Matthew 7:26-27 - Exposition

And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it . In the Plain of Sharon the clay seems to have been so interior that not only were the jars made of it often worthless, but the bricks could offer so little resistance to the weather that the houses were hardly safe. Hence a special prayer was offered by the high priest on the Day of Atonement that the Lord would grant that their houses might not become their tombs. In the parable, however, it is not the structure, but the foundation, that is wrong. The sand may refer, as Stanley suggests, to one locality, in which case it is probably "the long sandy strip of land which bounds the eastern plain of Acre, and through which the Kishon flows into the sea;" or, as would seem more probable, to the sand which would naturally be found on the edges of such a torrent as is here described. Beat upon ; smote upon (Revised Version). In Matthew 7:25 the thought is more of the swoop of the tempest ( προσέπεσαν ); here, of its impact on the house ( προσέκοψαν ) . It is possible that there is here less indication of force necessary for the destruction. "It needed only the first blow, and the house fell" (Weiss, 'Matthaus-ev.'). And great was the fall of it. Our Lord's solemn verdict of the utter ruin awaiting him who does not put his assent into action. The clause conveys an impression even stronger than Matthew 7:23 . There the positive worker of lawlessness is banished from Christ's presence; here, on the mere non-worker of Divine messages received is pronounced ruin and (for such, at least, seems suggested) that irremediable.