The Biblical Illustrator
Psalms 7:15
He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made.
Social sappers
There is much among men of the particular sin rebuked in this text.
I. How this pit digging may be done. It may be done by attempting to lower a man’s reputation. We are often guilty of talking in such a way that we “lower” people. The society papers live on this sort of thing. Scandal is a most, prominent form of the pit-digging business. It may be done by sapping a man’s business. We have a general idea of what is fair and unfair within the world of trade. Now, some men steadily set themselves to ruin their neighbour’s business, thinking this essential to their own aggrandisement. You may do it by your capital, by your tongue, by your influence. Men sometimes seek to entice their neighbours into plausible and ruinous speculations. It may be done by endangering a man’s character. Men will knowingly and designingly ruin their brother; they “let them in” to some sin or other. They will do this for the sake of gain, for a companionship in guilt, and sometimes out of a mere delight in iniquity. Sometimes we dig a pit for others when we do not think of all that we are doing. We have no right to lay snares, nor to put an occasion of stumbling in our brother’s way. If our brother shows a tendency to slide we must not grease his path.
II. Characterise this work of pit digging.
1. It is dark work; it has to be done secretly, under cover of night: to be done softly, to be wrapped up. Let us decline all that kind of work in which we should be ashamed for society to see us. The great motto of Positivism is, “Live without concealment.” So live that you would not care if your house were glass. Let us decline all that work we should shrink from bringing under the eye of God.
2. It is dirty work, ignoble, base, disgraceful. Whatever aims to lower men is of this character. Such conduct involves only base qualities. Sometimes it is prompted by covetousness. Or it springs from envy or from revenge; or from mere levity. Pit diggers may be well dressed, but their work is of a far dirtier kind than that of the delver in the earth.
3. It is dismal work. All the true work of life has a joy in it, but there is no brightness or blessing in letting people down. It is a joyless thing to be a gravedigger among living men: to dig graves for men’s reputations. Lighthouse building is better than pit sinking. Let our life be devoted to the uplifting of men.
4. It is degrading work. As soon as you begin to dig you stoop, and whatever progress you make you sink with your work. All true work resembles the work of the builder. If in conversation we talk down others, if that is our habit and pleasure, we talk ourselves down at the same time, whether we know it or not. As George Sand says, “Insults, harsh words, detractive utterances, kill morally those who give expression to them.” You narrow and debase your own thought and feeling, you wrong your own soul. If the spirit of our life is sympathy, and if we find readily and praise readily whatever is good, beautiful, clever, successful in the work of our fellows, we are really nourishing and promoting our intellect in an eminent degree. And so in our business life. It was said to me concerning one of the richest men in Bradford, “He has made more gentlemen than any man in Bradford.” That is the way, so to rise that you lift others up with you. The whole idea of the New Testament is, that a noble life is devoted to raising one’s fellow men. This was the grand task of the Master. He was constantly raising what was fallen. (W. L. Watkinson.)
The self-avenging power of sin
The man that travaileth with iniquity, who is big with thoughts and purposes of evil, shall experience, as the issue of his birth throes, nothing but mischief and falsehood, misery and disappointment. Sin is a thing that recoils upon its perpetrator, and inflicts its heaviest blows upon the soul conceiving it, intending it, and giving it life and form. It was in accordance with this self-avenging power of sin that Saul was slain by the Philistines (1 Samuel 31:2), whom he had designed to be slayers of David (1 Samuel 18:21; 1 Samuel 18:25); that Haman was hanged upon the gallows he had erected for another (Esther 7:10); and that the Jews themselves were destroyed by the Romans, whose aid they had invoked and received to crucify their Messiah. This recoiling, self-avenging power of sin is conclusive proof that a holy, just, and living God is moving everywhere in nature, and in the affairs of men, to paralyse the arm of the evil-doer, and to make man feel in every blow that he inflicts upon truth and right, upon innocence and virtue, a counter blow of overwhelming force. It is the conviction of this great truth, as a principle permeating the government of God, that makes David speak of the discomfiture of his enemies as a thing already accomplished. He sees every blow aimed at him recoiling upon themselves; every machination concocted for his overthrow, rendering their own still more inevitable. A fearful thought this, to the wicked, that “his own evil shall slay him”; and yet, to others, a thought full of hope, that God has so ordered things in His universe that evil must destroy itself. (David Caldwell, A. M.)
Retribution
The story of Phalaris’s bull, invented for the torment of others, and serving afterwards for himself, is notorious in heathen story It was a voluntary judgment which Archbishop Cranmer inflicted on himself when he thrust that very hand into the fire, and burnt it, with which he had signed to the popish articles, crying out, “Oh, my unworthy right hand!” but who will deny that the hand of the Almighty was also concerned in it? (William Turner.).