Job 20:15

What other riches are unjustly gathered but those which are in their speeches? Indeed, they are unjustly gathered. But God, in his benevolence, does not allow those mad people to keep forever their unjustly gathered riches. He will cause them to vomit them up again.… The angel, in fact, through the action and benevolence of God, drags him out of his wickedly built house, that is, the church of those who behave wickedly; it is their house. But the angel drags him out of his house.

Second, the food which has been eaten and if it cannot be digested is sometimes rejected by vomitting it out in disgust and pain. So also it sometimes happens that sinful men lose the temporal goods which they acquire in this world because they do …

Ver. 15. The riches he hath swallowed down, he shall vomit up, and God shall cast them out of his belly. 17. The hypocrite desires to know the revelations of God, yet not to practise them. He would speak sagely, but not live so. For this reason, then, that he does not do what he knows, even that which he knows he loses, that forasmuch as he does not unite pure practice with his knowledge, contemning purity of right practice he loses the knowledge also. Therefore the 'riches' of the Sacred Law, which he 'swallowed' in reading, he vomits in forgetting, and God 'casts them out of his belly,' in that what he would not observe to do, by a righteous judgment He roots out of his recollection, that at all events he should not keep the precepts of God in the tongue, which he kept not in his life. Whence it is said by the Prophet; But unto the wicked God saith, What hast thou to do to declare my statutes, and that thou shouldest take my covenant in thy mouth? [Ps. 50, 16] Which words of instruction if it ever at any time chance that the hypocrite should seem to retain in his mouth until the end, he will be condemned the more on the very grounds, whereon not even a bad man is ever deprived of the good gift of God. For it is written; To those that remember His commandments to do them. [Ps. 103, 18] He then that keeps His commandments in mind, but never does them, such an one holds in the words of instruction the sentences whereby he is condemned. 18. For hence it is written in Zechariah; What seest thou, Zechariah? And I answered, I see a flying roll; the length thereof is twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof ten cubits. This said he to me; This is the curse that goeth over the face of the whole earth. For everyone that stealeth shall be judged as on this side according to it. [Zech. 5, 2. […]

Or, if he do not himself refund what he has violently taken away, God will, by his providence, force him to it, and bring it about, one way or other, that ill-gotten goods shall return to the right owners: God shall cast them out of his belly, while yet the love of the sin is not cast out of his heart.

4 Knowest thou not this of old, since man was placed upon earth, 5 That the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment? 6 Though his excellency mount up to the heavens, and his head reach unto the clouds; 7 Yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung: they which have seen him shall say, Where is he?

quarantine:scripture (2026-07-29) — verbatim-scripture