Proverbs 5:23

He shall die without instruction.

The great charity of early instruction

All persons are born in a state of ignorance and darkness as to spiritual things; therefore all young persons need instruction. Good instruction in youth is God’s appointed means to bring men to the saving knowledge of Himself, and the attainment of salvation. The neglect of early instruction and good education is the ruin of many a person in both worlds. They live viciously and die desperately; they pass from the errors and works of darkness to the place of utter and eternal darkness. They die without instruction, and go astray, and perish in their ignorance and folly. The time of youth is the most proper time in nature for good instructions; children are apt to catch at everything they hear, and to retain it and repeat it. Their faculties are fresh and vigorous, and they are void of those prejudices against truth and virtue which they are afterwards likely to take up.

1. Children cannot live as Christians if they know not the fundamentals of the Christian religion. A man can act no better than his principles dictate to him.

2. For want of being grounded in the essentials of Christian doctrine, young people are easily led into error or heresy.

3. These undisciplined persons usually prove ill members of the State, and the very pest of the neighbourhood in which they live.

4. These untaught people bring a reproach on our religion and the Church of Christ amongst us.

5. The God who made them will surely reject them at last. Then gaining efficiency in the religious education of our young people is supremely to be desired. (Josiah Woodward, D.D.)

In the greatness of the folly he shall go astray.

The greatness of the sinner’s folly

I. You deny boldly the existence of God. You believe the world fatherless and forsaken; itself eternal, or the product of chance. By your creed you profess to be, or at least to know, the very God whose existence you so madly deny. In the greatness of your folly you arrogate to yourselves the very perfections of Divinity, while a God is denied.

II. Apply the description of the text to the character and history of a deist. You admit the existence of a Supreme Being, but you deny that the Scripture is His Word. The work of His hands is your only Bible, the dictates of your unenlightened conscience your only law.

III. Apply to the character and history of the undecided. The man who allows the truth of the Bible, but lives and feels as if it were false. Such conduct is full of contradictions. (J. Angus, M.A.)

The ways and issues of sin

It is the task of the wise teacher to lay bare with an unsparing hand--

(1) The fascinations of sin;

(2) the deadly entanglements in which the sinner involves himself.

I. The glamours of sin and the safeguard against them. There is no sin which affords so vivid an example of seductive attraction at the beginning, and of hopeless misery at the end, as that of unlawful love. The safeguard against the specific sin before us is presented in a true and whole-hearted marriage. And the safeguard against all sin is equally to be found in the complete and constant preoccupation of the soul with the Divine love. Forbidding to marry is a device of Satan; anything which tends to degrade or desecrate marriage bears on its face the mark of the tempter. Our sacred writings glorify marriage, finding in it more than any other wisdom or religion has found.

II. The binding results of sin. Compare the Buddhistic doctrine of Karma. Buddha in effect taught. “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. Thou wilt not find a place where thou canst escape the force of thy own evil actions.” The Bible says, “His own iniquities shall take the wicked, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sin.” This is illustrated in the sin of sensuality. There are four miseries, comparable to four strong cords, which bind the unhappy transgressor.

1. There is the shame.

2. The loss of wealth.

3. The loss of health.

4. The bitter remorse, the groaning and the despair at the end of the shortened life.

And there is an inevitableness about it all. By the clearest interworking of cause and effect, these fetters of sin grow upon the feet of the sinner. Our evil actions, forming evil habits, working ill results on us and on others, are themselves the means of our punishment. It is not that God punishes, sin punishes; it is not that God makes hell, sinners make it. This is established by the possible observation of life, by a concurrent witness of all teachers and all true religions. Sin may be defined as “the act of a human will which, being contrary to the Divine will, reacts with inevitable evil upon the agents.”

1. Every sin prepares for us a band of shame to be wound about our brows and tightened to the torture-point.

2. Every sin is preparing for us a loss of wealth, the only wealth which is really durable, the treasure in the heavens.

3. Every sin is the gradual undermining of the health, not so much the body’s as the soul’s health.

4. The worst chain forged in the furnace of sin is remorse; for no one can guarantee to the sinner an eternal insensibility. Memory will be busy. Here, then, is the plain, stern truth, a law, not of nature only, but of the universe. How men need One who can take away the sin of the world, One who can break those cruel bonds which men have made for themselves! (R. F. Horton, D. D.)

The martyr of guilt

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.

I. The views it affords of the power and progress of evil in the human kind.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

II. 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--

1. 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.

2. That the objects were worthless and insignificant for which the blessings of salvation were resigned.

3. That you possessed an ample sufficiency of means for your guidance and direction into the path of life.

4. 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--

1. The riches of God’s mercy in forgiving sin.

2. The power of His grace in subduing sin.

3. The wisdom of His providence in preventing sin.

4. 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.).