EATING VOMIT

Proverbs 26.11
EATING VOMIT
"As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly."

THE SIGHT WAS DISGUSTING: I ONCE saw a dog licking and eating faeces. Solomon describes a scene that is just as repugnant. It offends all our senses. A dog regurgitates the horrid contents of its stomach. The slimy, foul-smelling, defiling mess keeps everybody at a distance. But the dog takes it up in its mouth and enjoys it like a savory meal.

Nothing fouls the premises and atmosphere as does a vile discharge of vomit. To clean it up requires a considerable sense of responsibility. In a kindergarten, a debate is likely to follow a child's vomiting spell: whose job is it to clean it up — the teacher, the parent or the cleaner? No one, if he can help it, wants to do it. How much more to swallow back the vomit!

Yet, the dog does it. So do we. Nothing fouls our lives as does sin. Sin is the abominable discharge of our heart. Yet, we go back to it again and again — tasting it, relishing it and chewing it as cud. The folly of sin is loathsome, but more loathsome is the repetition of sin.

"If I only knew" is the excuse many give for falling into sin. If they only knew it was wrong, or that it would reap such dire consequences, they would not have done it. But is ignorance the simple explanation for sin? If so, education by itself would have eradicated our moral and social ills. But no, information does not make any of us less a sinner, only a more informed one.

So knowing that vomit leaves a bad taste in the mouth does not stop us from stuffing it back into our throat. The apostle Peter draws another parallel picture: "A sow that is washed goes back to her wallowing in the mud" (Il Pet 2.22). Whether dogs or pigs, it is in their nature to do what they do. So it is with man. It is not that he becomes sinful when he sins; it is that he sins because he is sinful.

Proverbs could not have put it in stronger terms than when it says, "Though you grind a fool in a mortar, grinding him like grain with a pestle, you will not remove his folly from him" (27.22). God's solution to the sinful nature of man is not cosmetic touch-up, but radical surgery: "l will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (Eze 36.26). Only when the heart is changed, or more correctly, exchanged, will we overcome the carnal appetite for mud and vomit.

Have I a new heart and a new appetite?