Verse of the day · September 11

What is the way that seems right in Proverbs 14:12?

The sinner on the broad pleasant road gets off lighter than the man with works he calls good.

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.
Proverbs 14:12

The way seems right, and the person it seems right to is the person walking it. Seemeth is the verb, and unto a man is the whole audience for it. Two lines above it the chapter says the heart knows its own bitterness, and that no stranger intermeddles with its joy — a man's conscience is witness to his own grief, and another cannot feel the joy and comfort he feels in himself. What the proverb sets down is the way and the end of a great many self-deluded souls.

Their way is seemingly fair. It seems right to themselves, Matthew Henry writes: they please themselves with a fancy that they are as they should be, that their opinions and their practices are good, and such as will bear them out. They flatter themselves in their own eyes that all will be well at last.

The way of ignorance and carelessness, the way of worldliness and earthly-mindedness, the way of sensuality and flesh-pleasing all seem right to the men walking in them. John Gill begins with the way of sin and wickedness, which promises much carnal pleasure and mirth, has a great deal of company in it, is a broad road, and is pleasant. It seems right, and it leads to destruction.

Much more than any of those, Henry has it, the way of hypocrisy in religion seems right: external performances, partial reformations, blind zeal. This they imagine will bring them to heaven. His list opens with ignorance and carelessness, where a man is barely trying at all, and closes with performances and zeal, where he is trying hardest.

Gill goes on to the hypocrite and the Pharisee. That man trusts to his own righteousness. He despises other men, and he despises the righteousness of Christ along with them — or at the least he does not submit to it, but tramples upon him and counts the blood of the covenant an unholy thing, and so is deserving of a sorer punishment than the profane sinner.

Yet on account of his good works, as he calls them, the man fancies himself to be in a fair way for heaven and happiness. His confidence rests on works that he is the one calling good. The profane sinner stands in the very same sentence, and of the two of them he carries the lighter reckoning. The man carrying the heavier one is, in Gill's sentence, the man who is sure of his road.

Both readings put that confidence on the same footing. The man is looking at his own opinions and his own practices — what he thinks and how he lives — and at works he has himself judged good, and pleasing himself with a fancy that they will bear him out. The evidence is his, and the verdict on it is his, and the chapter has already said that no stranger intermeddles there. Henry's word for the way is seemingly, and his word for the end is really. What the man never gets out of any of his evidence is the end of the road.

Then the proverb turns to the end thereof. JFB gloss the word as reward, what results, and read the ways of death as ways leading to it. Gill runs it out to eternal death, because that is the wages of sin, let it appear in what shape it will. The shapes it had appeared in were ways that seemed right — a broad and pleasant road in one of them, a fair way for heaven and happiness in another.

The end, in Henry, is really fearful, and the more so for their mistake. In his reading the mistake belongs to what makes the end terrible, rather than standing as a plea against it. Their iniquity will certainly be their ruin. They will perish with a lie in their right hand.

Nobody lied to the man in the proverb. He had opinions and practices and works of his own to look at, and the more of them he had, the better the way looked. The proverb grants him the seeming, and puts the end somewhere the seeming never reached. Self-deceivers prove in the end self-destroyers. He was the one who made the way look right, and the one it looked right to.

Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made

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