36. Nevertheless they did flatter him with their mouth. Bad were they at their best. False on their knees, liars in their prayers.
Mouth-worship must be very detestable to God when dissociated from the heart:
other kings love flattery, but the King of kings abhors it. Since the sharpest
afflictions extort from carnal people a feigned submission to God, there is
proof positive that the heart is desperately set on mischief, and that sin is
ingrained in our very nature. The devil cannot be whipped out of human nature,
though another devil, namely hypocrisy, may be whipped into it. Piety produced
by the damps of sorrow and the heats of terror is of mushroom growth; it is
rapid in its upspringing—“they
inquired early after God”—but it
is a mere unsubstantial fungus of unabiding excitement. And they lied unto him with their tongues. Their godly speech was cant, their praise mere
wind, their prayer a fraud. Their skin-deep repentance was a film too thin to
conceal the deadly wound of sin. This teaches us to place small reliance upon
professions of repentance made by dying people, or when the basis is evidently
slavish fear and nothing more. Any thief will whine out repentance if he thinks
the judge will thereby be moved to let him go scot-free.
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