For the idols have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie, and have told false dreams; they comfort in vain: therefore they went their way as a flock, they were troubled, because [there was] no shepherd.
Ver. 2. For the idols have spoken vanity] q.d. Therefore ask good things at God's hands, as rain, food, and all necessary provision; because idols and soothsayers cannot help you to these things. If they promise you (as they will), believe them not; for they lie as fast as once Rabshakeh did for his master, when he promised the people a land of corn and wine, a land of bread and vineyards, Isaiah 36:17. And they will finally serve you as Absalom's mule served her master; whom she left at his greatest need, to hang between heaven and earth, as rejected of both. Lo such are all creaturecomforts, golden delusions, lying vanities, apples of Sodom, nec vera, nec vestra, neither true nor yours, the fashion of this world, saith Paul, 1 Corinthians 7:31; the fantasies of men's brain, saith Luke, Acts 25:23, the semblances and empty shows of good, without any reality or solid consistency, saith Solomon often. They are, saith our prophet here, a wicked deceit and fraudulence. An arrant lie, a false dream, a vain or empty comfort, that utterly deceiveth a man's confidence, and maketh him, in the fulness of his conceited sufficience, to be in straits. These here for instance; viz. the Jews that had been carried captives as a flock without a guide, sheep without a shepherd, and yet had not (till after some while at least) renounced their idols, Jeremiah 44:22 Ezekiel 8:10
Therefore they went their way as a flock] Driven by the butcher to the slaughter house. Idolatry is a land desolating sin; as besides these Jews (the more ingenuous of them at this day confess that in all their punishments there is still an ounce of the golden calf made by them in the wilderness) the Greek Church was undone by it. The worshipping of images they defended with tooth and nail (as they say), and established it in the second Council of Nice; not long before the Turk took Nice, and made it the seat of his empire, in opposition to Constantinople, which at length he took also; and brought in Mahometanism, that foul impiety, which quickly overspread the whole East and South, like as Popish idolatry did the West and North. But this iniquity will be their ruin. Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen (επεσεν, επεσεν). She hath fallen culpably, she shall therefore fall penally. And why? She is become the habitation of devils, that is, of idols. See Revelation 9:20 1 Corinthians 10:20 .