V. 13.— But exhort one another daily, while it is called Today; lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. They were not only each to mind his own things, but every man also the things of others. The Lord has commanded his people to associate together, that they may support and strengthen each other. Ecclesiastes 4:9-10. They are not only individually to beware of an evil heart of unbelief, but to exhort one another; to be aware of the dangers to which they are exposed, and to watch over one another in love, and daily to exhort each other, lest they should be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. Satan first entered the hearts of our first parents in the form of a lie, and he insinuated it in the most ensnaring manner. He at first questioned whether our first parents had rightly understood what God said. “Yea, hath God said?” as if he said, It cannot be; surely God could not lay you under this restraint. Had Eve spurned the insinuation— had she rested on the glorious perfections of the Divine character— had she considered that it was her honor and happiness to be implicitly guided by her Creator in all things, Satan would have been baffled, and would have fled from her, James 4:7; but she chose to argue the matter, to explain to the tempter the liberty bestowed on them to eat of the trees of the garden with one exception. This emboldened Satan directly to contradict the Almighty, and to assure the woman that, in- stead of dying, they should become as gods. Thus was Eve hardened through the deceitfulness of sin; the tempter, by his subtlety, led her not only to expect impunity, but an increase of rank and happiness; and thus, by the hope of impunity, and the prospect of enjoyment, are men in every age hardened by those lusts which are gendered by the deceitfulness and desperate wickedness of the heart of fallen man. There is but one safeguard, to which we have already alluded:— " Concerning the works of men, by the word of thy lips I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer.” Psalms 17:4.