He has swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly.
All Commentaries on Job 20:15 Go To Job 20
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
The hypocrite desires to know the revelations of God, yet [he does] not to practice them. He would speak sagely but not live so. For this reason, then, he does not do what he knows, and even that which he knows he loses. For since he does not unite wholesome practice with his knowledge, despising purity of right practice, he loses the knowledge also. Therefore, the “riches” of the sacred law that he “swallowed” in reading, he vomits in forgetting. And God “casts them out of his belly,” in that what he fails to do is by a righteous judgment rooted altogether out of his memory. God will not allow him to keep the precepts of God with his words only, but which he did not practice in his life. Hence it is said by the prophet, “But to the wicked God said, ‘Why should you declare my statutes? For what reason should you take my covenant in your mouth?’ ” If at any time the hypocrite should seem to retain these words of instruction in his mouth until the end, he will be condemned the more on those very grounds; whereas not even a bad person is ever deprived of the good gift of God. For it is written, “To those who remember his commandments.” … He then that keeps his commandments in mind but never does them, holds in the words of instruction the very sentences by which he is condemned.
