Proverbs 6:16 Commentary and Bible Study

We have looked at three illustrations, and they in a way bring to an end, for the moment, this wonderful long series of parables, which teach different aspects of the same theme. We have come to the end of these parables that are presented as evangelistic arguments, powerful arguments, urging men and women not to be seduced by ungodliness and by worldliness.But now, although there is a little repetition of evangelistic arguments before you get into the main book in chapter 10, just at this point Solomon moves rather abruptly from salvation to sanctification, and he is going to spend some time now on holiness, the things the Lord hates, the things that must be avoided. And it is natural and it is right that he should do so. There is a tendency these days among Christians for people to seek and to find the Lord, and probably truly to have the salvation of God, but then to immediately lose interest in the implications of that. The implications of salvation are that it is a walk in holiness. We are saved from ungodliness and we are converted, and we are brought into a walk of increasing holiness. Salvation, conversion, the new birth, is the beginning of sanctification. It is the beginning of a lifelong battle against sin, and walk in holiness – we have a new nature, a new outlook, new desires, a grasp of the holiness of God. But sometimes there are those who come to the Lord, and they do not seem to understand this, and they very quickly leave it behind, and they go back almost to square one. So King Solomon immediately proceeds to reason with his young converts, as those who must be walking in holiness. There follows a list. ‘Six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven.’ This literary construction is repeated a number of times through the Book of Proverbs. It is one of those figures of speech or statements or literary constructions that we cannot be one hundred percent sure about, but the most likely sense is this: that we are going to be given a definite number of evils that the Lord hates, but it is not an exhaustive list, there are many others also. If he had come directly to the point and said, ‘There are seven things the Lord hates’, we might have assumed quite wrongly that these seven things are in a special category of their own. Instead, he gives us a definite list, but not an exclusive list.