[That which is] crooked cannot be made straight
By all the art and cunning, wisdom and knowledge of man, that he
can attain unto; whatever he, in the vanity of his mind, may find
fault with in the works of God, either of nature of providence,
and which he may call crooked, it is not in his power to make
them straight, or to mend them; see ( Ecclesiastes
7:13 ) . There is something which, through sin, is crooked,
in the hearts, in the nature, in the principles, ways and works,
of men; which can never be made straight, corrected or amended,
by all the natural wisdom and knowledge of men, which shows the
insufficiency of it: the wisest philosophers among men, with all
their parade of wit and learning, could never effect anything of
this kind; this only is done by the Spirit and grace of God; see
( Isaiah
42:16 ) ; and that which is wanting cannot be
numbered;
the deficiencies in human science are so many, that they cannot
be reckoned up; and the defects in human nature can never be
supplied or made up by natural knowledge and wisdom; and which
are so numerous, as that they cannot be understood and counted.
The Targum is,
``a man whose ways are perverse in this world, and dies in them, and does not return by repentance, he has no power of correcting himself after his death; and a man that fails from the law and the precepts in his life, after his death hath no power to be numbered with the righteous in paradise:''to the same sense Jarchi's note and the Midrash.
