The Weight of Sand
A. Maclaren, D.D. Proverbs 27:3 A stone is heavy, and the sand weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both. By a fool this book means, not so much intellectual feebleness as moral and religious obliquity, which are the stupidest things that a man can be guilty of. The proverb-maker compares two heavy things, stones and sand, and says that they are feathers in comparison with the lead-like weight of such a man's wrath. I want to make a parable out of the text. What is lighter than a grain of sand? What is heavier than a bagful of it? The accumulation of light things is overwhelmingly ponderous. Is there anything in our lives like that? I. THIS REMINDS US OF THE SUPREME IMPORTANCE OF TRIFLES. The small things make life, and if they are small, then it is. We are poor judges of what is great or small. We have a very vulgar estimate of noise, notoriety, and bigness. We think the quiet things are the small ones. The most trivial actions have a knack of leading on to large results, beyond what could have been expected. These trivial actions make character. Men are not made by crises. The crises reveal what we have made ourselves by the trifles. We shape ourselves by the way we do small things. II. THE OVERWHELMING WEIGHT OF SMALL SINS. The accumulated pressure upon a man of a multitude of perfectly trivial faults and transgressions makes up a tremendous aggregate that weighs upon him. The words "great" and "small" should not be applied in reference to things about which "right" and "wrong" are the proper words to employ. Acts make crimes, but motives make sins. To talk about magnitude, in regard to sins, is rather to introduce an irrelevant consideration. Small sins, by reason of their numerousness, have a terribly accumulative power; a tremendous capacity for reproduction. All our evil doings have a strange affinity with one another. To go wrong in one direction leads to a whole series of consequential transgressions of one sort or another. Every sin makes us more accessible to the assaults of every other. If we indulge in slight acts of transgression, be sure of this, that we shall pass from them to far greater ones. An overwhelming weight of guilt results from the accumulation of little sins. III. PLAIN, PRACTICAL ISSUES OF THESE THOUGHTS. 1. The absolute necessity for all-round and ever-wakeful watchfulness of ourselves. 2. This thought may take down our easy and self-complacent estimate of ourselves. 3. Should we not turn ourselves with lowly hearts to Him who alone can deliver us from the habit and power of these accumulated faults, and who alone can lift the burden of guilt and responsibility from off our shoulders? (A. Maclaren, D.D.) Parallel Verses KJV: A stone is heavy, and the sand weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both. WEB: A stone is heavy, and sand is a burden; but a fool's provocation is heavier than both.