clawrence9008
Puritan Board Freshman
“… [The crook in the lot has] aptness to catch hold and entangle, like hooks, ‘fish-hooks.’ The crook in the lot does so very readily make impression, to be ruffling and fretting one’s spirit, irritating corruption, that Satan fails not to make diligent use of it for these dangerous purposes; which point once gained by the tempter, the tempted, before he is aware, finds himself entangled as in a thicket, out of which he does not know how to extricate himself.
In that temptation it often proves like a crooked stick troubling a standing pool, which not only raises up the mud all over, but brings up from the bottom some very ugly thing. Thus it brought up a spice of blasphemy and atheism in Asaph’s case; ‘Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocence’ (Ps. 73:13; citation mine), as if he had said, there is nothing at all in religion, it is a vain and empty thing, that profits nothing; I was a fool to have been in care about purity and holiness, whether of heart or life. Ah! is this the pious Asaph? How is he turned so quite unlike himself! But the crook in the lot is a handle by which the tempter makes surprising discoveries of latent corruption even in the best.”
- from Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot
In that temptation it often proves like a crooked stick troubling a standing pool, which not only raises up the mud all over, but brings up from the bottom some very ugly thing. Thus it brought up a spice of blasphemy and atheism in Asaph’s case; ‘Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed my hands in innocence’ (Ps. 73:13; citation mine), as if he had said, there is nothing at all in religion, it is a vain and empty thing, that profits nothing; I was a fool to have been in care about purity and holiness, whether of heart or life. Ah! is this the pious Asaph? How is he turned so quite unlike himself! But the crook in the lot is a handle by which the tempter makes surprising discoveries of latent corruption even in the best.”
- from Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot
