Three points are involved in the words: 
  1.  Our keener sense of man’s displeasure than of God’s.
  2.  The consequent possibility of accepting pardon with too light a heart.
  3.  The means of preventing such acceptance of pardon.

1. We are much more sensitive to the displeasure of man than to that of God. Men have several methods of expressing their opinion of us and their feeling toward us; and these methods are quite effectual for their purpose.  There is an instinctive and exact correspondence between our feelings and every slightest hint of disapprobation on the part of our acquaintances; and so readily and completely does the mere carriage of any person convey to us his estimate of our conduct that explicit denunciation is seldom required.  The mode of expressing opinion which is cited in the text is the most forcible Eastern mode of expressing contempt.  When one man spits in the face of another, no one, and least of all the suffering party, can have the slightest doubt of the esteem in which the one holds the other.  If an insolent enemy were to spit in the face of a slain foe, the dead man might almost be expected to blush or to rise and avenge the insult.  But comparing His methods with such a method as this, God awards the palm to His own for explicitness and emphasis.  He speaks of the most emphatic and unambiguous of human methods with a “but,” as if it could scarcely be compared with His expressions of displeasure.  “If her father had but spit in her face”—­if that were all—­but something immensely more expressive than that has happened to her.

God, therefore, would have us ponder the punishments of sin, and find in them the emphatic expressions of His judgment of our conduct and of ourselves.  He resents our shamelessness, and desires that we consider His judgments till our callousness is removed.  The case stands thus:  God. is long-suffering, slow to anger, not of a fault-finding, everchiding nature, but most loving and most just; and this God has recorded against us the strongest possible condemnation.  This God, who cannot do what is not most just, and who cannot make mistakes, this unfurious and holy God, whose opinion of us represents the very truth, has pronounced us to be wicked and worthless; and we seem scarcely at all impressed by the declaration.  God’s judgment of us is not only absolutely true, but it must also take effect; so that what He has pronounced against us will be seen written in the facts bearing upon and entering into our life.  But, although we know this, we are for the most part as unmoved as if in hearing God’s judgment pronounced against us we had heard but the sighing of the wind or any other inarticulate, unintelligible sound.  There is a climax of ignominy in having excited in the Divine mind feelings of displeasure against us.  One might suppose a man would die of shame, and could not bear to live conscious of having merited the condemnation and punishment of such a Being; one might suppose that the breath of God’s disapproval would blast every blessing to us, and that so long as we know ourselves displeasing to Him His sweetest gifts must be bitter to us; but the coldness of a friend gives us more thought, and the contempt of men as contemptible as ourselves affects us with a more genuine confusion.