Does Proverbs contain a blatant contradiction? It tells us to answer a fool according to his folly, and in the very next verse, not to answer a fool according to his folly. Stay tuned to find out on Unapologetic.

If you've had very many conversations about the Bible, you assuredly have heard someone say that it contains contradictions. Now, often when people say this, it's helpful to say, "Well can you show me one? Can you show me a contradiction?" Because it's really easy for someone to throw out a claim like that and have no idea if it's true or why it's true. You'll actually be surprised that, when people make that claim, they can't actually even show you one.

Now this is often true for people like Mormons and followers of the LDS faith. They'll say, "The Bible's been corrupted. You can't trust it." You can ask them, "Well what's a part that's been corrupted? What part don't you trust?" Often they can't actually point to anything. They don't have an idea. They've just heard that claim. This is true often with other non-Christians too, like atheists, who will say the Bible contains contradictions. Well where? Show me one. That should be our first reply. Our first response should not be to start defending the truthfulness of scripture. Make the other person prove their point. Show me a contradiction.

Now if they show you something that seems to be a contradiction, we can talk about that. Let's actually talk about one example today. In Proverbs 26, verses 4 and 5, we read this:

“Don't answer a fool according to his folly lest you be like him yourself.

Some people have said this appears to be a contradiction. One verse says to not answer a fool according to his folly and the next says to answer him according to his folly. Which is it? This seems like a blatant contradiction.

The first thing to point out is the more blatant the contradiction seems, the less likely it's a contradiction. Here's what I mean by that. If you were to read a newspaper article that seemed to contain an incredibly blatant contradiction, would you think the author was just too dumb to realize that? Or would you think maybe there's something else going on? Maybe I've misunderstood or maybe he's getting at something else.

When something is back to back like these two verses, they're verses 4 and 5, and they seem to say entirely opposite things, do we really think the writer was that dumb? That people didn't realize that? Are we really that advanced today? Well no, we're not. People weren't automatically just dumb back in the ancient world either. I think the first thing we can say here is obviously the author didn't think these were contradictory. They might seem contradictory on the face of it to us, but the fact that they're included back to back I think strongly points out the fact that whoever wrote this did not think it was contradictory.

Now we also need to deal with the fact that these are proverbs, so we need to interpret literature according to its genre. Not everything in the Bible is a set of scientific, propositional statements like, "This thing weighs this much exactly and is this color and this long." No, this is a proverb, which is a generally true wise saying. Proverbs are not laws; they're not spiritual laws; they're not laws of nature. So, they're not always true. It's always truthful wisdom, but that doesn't mean that everything a proverb says is always true.

For instance, "Train up your child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he won't depart from it," is not a promise. It is possible to train up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he may depart from it. The thing is, it's ge…