The Self-Avenging Power of Sin
Psalm 7:15
He made a pit, and dig it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made.


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 31:2-4), whom he had designed to be slayers of David (1 Samuel 18:21, 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.)



Parallel Verses
KJV: He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made.

WEB: He has dug a hole, and has fallen into the pit which he made.




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