5 You may not go down on your faces before them or give them worship: for I, the Lord your God, am a God who will not give his honour to another; and I will send punishment on the children for the wrongdoing of their fathers, to the third and fourth generation of my haters;
The Lord is slow to wrath and great in mercy, overlooking wrongdoing and evil, and will not let wrongdoers go free; sending punishment on children for the sins of their fathers, to the third and fourth generation.
The Lord is a God who takes care of his honour and gives punishment for wrong; the Lord gives punishment and is angry; the Lord sends punishment on those who are against him, being angry with his haters.
You have mercy on thousands, and send punishment for the evil-doing of the fathers on their children after them: the great, the strong God, the Lord of armies is his name:
For the Lord your God is an all-burning fire, and he will not let the honour which is his be given to any other.
You may not go down on your faces before them or give them worship: for I, the Lord your God, am a God who will not give his honour to another; and I will send punishment on the children for the wrongdoing of their fathers, to the third and fourth generation of my haters;
Do not go down on your faces and give worship to their gods, or do as they do; but overcome them completely, and let their pillars be broken down.
And your children will be wanderers in the waste land for forty years, undergoing punishment for your false ways, till your bodies become dust in the waste land.
Have nothing to do with these nations who still are living among you; let not their gods be named by you or used in your oaths; do not be their servants or give them worship:
And Joshua said to the people, You are not able to be the servants of the Lord, for he is a holy God, a God who will not let his honour be given to another: he will have no mercy on your wrongdoing or your sins.
Let the Lord keep in mind the wrongdoing of his fathers; and may the sin of his mother have no forgiveness.
See, it is recorded before me, says the Lord: I will not keep back my hand, till I have sent punishment, For their sins and the sins of their fathers, who were burning perfumes on the mountains, and saying evil things against me on the hills: so I will take the measure of their sins, and will send the punishment for them into their breast.
But still the heat of the Lord's wrath was not turned back from Judah, because of all Manasseh had done in moving him to wrath.
Now his children have no safe place, and they are crushed before the judges, for no one takes up their cause.
As for your fathers, you will not be united with them in their resting-place, because you have been the cause of destruction to your land, and of death to your people; the seed of the evil-doer will have no place in the memory of man. Make ready a place of death for his children, because of the evil-doing of their father; so that they may not come up and take the earth for their heritage, covering the face of the world with waste places.
Then it will be used to make a fire, so that a man may get warm; he has the oven heated with it and makes bread: he makes a god with it, to which he gives worship: he makes a pictured image out of it, and goes down on his face before it.
And no one takes note, no one has enough knowledge or wisdom to say, I have put part of it in the fire, and made bread on it; I have had a meal of the flesh cooked with it: and am I now to make the rest of it into a false god? am I to go down on my face before a bit of wood?
For this reason, I will again put forward my cause against you, says the Lord, even against you and against your children's children.
It is not possible for you to be hated by the world; but I am hated by it, because I give witness that what it does is evil.
He who has hate for me has hate for my Father. If I had not done among them the works which no other man ever did, they would have had no sin: but now they have seen, and they have had hate in their hearts for me and my Father.
Hated by God, full of pride, without respect, full of loud talk, given to evil inventions, not honouring father or mother,
Let seven men of his family be given up to us and we will put an end to them by hanging them before the Lord in Gibeon, on the hill of the Lord. And the king said, I will give them.
In the days of David they were short of food for three years, year after year; and David went before the Lord for directions. And the Lord said, On Saul and on his family there is blood, because he put the Gibeonites to death.
And those of you who are still living will be wasting away in their sins in the land of your haters; in the sins of their fathers they will be wasting away. And they will have grief for their sins and for the sins of their fathers, when their hearts were untrue to me, and they went against me;
Do not make images of false gods, or put up an image cut in stone or a pillar or any pictured stone in your land, to give worship to it; for I am the Lord your God.
And the Lord went past before his eyes, saying, The Lord, the Lord, a God full of pity and grace, slow to wrath and great in mercy and faith; Having mercy on thousands, overlooking evil and wrongdoing and sin; he will not let wrongdoers go free, but will send punishment on children for the sins of their fathers, and on their children's children to the third and fourth generation.
Then my face will be turned against him and his family, and he and all those who do evil with him will be cut off from among their people.
Rewarding his haters to their face with destruction; he will have no mercy on his hater, but will give him open punishment.
If I make sharp my shining sword, and my hand is outstretched for judging, I will give punishment to those who are against me, and their right reward to my haters.
If the agreement of the Lord your God, which was given to you by his orders, is broken, and you become the servants of other gods and give them worship, then the wrath of the Lord will be burning against you, and you will quickly be cut off from the good land which he has given you.
But whenever the judge was dead, they went back and did more evil than their fathers, going after other gods, to be their servants and their worshippers; giving up nothing of their sins and their hard-hearted ways.
The Lord of armies says, I will give punishment to Amalek for what he did to Israel, fighting against him on the way when Israel came out of Egypt. Go now and put Amalek to the sword, putting to the curse all they have, without mercy: put to death every man and woman, every child and baby at the breast, every ox and sheep, camel and ass.
Now when Amaziah came back from the destruction of the Edomites, he took the gods of the children of Seir and made them his gods, worshipping them and burning offerings before them.
You say, God keeps punishment stored up for his children. Let him send it on the man himself, so that he may have the punishment of it!
For bitter is the wrath of an angry husband; in the day of punishment he will have no mercy. He will not take any payment; and he will not make peace with you though your money offerings are increased.
But he who does evil to me, does wrong to his soul: all my haters are in love with death.
And he put out the form of a hand and took me by the hair of my head; and the wind, lifting me up between the earth and the heaven, took me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the way into the inner door facing to the north; where was the seat of the image of envy.
And the Lord gave into his hands Jehoiakim, king of Judah, with some of the vessels of the house of God; and he took them away into the land of Shinar to the house of his god; and he put the vessels into the store-house of his god.
And he said to him, All these things will I give you, if you will go down on your face and give me worship.
For this reason, I send you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: some of them you will put to death and put on the cross, and to some of them you will give blows in your Synagogues, driving them from town to town; So that on you may come all the blood of the upright on the earth, from the blood of upright Abel to the blood of Zachariah, son of Barachiah, whom you put to death between the Temple and the altar. Truly I say to you, All these things will come on this generation.
Worthy.Bible » Commentaries » Matthew Henry Commentary » Commentary on Exodus 20
Commentary on Exodus 20 Matthew Henry Commentary
Chapter 20
All things being prepared for the solemn promulgation of the divine law, we have, in this chapter,
Exd 20:1-11
Here is,
Exd 20:12-17
We have here the laws of the second table, as they are commonly called, the last six of the ten commandments, comprehending our duty to ourselves and to one another, and constituting a comment upon the second great commandment, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. As religion towards God is an essential branch of universal righteousness, so righteousness towards men is an essential branch of true religion. Godliness and honesty must go together.
Exd 20:18-21
Exd 20:22-26
Moses having gone into the thick darkness, where God was, God there spoke in his hearing only, privately and without terror, all that follows hence to the end of ch. 23, which is mostly an exposition of the ten commandments; and he was to transmit it by word of mouth first, and afterwards in writing, to the people. The laws in these verses related to God's worship.