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287 illustrations — Lessons from history, biography, and world events
The perverse actively attempt to seduce the righteous from their path—a reality that reveals moral agency itself.
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Exell's Victorian commentary catalogues six species of this spiritual blindness with surgical precision.
Solomon warns that the seductress "spreads a thousand snares"; escape one entanglement only to find yourself caught by another.
This teaching rests upon nature's own law—that no creature exists in isolation, but all things experience mutual action and reaction within Elohim's creation.
It is a corruption of self-love, a form of self-flattery.
Temporal possessions obtained in harmony with God's will and employed in benevolence produce genuine happiness.
In primitive times, merchants practiced fraud through inadequate measures, systematically shortchanging customers with each transaction.
The slothful man pursues an impossible contradiction: he craves wealth without labour, knowledge without study, and respect without merit.
The contempt of God's Sabbaths and disregard of ministerial instruction mark our age as spiritually perilous.
The impulse to adorn ourselves belongs distinctly to human nature, yet moral qualities constitute the truest adornments of any person.
The previous verse (Proverbs 16:14) describes a king's anger as *messengers of death* — swift, certain, and irreversible.
Wisdom speaks as a person in Scripture, and the New Testament declares, "Christ Jesus is made of God unto us Wisdom." Thus Christ the Son of God Himself teaches the fear of Yahweh in this text.
We may lawfully wish for one another extended years; this desire is no infirmity.
Exell's Victorian commentary unpacks reproof as an obligation rooted in love for our neighbours.
Since He is full of mercy Himself, He delights when we exercise the same toward our fellow creatures.
The Preacher employed a single lamp to illuminate the young man's delusion about the strange woman's house: the lamp named "At the last." This is no ordinary light but Ithuriel's spear itself, which according to Milton's *Paradise Lost*, dispels all...
Like the mythological Twins of Love, *eros* and *anteros*, Truth and Mercy weep together, smile together, sicken together, and recover jointly.
Sin, defined in 1 John 3:4 as *paranomia* (transgression of law), springs from contempt of God's authority and forfeiture of His favour.
This duty offends the natural mind and cannot be softened for worldly taste; it rests upon God's command alone, for our salvation hangs in the balance.
The upright—those bent on fulfilling God's will and keeping His commandments—walk a highway characterized not merely by abstinence from evil, but by active *apochōreō* (departure, turning away).
Proverbs 4:7 declares wisdom the principal thing—not merely intellectual attainment, but the *summum bonum* (*chief good*) that elevates the human soul. Joseph S. Exell's 1887 exposition reveals wisdom's four-fold excellence. First, wisdom addresses man's spiritual state before Elohim. True happiness...
The text concerns those stern dealings of God which appear painful and unwelcome, yet contain dual truths we must grasp.
One such truth concerns a child's early accountability.
Righteousness most effectually answers the end and design of government itself.