Verse 29. Those who do _not choose_ the fear of the Lord are condemned no less than those who hate it. Not to choose is virtually to dislike, and ends in positive hatred. (Matt. xii. 30.) Men are free in choosing destruction, so that the blame rests wholly on themselves. "Ye judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life." (Acts xiii. 46.)--_Fausset._ God will give them a reason of their punishment. No marvel if they who hate knowledge do not choose the fear of the Lord. For knowledge is the guide of election, and if the guide be bad the choice cannot be good. And to show the badness of the choice, there being many fears proposed to man's choice to which man's life is subject; to choose the fear of the Lord, freeth from all the rest; not to choose that, is to be a slave to all the rest.--_Jermin._ Verse 30. There is not a word here of _disability_, it is all unwillingness. Point me to one passage in the Bible where sinners are represented as being condemned for not doing what they _could not_ do. The blessed God is no such tantaliser. When, at any time inability _is_ spoken of, it is inability all of a moral nature, and resolves itself into _unwillingness_.--_Wardlaw._ Can it be that _none_ of God's counsel should be followed? Can it be that _all_ his reproof should be despised? Yes; not to have a care of following all God's counsel is to follow none: not to have a mind that regardeth all His reproof, is to despise all. . . . As the wings of the living creature which Ezekiel saw, were joined together, so is the joining together of God's commandments, our desire of yielding a general obedience unto them, that must carry us up to heaven.--_Jermin._ Verse 31. Their miserable end is the fruit--not of God's way, but of their own. _His_ plan, _His_ device for them, was a plan of salvation.--_Wardlaw._ If a man plants and dresses a poisonous tree in his garden, it is just that he should be obliged to eat the fruit. If our vine is the vine of Sodom, and our clusters the clusters of bitterness, we must leave our complaint on ourselves, if we drink till we are drunken, and fall, and rise no more.--_Lawson._ The sinner's sin is its own punishment (Isa. iii. 9-11.) Hell is not an arbitrary punishment, like human penalties, which have no necessary connection with the crimes, but a natural development of the seed and the bud (Isa. lix. 4; Gal. vi. 8). "Filled with their own devices"--_i.e._ filled even to loathing, which is the final result of the pleasures of sin. "They did eat, and were well filled; for He gave them their own desire; . . . but while the meat was yet in their mouths, the wrath of God came upon them" (Psa. lxxviii. 29). Men's own desires fulfilled are made their sorest plagues (Psa. cvi. 11).--_Fausset._