The two verses looked at in this post are some of the most frightening in the Bible. They are about those people who think they are getting away with sinning.
These not only apply to the believer who is backsliding, but to those marauders who are doing smash and grabs; to those manipulators cheating to win elections; those malevolent globalists creating vaccines to harm others and rid the earth of them, or who are orchestrating famines to accomplish that end… but they are God’s words to all who think they can get away with sinning: the act of sin carries its own punishment (as the commentators clarify below).
Proverbs 5:22 The iniquities of the wicked ensnare him, and he is held fast in the cords of his sin. 23 He dies for lack of discipline, and because of his great folly he is led astray.
The following verse is not covered in this post but was added to reinforce my introduction:
Galatians 6:7 Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap.
[Bracketed statements, emboldening and underscoring are mine. All the commentaries below can be read in their entirety at Bible Hub dot com.]
From the Commentator, Joseph Benson:
His own iniquities shall take the wicked — “Let him not think to escape, because he is so cunning that nobody observes him, or so powerful that no one can call him to an account; for his own manifold iniquities shall arrest and apprehend him.” And he shall be holden with the cords of his sins — “He shall need no other chains to bind, and hold him fast, to answer for them to God.” — Bishop Patrick. He shall die without instruction — Because he neglected instruction; or, as באין מוסר, may be rendered, without correction, or amendment.
He shall die in his sins, and not repent of them, as he designed and hoped to do, before his death. And in the greatness of his folly &mdash Through his stupendous folly, whereby he cheated himself with hopes of repentance or impunity, and exposed himself to endless torments for the momentary pleasures of gratifying sinful lusts; he shall go astray — From God, and from the way of life and eternal salvation.
From the commentary, The Biblical Illustrator [partial comment]:
Sin is an evil of fearful tendencies, and necessarily productive, if unchecked, of remediless consequences. The reason is obvious. Moral evil corrupts and vitiates the mind itself, carries the contagion of a mortal disease through all its affections and powers, and affects the moral condition of the man through the whole duration of his being.
- [Sin]The views it affords of the power and progress of evil in the human kind.
- It ensnares. Reference is to the methods adopted in the East by those who hunt for game, or for beasts of prey. Evil allures under the form of good. All the way is white as snow that hides the pit.
- It enslaves. St. Paul speaks of the “bondage of corruption,” and of the hardening of the heart through the deceitfulness of sin. Sin gathers strength from custom, and spreads like a leprosy from limb to limb. The power of habit turns upon the principle that what we have done once we have an aptitude to do again with greater readiness and pleasure. The next temptation finds the sons of folly an easier prey than before.
- It infatuates. After a seasons wickedness so far extends its power from the passions to the understanding that men become blind to the amount of their own depravity, and in this state begin to fancy music in their chains. It would seem to be one of the prerogatives of sin, like the fascination of the serpent, first to deprive its victims of their senses and then make them an unresisting prey. Guard against the beginnings of sin. Sin prepares for sin.
- It destroys. The soul is destroyed, not as to the fact of its continued existence, but as to all its Godlike capacities of honour and happiness.
- Some of the circumstances of aggravation which will tend to embitter the sinner’s doom. It must for ever be a melancholy subject of reflection—
- That the ruin was self-caused. A man may be injured by the sins of others, but his soul can be permanently endangered only by his own. By a fine personification, a man’s sins are here described as a kind of personal property and possession. Sin, remorse, and death may be deemed a kind of creation of our own.
- That the objects were worthless and insignificant for which the blessings of salvation were resigned.
- That you possessed an ample sufficiency of means for your guidance and direction into the path of life.
- That the evil incurred is hopeless and irremediable.
III. The interesting aspect under which this subject teaches us to contemplate the Divine dispensations. It illustrates—
- The riches of God’s mercy in forgiving sin.
- The power of His grace in subduing sin.
- The wisdom of His providence in preventing sin.
- The urgency of His invitations to those who are the slaves of sin. (Samuel Thodey.)
Fixed habits
A rooted habit becomes a governing principle. Every lust we entertain deals with us as Delilah did with Samson—not only robs us of our strength, but leaves us fast bound. (Abp. Tillotson.).
From the Expositor’s Bible Commentary [partial comment with link; about 40% of his words are below, if you desire to read his comments in their entirety, then use the following link: https://biblehub.com/commentaries/expositors/proverbs/5.htm ]:
…The binding results of sin.- It is interesting to compare with the teaching of this chapter the doctrine of Karma in that religion of Buddha which was already winning its victorious way in the far East at the time when these introductory chapters were written. The Buddha said in effect to his disciple, “You are in slavery to a tyrant set up by yourself. Your own deeds, words, and thoughts, in the former and present states of being, are your own avengers through a countless series of lives. If you have been a murderer, a thief, a liar, impure, a drunkard, you must pay the penalty in your next birth, either in one of the hells, or as an unclean animal, or as an evil spirit, or as a demon. You cannot escape, and I am powerless to set you free. Not in the heavens,” so says the Dhammapada, “not in the midst of the sea, not if thou hidest thyself in the clefts of the mountains, wilt thou find a place where thou canst escape the force of thy own evil actions.”
“His own iniquities shall take the wicked, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sin.” This terrible truth is illustrated with mournful emphasis in the sin of the flesh which has been occupying our attention, a sin which can only be described as “taking fire into the bosom or walking upon hot coals,” with the inevitable result that the clothes are burnt and the feet are scorched.
(Pro_6:27-28) There are four miseries comparable to four strong cords which bind the unhappy transgressor. First of all, there is the shame. His honor is given to others, (Pro_5:9) and his reproach shall not be wiped away. (Pro_6:33) The jealous rage of the offended husband will accept no ransom, no expiation; (Pro_6:34-35) with relentless cruelty the avenger will expose to ruin and death the hapless fool who has transgressed against him.
Secondly, there is the loss of wealth. The ways of debauchery lead to absolute want, for the debauchee, impelled by his tormenting passions, will part with all his possessions in order to gratify his appetites, (Pro_5:10) until, unnerved and “feckless,” incapable of any honest work, he is at his wits’ end to obtain even the necessities of life.
(Pro_6:26) For the third binding cord of the transgression is the loss of health; the natural powers decay, the flesh and the body are consumed with loathsome disease.
(Pro_5:11) Yet this is not the worst. Worse than all the rest is the bitter remorse, the groaning and the despair at the end of the shortened life. “How have I hated instruction, and nay heart despised reproof!” (Pro_5:12-14) “Going down to the chambers of death,” wise too late, the victim of his own sins remembers with unspeakable agony the voice of his teachers, the efforts of those who wished to instruct him.
There is an inevitableness about it all, for life is not lived at a hazard; every path is clearly laid bare from its first step to its last before the eyes of the Lord; the ups and downs which obscure the way for us are all level to Him. (Pro_5:21) Not by chance, therefore, but by the clearest interworking of cause and effect, these fetters of sin grow upon the feet of the sinner, while the ruined soul mourns in the latter days.
The reason why Wisdom cries aloud, so urgently, so continually, is that she is uttering eternal truths, laws which hold in the spiritual world as surely as gravitation holds in the natural world; it is that she sees unhappy human beings going astray in the greatness of their folly, dying because they are without the instruction which she offers.
(Pro_5:23) But now, to turn to the large truth which is illustrated here by a particular instance, that our evil actions, forming evil habits, working ill results on us and on others, are themselves the means of our punishment.
“The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.”
We do not rightly conceive God or Judgment or Hell until we recognize that in spiritual and moral things there is a binding law, which is no arbitrary decree of God, but the essential constitution of His universe. He does not punish, but sin punishes; He does not make hell, but sinners make it. As our Lord puts it, the terrible thing about all sinning is that’ one may become involved in an eternal sin. (Mar_3:26) It is by an inherent necessity that this results from a sin against the Holy Spirit within us.
We cannot too frequently, or too solemnly, dwell upon this startling fact. It is a fact established, not by a doubtful text or two, nor by a mere ipse dixit of authority, but by the widest possible observation of life, by a concurrent witness of all teachers and all true religions.
No planetary movement, no recurrence of the seasons, no chemical transformation, no physiological growth, no axiom of mathematics, is established on surer or more irrefutable grounds. Sin itself may even be defined, from an induction of facts, as “the act of a human will which, being contrary to the Divine Will, reacts with inevitable evil upon the agent.”
Sin is a presumptuous attempt on the part of a human will to disturb the irresistible order of the Divine Will, and can only draw down upon itself those lightnings of the Divine power, which otherwise would have flashed through the heavens beautiful and beneficent.
Let us, then, try to impress upon our minds that, not in the one sin of which we have been speaking only, but in all sins alike, certain bands are being woven, certain cords twisted, certain chains forged, which must one day take and hold the sinner with galling stringency.
Every sin is preparing for us a band of shame to be wound about our brows and tightened to the torture-point. There are many gross and generally condemned actions which when they are exposed bring their immediate penalty. To be discovered in dishonorable dealing, to have our hidden enormities brought into the light of day, to forfeit by feeble vices a fair and dignified position, will load a conscience which is not quite callous with a burden of shame that makes life quite intolerable.
But there are many sins which do not entail this scornful censure of our fellows, sins with which they have a secret sympathy, for which they cherish an ill-disguised admiration, -the more heroic sins of daring ambition, victorious selfishness, or proud defiance of God. None the less these tolerated iniquities are weaving the inevitable band of shame for the brow: we shall not always be called on only to fade our fellows, for we are by our creation the sons of God, in whose image we are made, and eventually we must confront the children of Light, must look straight up into the face of God, with these sins-venial as they were thought-set in the light of His countenance. Then will the guilty spirit burn with an indescribable and unbearable shame, -“To hide my head! To bury my eyes that they may not see the rays of the Eternal Light,” will be its cry. May we not say with truth that the shame which comes from the judgment of our fellows is the most tolerable of the bands of shame?
From Matthew Henry’s Commentary of the Whole Bible [in part]:
“Foresee the certain ruin of those that go on still in their trespasses.” Those that live in this sin promise themselves impunity, but they deceive themselves; their sin will find them out, Pro_5:22, Pro_5:23.
The apostle gives the sense of these verses in a few words. Heb_13:4, Whoremongers and adulterers God will judge. 1. It is a sin which men with great difficulty shake off the power of. When the sinner is old and weak his lusts are strong and active, in calling to remembrance the days of his youth, Eze_23:19.
Thus his own iniquities having seized the wicked himself by his own consent, and he having voluntarily surrendered himself a captive to them, he is held in the cords of his own sins, and such full possession they have gained of him that he cannot extricate himself, but in the greatness of his folly (and what greater folly could there be than to yield himself a servant to such cruel task-masters?) he shall go astray, and wander endlessly.
Uncleanness is a sin from which, when once men have plunged themselves into it, they very hardly and very rarely recover themselves. 2. It is a sin which, if it be not forsaken, men cannot possibly escape the punishment of; it will unavoidably be their ruin.
As their own iniquities do arrest them in the reproaches of conscience and present rebukes (Jer_7:19), so their own iniquities shall arrest them and bind them over to the judgments of God.
There needs no prison, no chains; they shall be holden in the cords of their own sins, as the fallen angels, being incurably wicked, are thereby reserved in chains of darkness.
The sinner, who, having been often reproved, hardens his neck, shall die at length without instruction. Having had general warnings sufficient given him already, he shall have no particular warnings, but he shall die without seeing his danger beforehand, shall die because he would not receive instruction, but in the greatness of his folly would go astray; and so shall his doom be, he shall never find the way home again.
Those that are so foolish as to choose the way of sin are justly left of God to themselves to go in it till they come to that destruction which it leads to, which is a good reason why we should guard with watchfulness and resolution against the allurements of the sensual appetite.
[Henry’s last two paragraphs reminded me of the following dreadful verse: “Proverbs 7:22 All at once he follows her, as an ox goes to the slaughter….” That is, the ox does not know it is going to be slaughtered.]
From The Preacher’s Complete Homiletical Commentary [in part]:
…The meaning is, that directly in God’s eyes are the ways of every man, as though there were no other creature in the universe; as though the wise man were saying, “Why, because the way seems smooth, and you seem helped in your folly, do you go on in your impenitency, and embrace the bosom of this wanton?” “For” the way of every man is directly in the sight of God. He takes the most emphatic interest in our schemes, whether we are doing well or ill.
He helps us either in sinning or doing right, for “He levels all (one’s) paths” (see CRITICAL NOTES). Not that we are to involve Him in the folly of any sin, but if a man desires to drink, He levels the way for Him. If he wishes liquor, He gives it; if he desires to steal, He gives the eye and the nerve.… The Divinity seems to help the struggling, whether saint or sinner, but the impenitent must not therefore imagine that it is righteous to go on.—Miller.
Proverbs 5:22. The licentious flatter themselves that in old age, when the passions are less fiery, they will easily extricate themselves from the dominion of their lusts, and repent and seek salvation. But Job_20:11 declares that the old sinner’s “bones are full of the sins of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the dust.” Augustine, after experience, says: “While lust is being served the habit is formed, and whilst the habit is not being resisted necessity is formed.”—Fausset.
Pro_5:23. Surely it is most just that he who lived without following instruction should die without having instruction; he that in his life would not do as he was instructed, deserveth that at death he should not be instructed what to do.—Jermin.