For they know not to do right, saith the LORD, who store up violence and robbery in their palaces.
Ver. 10. For they know not to do right] They have done wrong so long together, against knowledge and conscience, that now they are given up to a reprobate sense, to an injudicious mind, εις νουν αδοκιμον, Romans 1:28, having sinned away the light they had, and lost that little knowledge they had learned out of the law of Moses concerning good works: this they had wickedly blotted out of their own minds; as also those common notions of good and evil, that glimmering of Divine light left in the natural man; this in a defiled conscience is wholly extinct. "Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge?" No, not they, as appears by what follows: "they eat up my people as they eat bread," Psalms 14:4. These cannibals, like pickerels in a pond, or sharks in the sea, devour the poorer as they the lesser fishes. And though they cannot but know this to be evil, condemned by the light of nature, and much more of Scripture, yet they do it, and will do it; their eyes being put out with the dust of covetousness, and their hearts so exercised therewith, 2 Peter 2:14, that they can say, as that wretched fellow did, We are masters of our consciences, we can do what we will for all them; and as Balaam resolved at length, to curse, whatever came of it.
Who store up violence and robbery in their palaces] Till the screech owls of woe cry aloud from the walls, and the beams out of the timber make answer, Habakkuk 2:11,12; till their cursed hoards of evil gotten goods witness against them, and eat their flesh as it were fire, James 5:3; till very Philistines and Egyptians cry shame on them, and say, as the Indians did of the cruel Spaniards, that they carried themselves neither like Christians nor men, but like devils; that it had been better the Indies had been given to the devils of hell than to them; and that if the Spaniards went to heaven when they were dead, they would never come there. Let no man think to thrive, violentia et vastitate, by rapine and robbery; to treasure up sin is to treasure up wrath, Romans 2:5, which, as a fire, will devour their palaces, and it shall not be quenched, Jeremiah 17:27 .