated with the severest labour. But what a stranger is toil and labour to a great fortune!
2. For heightening and inflaming men’s corruptions. Nothing more effectually betrays the heart into a love of sin and a loathing of holiness than an ill-managed prosperity. The vices which particularly receive improvement by prosperity are--
1. Pride.
2. Luxury and uncleanness.
3. Profaneness and neglect of God in the duties of religion. Those who lie soft and warm in a rich estate seldom come to heat themselves at the altar.
III. Because prosperity directly indisposes men to the proper means of their amendment and recovery.
1. It renders them utterly averse to receiving counsel and admonition.
2. It unfits for the sharp trials of adversity which God uses to correct and reduce the soul.
(1) He either faints and desponds and parts with his hope together with his possessions, or
(2) he will murmur and blaspheme the God that afflicts him. The only way for a man not to find prosperity destructive is for him not to be a fool.
This he may avoid by a pious observance of these following rules:
1. Let him consider on what weak hinges his prosperity and felicity hang.
2. Let him consider how little he is bettered by prosperity as to those perfections which are chiefly valuable.
3. Let a man correct the gaieties and wanderings of his spirit by the severe duties of mortification. Since the fool in his best--that is, in his most prosperous condition--stands tottering upon the very brink of destruction, we should solicit God, not for temporal enjoyment, but for a heart that may fit us for it, if it be God’s will that prosperity be our lot. (R. South, D.D.)
The danger of prosperity
The title of “fool” is the usual character of the sinner in the language of Wisdom, in opposition to prudence. Prosperity comprehends all things desired by worldly men--riches, honours, pleasures, health, strength, peace, plenty, all that is grateful to the carnal mind and appetites. Prosperity abused is fatal and destructive to foolish sinners.
I. Prosperity is destructive to the wicked. There is no pestilence and contagion in the nature of things that are pleasing to our faculties. They are dangerous, not as made by God, but as managed by Satan. The primary design of God, in His most free and rich benefits, is to endear Himself to us and bind us to His service. When the wicked abuse God’s blessings, defeat His kindness, and frustrate the excellent ends of it, He most righteously and severely continues their prosperity, that foments their lusts and renders them more wilful and incorrigible and the more guilty of their own damnation. Prosperity is a fatal ambush for their surprisal and ruin. Prosperity abused is destructive to sinners, both meritoriously, as it induces a deadly guilt and makes them obnoxious to the revenging wrath of God, and effectively, as it is opposite to the felicity and perfection of man.
1. Prosperity is the continual incentive of the vicious affections.
2. Prosperity occasionally incenses an irascible appetite.
3. Prosperity inclines sinners to an impious neglect of God.
4. Prosperity exposes dangerously to the tempting power of Satan.
5. Prosperity is destructive to many, in that it affords them advantages to corrupt others, and reciprocally exposes them to be corrupted by others.
6. Prosperity usually renders the means of grace ineffectual.
7. Prosperity renders men averse to suffering for the sake of Christ.
8. Prosperity makes men careless of evils that might happen.
9. Prosperity is the great temptation to delay repentance until the sinner’s case is desperate.
II. The folly of prosperous sinners. Folly is the cause of their abusing prosperity and the effect of their prosperity abused.
1. The perfection of man consists in the excellences of his spiritual and immortal part.
2. All the prosperity in the world cannot bring true satisfaction to him that enjoys it, for it is disproportionate to the spiritual and immortal nature of the soul. The folly of the sinner is a voluntarily chosen folly, a culpable and guilty folly; the most ignominious folly, the most woful folly.
III. The justice, certainty, and heaviness of the judgment coming on sinners who abuse their prosperity. Justice, for their destruction is the fruit of their own choice. Certainty, for it is unchangeably established by the Divine ordination that the pleasures of sin shall end in the misery of obstinate sinners. The heaviness will be according to the aggravation of their sin. Temporal prosperity is, therefore, no special sign of God’s favour. (William Bates, D.D.)
The fool’s prosperity
I. These words describe the ungodly.
1. By their present way of sin.
2. By their future state of misery.
II. They describe the sin of the ungodly.
1. By the occasion.
2. By the act.
3. By the habit. Prosperity and ease is the occasion; turning away from God and rejecting His counsel is the act; and folly or simplicity is part of the habit.
III. They describe the Godly.
1. By their obedience. They hearken.
2. By their privilege or reward. They be quiet from fear of evil.
(1) It is so that “the prosperity of fools destroyeth them.”
(2) How folly and prosperity concur to their destruction. By the pleasing of their sensitive appetite and fancy, and so overcoming the power of reason. The more amiable the world appears, the more strongly it doth allure the soul to love it. Hereby it taketh the soul off from God. The very noise and bustle of earthly things divert their minds and hinder them from being serious. The sense of present ease and sweetness doth make them forget the change that is near. Pride lifts them up, so that God abhors them, and prosperity engages them in opposition to the word and ways and servants of the Lord.
(3) The uses to make of the text. Do not grudge at the prosperity of ungodly men. Do not desire riches or prosperity. Honour those that are great and godly, rich and religious. Let great men have a double interest in your prayers. (R. Baxter.)
Self-slayers
Suppose an iceberg possessed an intelligence and conscience; suppose it should say while dwelling in the polar region, “It is because of the sun that I am an iceberg,” what would you answer? You would say, “It is not because of the sun, but because of your attitude towards the sun.” Go down and place yourself beneath its melting rays, permit yourself to be enfolded in the arms of the Gulf Stream, and you will soon cease to be an iceberg, and become a part of the warm and gentle waters which enfold you. Or suppose we take this same truth in the realm of physical law. Many a Hindoo has stood for years with a napkin bound about his eyes that he might not see the sun, and when the cloth has been removed and he has sought to look upon that sun, he could not see. Behold, he had become blinded. Was it not he who had blinded himself? And yet, was it not also true that working through the natural law God had blinded him? There is a man sweeping toward Niagara, and I, standing on the shore, cry out, “Pull for the shore; the rapids are just below you, and you will go over the falls”; but he simply says to me, “God is too good to permit me to go over the falls”; and I cry again and he heeds not. But presently I see him grasp the oars. Alas, it is too late. Sweeping, whirling, plunging, his boat, like a cockle-shell, dashes over the cataract, and he is gone. Now we may say that the God who made water run down hill slew that man, but is the responsibility with Him? No. The man who knew that law and refused to recognise it slew himself. Well, men realise this in relation to their own physical organisation, because they realise that they have a physical constitution; but they do not realise that they have just as truly a moral constitution; that the laws of the one are as inevitable as the other; that in reference to the soul it is as true as of the body; “the soul that sinneth ‘against the law of its being’ shall die.” (G. T. Dowling, D.D.)
Whoso hearkeneth unto Me shall dwell safely.
Quiet from the fear of evil
The secret of a quiet life has been the great quest of man. The Confucian, the Buddhist, the Pythagorean have busied themselves with it, as well as Solomon. It was the motive of the mightiest movement of mediaeval Christendom. Simeon on his pillar, Bernard in his cell, Francis in his rags, were all occupied with it; and in these restless, stormy, anxious times it is the question of questions still.
I. The fear of evil is the element of it with which man has most directly to do. Man is a being “looking before and after.” Apprehension and memory furnish together pretty well the whole of our bitter experience in life. The fear of evil is not an animal, it is strictly a human experience; part of the endowment of our race.
II. It is precisely this fear of evil which, by God’s help, we are to conquer; the evil itself is wholly beyond our power. Calamity haunts the evil air of an evil world, and man catches the infection. He lives fearfully, and faces death fearfully, till he has learnt the Divine secret.
III. How is the power to be won?
1. By realising how purely independent of things is man’s peace and happiness.
2. By taking a true measure of the range of our being and its resources.
3. By perfect filial trust in God. We want a heart, an arm to rest on. The only perfect rest is in God. This sense of the Divine love, the clasp of the everlasting arms, is exquisite and blessed rest. (Baldwin Brown, B.A.)
The blessedness of hearkening to the voice of heavenly wisdom
To hearken means not only to hear, but to hear with attention, so as to follow the advice given (James 1:25); or, as the Saviour says (John 10:27). Such hear, not to forget, but to treasure up in their memories, that they may reduce to practice what they hear: such hear, not to cavil and find fault, but that they may profit by the instruction they receive. Now, this attention is assuredly the work of the Spirit on the heart, as we read of Lydia (Acts 16:14). And hence it behoves all, when hearing God’s Word, to lift up their hearts to Him, that it may be with profit to their souls. And what are the promises made to such hearers? Safe dwelling and quietness from fear of evil. The gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, operating on the heart, brings solid and lasting peace. The first of these promises is beautifully illustrated by our blessed Lord Himself at the close of His sermon on the mount (Matthew 7:24-27). The man who hears Christian instruction, and who satisfies himself with listening and approving, but goes no further, never casts away his sins, or really lays hold on Christ, may flatter himself that all is right with his soul, because he has feelings and convictions and desires of a spiritual nature; but such a man’s religion will break down entirely under the first flood of tribulation, and fail him completely when his need is the sorest, whereas the man who hears Christian instruction, and practises what he hears, upon such a man the floods of sickness, sorrow, poverty, disappointments, bereavements may beat, but his soul is unmoved, his faith does not give way, his comforts do not forsake him. Not only, however, is safety promised to him who hearkeneth to the voice of heavenly wisdom, but such an assurance of it as shall remove every distressing fear. Not only quietness from evil, but from the fear of it. Men in general suffer much more from fear of evils which they expect may come upon them than from those which they actually have to undergo; but God “keeps him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on Him.” A wicked man is terrified with imagined danger; a godly man is not afraid even when the danger is real; for the one has a witness for him in his own breast, whereas the other carries within a witness against himself; and this witness is a judge to condemn him, yea, an executioner to torment and vex him. To be freed from the fear of evil is, in truth, the perfection of a spiritual state; and a great part of the saint’s portion both on earth and in heaven lies in the deliverance and security from it. But it may be asked, To whom are these gracious promises made? They are made to all: high and low, rich and poor, old and young. The term used is as large as any can desire: “Whoso hearkeneth.” Let them only listen to Christ’s invitation in the gospel, and render obedience to His commands, and the promised blessings shall be vouchsafed to them. (T. Grantham.).