The wicked cometh in his stead - Often God makes this distinction; in public calamities and in sudden accidents he rescues the righteous, and leaves the wicked, who has filled up the measure of his iniquities, to be seized by the hand of death. Justice, then, does its own work; for mercy has been rejected.

The righteous is delivered out of trouble, and the wicked cometh in his (c) stead.
(c) That is, will enter into trouble.

The righteous is delivered out of trouble,.... One after another he comes into, if not in this life, yet at death; which is to him a perfect deliverance out of all tribulation; see Revelation 7:14; or when the wicked die, as in Proverbs 11:7, then the righteous are delivered from the trouble they gave them, or designed to give them; though it seems rather to design deliverance from trouble in the first sense, since it follows,
and the wicked cometh in his stead; as Haman did in the room of Mordecai, and was hanged upon the gallows the other was delivered from, and he had prepared for him, Esther 7:10; and as Daniel was delivered from the lion's den, and his enemies thrown into it, Daniel 6:24; and as in the latter day the righteous will be delivered from all their persecutors, and antichrist will be destroyed with the breath of Christ's mouth, and the brightness of his coming; and then they that destroyed the earth shall be destroyed themselves, Revelation 11:18.

The righteous are often wonderfully kept from going into dangerous situations, and the ungodly go in their stead.

Perhaps the trouble prepared by the wicked, and which he inherits (compare Proverbs 11:6).

8 The righteous is delivered from trouble,
And the godless comes in his stead.
The succession of the tenses gives the same meaning as when, periodizing, we say: while the one is delivered, the other, on the contrary, falls before the same danger. נחלץ (vid., under Isaiah 58:11) followed by the historical tense, the expression of the principal fact, is the perfect. The statement here made clothes itself after the manner of a parable in the form of history. It is true there are not wanting experiences of an opposite kind (from that here stated), because divine justice manifests itself in this world only as a prelude, but not perfectly and finally; but the poet considers this, that as a rule destruction falls upon the godless, which the righteous with the help of God escapes; and this he realizes as a moral motive. In itself תּחתּיו may also have only the meaning of the exchange of places, but the lxx translate αντ ̓ αὐτοῦ, and thus in the sense of representation the proverb appears to be understood in connection with Proverbs 21:18 (cf. the prophetico-historical application, Isaiah 43:4). The idea of atonement has, however, no application here, for the essence of atonement consists in the offering up of an innocent one in the room of the guilty, and its force lies in the offering up of self; the meaning is only, that if the divinely-ordained linking together of cause and effect in the realms of nature and of history brings with it evil, this brings to the godless destruction, while it opens the way of deliverance for the righteous, so that the godless becomes for the righteous the כּפר, or, as we might say in a figure of similar import, the lightning conductor.

Cometh - Into trouble.