Verse 4. 'Let his children be far from safety, and let them be crushed in the gate, and there be none to deliver them.' 4. All their children are perfidious. They are crushed in Christ, who is the gate. The children of this fool are all who are begotten by the preaching of his perfidy. They, indeed, are far from salvation, because although they receive temporal life without affliction, they are more grievously struck by eternal vengeance, as the Lord says of those same children of his: 'Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves' (Matthew xxiii, 15). There follows: 'And they shall be crushed in the gate, and there shall be none to deliver them.'
Who else ought to be understood by the name of the gate, but the Mediator of God and men, who says: 'I am the door: by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved' (John x, 9)? The children, therefore, of this fool advance outside the gate, and are crushed in the gate, because the depraved offspring of the Jews flourished in the observance of the Law before the coming of the Mediator; but in the very presence of our Redeemer, cast off from the service of the Divinity by the deserts of their own perfidy, they fell. And there is indeed none to deliver them, because, that is, while by persecuting they strove to extinguish the Redeemer Himself, they cut off from themselves the remedies of deliverance offered to them; of which it is well added: