Job 31:3

Job 31:3 [Is] not destruction to the wicked? and a strange [punishment] to the workers of iniquity?

Ver. 3. Is not destruction to the wicked?] Yes, that is their portion, their inheritance; and so Job makes answer to his own question proposed in the preceding verse. The ruin of impure souls is infallible, unsupportable, unavoidable; if God hath aversion from all other sinners, he hath hatred and horror for the unchaste; such stinking goats shall be set on the left hand, and sent to hell; where they shall have so much the more of punishment as they had here of sensual and sinful pleasure, as sour sauce to their sweet meats, Revelation 18:7. Not to speak of the miseries they meet with here, which are not a few: in their souls, hardness of heart, or horror of conscience: in their bodies, foul and loathsome diseases, such as will stick to them when their best friends forsake them: in their names, indelible reproach and infamy; like an iron mole, which nothing can fetch out; like the leprosy, which could never be scraped out of the walls: in their estates, poverty, even to a piece of bread, Proverbs 6:26. Harlots are poscinummia, crumenimulgae, suck purses, Luke 15:14. In their posterity, as Jericho was built, so is uncleanness plagued, both in the eldest and youngest; it goes through the race, till it have wasted all.

Corpus, opes, animam, famam, vim, lumina, Scortum

Debilitat, perdit, necat, aufert, eripit, orbat.

And a strange punishment to the workers of iniquity?] Even such as is unusual and extraordinary; as upon the Sodomites, who, going after strange flesh, were thrown forth for an example, as Jude hath it, Judges 1:7. So those Benjamites, Judges 20:12,15; Judges 20:43,48; the Trojans; the Lacedemonians at Leuctra; Zimri and Cozbi; Zedekiah and Ahab, Jeremiah 29:22; Eli's two sons; Heraclius, the emperor; Muleasses, king of Tunis, in Barbary, bereft by his own son Amida (another Absalom), not of his kingdom only, but of his eyes too, put out with a burning hot iron; those eyes of his that had been full of adultery, and could not cease to sin. In Hebrew the same word signifieth both an eye and a fountain; to show, saith one, that from the eye, as a fountain, floweth both sin and misery.