His children shall seek to please the poor, and his hands shall restore their goods.
Ver. 10. His children shall seek to please the poor] Tenuiores sunt ipsis tenuibus, saith Junius; shall be poorer than the poorest, and full glad to comply with them, and humour them, to beg with them, if not to beg of them. A just hand of God upon oppressors, whose work it hath been to make many poor; and now their posterity are brought to extreme poverty. Such shame consult these men to their houses, besides their sin against their own souls, Habakkuk 2:10. See Trapp on " Hab 2:10 " Some read it thus, The poor shall oppress his children; and how grievous that is, see Proverbs 28:3. See Trapp on " Pro 28:3 " A heathen historian observed that Dionysius, after his death, paid dear for his sacrilege, in the disasters that befell his children (Val. lib. 1, cap. 2).
And his hands shall restore their goods] Or, For his hands shall, &c. They should indeed restore their ill gotten goods, though to the impoverishing of their posterity, though they left their children no more but a wallet, to beg from door to door. But such are rare birds; most men will rather venture it than be drawn, Zacchaeus like, to make restitution. God must give them a vomit, as Job 20:20, or they will lay up nothing; part they will not with those murdering morsels, that riches of iniquity Luk 16:9 they have devoured, but what they can nor will nor choose, as being compelled to do it either by law or force, either by justice or violence. The right owners do not always receive what was by wrench or wile gotten from them; but these oppressors or their imps are many times rooked or robbed by others as bad as themselves (as the usurious Jews are in this day by the injurious Papists, who use them as spunges, which they may squeeze at their pleasure); God so disposing and ordering the disorders of men to his own glory.