At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, But the end thereof are the ways of death”
Proverbs 14:12
While they are doing it, everybody thinks they are doing the right thing. If they know they are doing a wrong thing, they put quotation marks around the “wrong” because they have some excuse or rationale for why the wrong thing is actually the right thing in this instance.
This is why men take the road to death. It seemed like the right thing to do. They took that road, thinking it was a road that went somewhere else. Or they took the wrong road, knowing it to be the wrong road, but they only intended to go down that road a little ways, not all the way. As William Gurnall once put it, men will often yield to go with Satan one mile who did not intend to go with him two.
But the end thereof is death. At some point the ground opens up beneath their feet, and they arrive at the destination they did not intend, and thought they were successfully avoiding.
Our problem is that we make decisions on the basis of what we see around us, and we choose this way at the crossroads rather than that way, doing so according to our own lights. But our “own lights” are ignorant. We are in a foreign land, and we don’t know the terrain. What we need is a map from an expert map maker.
This is what we have in the Scriptures. God knows the world. He knows the terrain. He knows which path leads to the Abyss, and which road leads to the Celestial City. We need to follow the instructions, instead of consulting our own hearts, and winging it from there.
