Job 31:3

[Is] not destruction to the wicked?.... It is even to such wicked men, who live in the sin of fornication, and make it their business to ensnare and corrupt virgins; and which is another reason why

For what portion of God is there from above? and what inheritance of the Almighty from on high? He asserts his guarding against being allured to sin by his senses. Verse 1. Think - cast a (lustful) look [ 'etbowneen (H995)].

Destruction is their portion, and a strange punishment, some extraordinary and dreadful judgment, which of right and course belongs to them, and only to such as they are, although it hath pleased God out of his sovereign power to inflict it upon me, who have lived in all good conscience before him. Heb. an alienation or estrangement, to wit, from God and from his favour. Had I been such a one, I neither could nor should have expected any kindness or mercy from God, as now I do.

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.

(3) Is not—i.e., Is not this the portion of Job 31:2?

Verse 3. Is not destruction to the wicked] If I had been guilty of such secret hypocritical proceedings, professing faith in the true God while in eye and heart an idolater, would not such a worker of iniquity be distinguished by a strange and unheard-of punishment?

1–12. Job clears himself of cherishing or yielding to sensuous desires. This idea is pursued through a series of instances; (1) simple desire, excited by the eye, Job 31:1-4; (2) actual yielding to such desire in word or deed, Job 31:5-8; (3) the grossest form of sensual sin, Job 31:9-12.

Is not destruction to the wicked? - That is, Job says that he was well aware that destruction would overtake the wicked, and that if he had given indulgence to impure desires he could have looked for nothing else.

3. A strange punishment — ðëø. The word bears a similar meaning in the Arabic.