Proverbs 8:35-36, The Fateful Choice
April 5, Proverbs 8:35-36
Acts 13:44-52 “… Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (Jas. 1:15)
The Fateful Choice
O soul, outside Christ, read verse 36 on your knees and cry to Heaven for mercy. This chapter ends with the fact that there are two opposite Ways, One of Life, the Other of Death, the Way of Salvation or the Way of Destruction (Pr. 14:12). He that sins against me (chata, misses the Prize), wrongs (chamas, does violence to) his own soul. The one who finds Christ, finds Life (lit. my finder), but the one who sins against me (lit. my misser) in reality hates me and not only misses Life, but violates his own soul and in sinful blindness loves death. God puts the issues of Life and Death so clearly as to leave Christ-rejecters without excuse. Their punishment will be just. Therefore, dear reader, learn:
- Sin is Self-Deceiving. While promising rights it produces only wrongs, not only temporal but also eternal. Does not the Bible plainly declare, The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked (Jer. 17:9)? Again, John reminds us, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (1 Jn. 1:8). Do we not deceive ourselves if we think we can sin against the Lord without punishment? Sin is missing the mark, and we never sin without consequences (cf. chata Judges 20:16). Sin goes against, violates, the very nature of man as God created him. How then can it ever bring happiness or fulfillment? It surely grieves the Heart of God, and injures our own soul. Sin deceives all its victims! The longer we rebel the more heartless and hardened we become. Robbie Burns, who knew this from experience, said of sin, “It petrifies the feelings and hardens a’within.” The greatest sinner is the greatest fool.
- Sin is Self-Destroying. It destroys the Self. John Trapp put it with the typical vividness of the Puritan that he was. The sinner “plunders his own soul of happiness and cruelly cuts his own throat, while despising his Saviour.” The one who takes a path that doesn’t lead to Wisdom is guilty of moral and spiritual suicide. It is self-injury, “soul murder” (Bridges). O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself (Hos. 13:9). Though nothing could be plainer than this warning, yet we witness this principle working out on every hand in the world around us. Is this not the very proof of the deceivableness and damnation of sin (2 Th. 2:10, 12)? For moments of the pleasure of sin millions are gambling with their immortal souls! This verse says men who miss Christ, the Truth, must love that which will be their eternal death, and reject, in their blindness, that which would give them life. No wonder that Bunyan’s Evangelist urged Christian to Flee from the wrath to come (Matt. 3:7), to which he responded in perplexity and anguish of soul, “Whether shall I flee?» But flee he did from the City of Destruction, crying, “Life! Life! Eternal Life!” “It is a rude beginning of Christian’s journey, this breaking away from the people about him with his fingers in his ears, yet it is the only way to begin a decisive course” (Sartor Resartus, Carlyle). “The sinner must flee from himself before he can flee from the misery which his sin entails” (Thomas). Have you fled for refuge to Christ?
Thought: “There is no sin so little as not to kindle an eternal fire” (Anon).
Prayer: May God’s Spirit continue to warn of this fateful choice.