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268 illustrations
This principle, drawn from Proverbs 26:27, establishes a sobering truth: every child of Adam, until renewed by Divine grace, presents to Omnipotence and Omniscience the same moral aspect.
Exell identifies four formidable obstacles by which mortals attempt resistance to the Almighty's purposes.
Herod's sorrow when Salome demanded John the Baptist's head reveals a critical spiritual truth: not all tears flow from godly conviction.
Yet it remains what it always was: a beast, combining antagonism to both God and humanity.
First, the believer who imagines himself mature in Christ—perhaps believing he has attained "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13)—when in reality he remains a babe, deceives himself catastrophically.
Exell's Victorian commentary illuminates three critical dimensions of this truth.
First, the objective reality: Christ's sacrifice demonstrates that Yahweh is a God against whom no sinner can rebel without incurring death.
First, the *sources* of our vulnerability: the human heart harbors dormant moral propensities until outward circumstance awakens them.
Clean hands may indicate abstinence from visible transgressions, yet a clean heart—*katharos*—concerns the inward disposition, the bias of the will, and the affections themselves.
That ordinary crowing became extraordinary, ordained by Elohim for specific ends: to remind Peter of his broken promise, to witness to Christ's words Peter refused to believe, to reprove his sin, and to accuse his own conscience.
Once deflected from righteousness, nothing becomes easier than sinking into deepening abysses of iniquity.
His evasion reveals six patterns that persist in modern hearts: First, he assumed the matter held no claims upon him: "Take ye Him." Second, he substituted favorable opinion for decision: "I find in Him no fault." Third, he claimed powerlessness:...
"If he steal to satisfy his soul when he is hungry" (Proverbs 6:30). Joseph S. Exell's 1887 treatment exposes sin's cunning architecture. Before transgression ripens into external action, sin deploys imagination, invention, and reason itself to justify the forbidden object—representing...
There exists a happiness which the spirits of just men enter immediately upon separation from the body; yet after the resurrection and general judgment, the righteous shall proceed into life eternal.
Yet this climactic judgment resolves a tension Scripture-readers often overlook.
He does not merely condemn; He first enumerates the favours which He had shown Israel, recalling the conditions of the covenant: no entangling alliances with the inhabitants, no tolerance for their idolatry.
Judah had forsaken their Rock, their *Elohim* of salvation, and in that abandonment rushed to cultivate 'gardens of pleasures' and 'vine slips of a stranger.' They nursed these alliances with Damascus with frantic care, as Maclaren observes: 'In a day...
When the prophet confronted Israel's transgressions, they protested their innocence, citing their diligent worship attendance.
Consider the varieties of mischief-making: some men deliberately pursue evil and delight in tempting others.
This image captures Amos's declaration: "Behold, I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves." God does not speak in literal terms—the Almighty cannot be physically oppressed—but rather as a great father addresses his...
Maclaren observes with penetrating clarity: 'All sins are attempts to break the chain which binds us to God—a chain woven of a thousand linked benefits.' This is no abstract moral law, but a relational rupture.
Jeremiah Burroughs, the Puritan divine, illuminated this distinction with precision.
Absalom's rebellion springs directly from David's disgraceful crime with Bathsheba, as surely as a poisoned root bears bitter fruit.
Abimelech ruled by usurpation, not divine appointment, yet the Almighty permitted his dominion briefly so wickedness might mature and be recognized for what it was.