How oft is the candle of the wicked put out! and [how oft] cometh their destruction upon them! [God] distributeth sorrows in his anger.
Ver. 17. How oft is the candle of the wicked put out!] q.d. I confess that which you say concerning God's judgments upon the wicked to be sometimes true in this world (Diod.); yet it is not so continually nor ordinarily, but very oft their lamp is extinguished, their comforts damped, and hopes of better dashed; they are all on the sudden left in the dark, cast into straits inextricable, plunged into sorrows inexplicable, and yet all these are but the "beginning of sorrows." For
How oft cometh destruction upon them!] Utmost destruction, irresistible ruin, that comes on in manner of a black cloud or fierce storm, undoing calamity, overflowing scourge, a tempest from which there is no covert. The Vulgate renders it thus, How oft is there an inundation upon the wicked!
God distributeth sorrows in his anger] Gives them their lot of greatest sorrows, as by a line, Luke 12:46, such sorrows as a travailing woman suffereth; or such as were those of Monsieur Mylius, an old minister at Heidelberg, when taken by the Spaniard; first they abused his daughter before his eyes, and then they tied a small cord about his head, which with truncheons they wreathed about till they squeezed out his brains (Spec. bell. fac.). The text implieth that though in this world many sorrows are to the wicked, yet these do not supersede their sufferings in hell, Psalms 32:10; but now they receive only a small portion or part of their punishments, there they shall be paid to the full; here they sip of the top only of God's cup, there they shall suck up the dregs thereof, though they have eternity to the bottom. This shall be the portion of their cup, and but a portion, Psalms 11:6 .