Reflections on the Proverbs Podcast

It is the twenty-fifth of September, so today’s reflection on the Proverbs takes us to chapter 25. The first verse reads:

“These also are proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied.”

I’m calling this the Solomonic retrieval movement.

Hezekiah’s men went back to the wisdom of Solomon. They copied his proverbs so that another generation could hear them. That is a small statement, but it tells us something about how wisdom travels through time. It has to be received, preserved, and handed on.

There have been many such returns to the sources. The Reformers used the phrase ad fontes—back to the fountains. They went back to Scripture in its original languages. They also read earlier Christian writers for themselves. Today we hear about the retrieval of classical theology, classical theism, and Reformed catholicity. These movements differ, but they share an instinct: we have inherited riches that we would be foolish to forget.

I think we need one foot firmly planted in the past if we are going to move forward with any stability. For me, one place where this matters is Greek and Hebrew. I wish I had learned them better in my own training. Reading the Bible in its native languages opens doors that translation alone cannot always open.

I think about this as a merchant mariner, too. I attended the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and sailed as an officer and a captain. One of the things I most enjoyed learning was celestial navigation.

Take Polaris, the North Star. It lies very close to the point in the sky above the North Pole. As the other stars appear to move across the night sky, Polaris hardly seems to move at all. Near the equator, you see it almost on the horizon. As you travel north, it rises higher. So a sailor can use its height to tell how far north he is—his latitude.

Longitude—how far east or west you are—is another matter. For that you need accurate time. Sailors had watched the heavens for centuries, but keeping accurate time aboard a moving ship was a difficult problem. The development of reliable marine chronometers gave them a much better way to determine longitude. They combined ancient knowledge of the sky with a new instrument.

But you have to keep practicing the old skills. When I sailed as captain, some of the older captains were very particular about that. Keep up your celestial navigation. Make your weather reports. Keep your compass error logbook up to date. Make sure the magnetic compass is adjusted and that you know its remaining error. Adjusting a ship’s compass to account for all the metal around it is an art, and an art can be lost.

I have seen why that matters. I was on a modern ship when both of its new laser gyros went out. They were supposed to be extraordinarily reliable. Well, nothing made by us is infallible. I have also seen younger mates trust the GPS without taking bearings from fixed objects or checking the radar. What do you do when the electronics fail?

When I began navigating, we had satellite navigation before GPS. It gave you a fix, but it was not a position continually updated on a screen. You had to know how to navigate. And it is not enough to know that celestial navigation exists. You have to practice it if you want to keep it.

I think the same is true of the tools available to us today, including AI. A tool can parse a Hebrew verb or give you the meaning of a Greek noun. It can help you organize your thoughts. But it should encourage you to learn, not become a reason to stop learning. Read the old books. Learn the languages if you can. Read the church fathers, read current writers, and read people you disagree with. Read widely enough that you can recognize when your own age is leading you astray. In knowledgeable hands, a new tool can multiply what you are able to do. If you depend on it for everything, you may no longer know your own position.

That does not mean imagining that the past was perfect. Solomon himself had serious faults. His wisdom is worth preserving, and his failures are worth remembering. Both can teach us.

Hezekiah’s men copied Solomon’s proverbs and passed them on. We need to do that kind of work in the maritime world, and we need to do it in our own lives. Keep the old knowledge, and keep practicing it. Keep your magnetic compass error logbook up to date. Have your compass adjusted so that you know its error.

Keep one foot firmly planted in the past so that you don’t lose your way into the future.

“Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles, lest the LORD see it and be displeased, and turn away his anger from him.”

That last line is startling. Why would the LORD turn his anger away from the person who has done evil?

God is at work in the world opposing evil. His anger is not something for us to enjoy watching. When he judges, he may be calling a sinner to turn and come to him. But one of the evils God must oppose is the evil of gloating—including the gloating of his own people.

If I see my enemy fall and my heart says, Good. He got what was coming to him, the LORD sees that too. He sees the person who has fallen, and he sees what is happening in me. The proverb says my delight in that person’s downfall displeases him. He may even turn his anger away from my enemy.

We see this in children. One child gets in trouble, and another starts celebrating: “You’re going to get it!” What does a good parent do? Does the parent join in and celebrate the child’s punishment? No. The parent says, “Johnny, stop. That is wrong.” Now the parent has to address what is happening in Johnny’s heart as well.

That is what makes this proverb so searching. It is possible to call our hatred “righteous indignation.” It is possible to speak as though we care about God’s justice when what we really want is to see our enemies burn. Some of the religious leaders in Jesus’ day knew how to condemn their enemies. Jesus taught his disciples to love them and pray for them.

The next lines say not to fret because of evildoers or envy the wicked. We do not have to take God’s judgment into our own hands, and we do not have to celebrate it when it comes. God sees the evil. He will deal with it.

So when an enemy falls, pray. Pray that he will turn. Pray that you will not begin to love his destruction. The LORD who opposes evil is also looking at your heart.

Who has woe? Who has sorrow?Who has strife? Who has complaints?Who has needless bruises? Who has bloodshot eyes?

The answer is those who linger over wine, who go to sample bowls of mixed wine.

Notice the progression.

Sin brings woe. It brings sorrow. It brings strife, complaints, bruises, and bloodshot eyes. Nothing in this list sounds desirable. And yet the person goes back.

Why?

Because before the wine bites, it sparkles.

“Do not gaze at wine when it is red, when it sparkles in the cup, when it goes down smoothly.”

It begins with the eye.

There is something here that sounds very much like the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You look at it. It looks good. It appears to offer something you need. Then you take it, and it goes down smoothly.

But the proverb says, “In the end it bites like a snake and poisons like a viper.”

Not necessarily at the beginning.

In the end.

Then comes the disorientation. Your eyes see strange things. Your mind imagines confusing things. You become like someone sleeping on the high seas, lying on top of the rigging. You are struck and do not feel it. You are beaten and scarcely know what has happened.

Sin numbs you.

And then comes perhaps the most frightening line in the whole passage:

“When will I awake so I can find another drink?”

After the woe, sorrow, strife, complaints, bruises, confusion, and numbness, the person wakes up and wants to do it all over again.

That is the treadmill of sin.

It is a doom loop.

And there is a law of diminishing returns at work. You return to the same well looking for the same satisfaction, but each time the well gives you less. So you need more to obtain what you once received from less. More alcohol. More money. More recognition. More sex. More pleasure. More of whatever you have chosen to make your life work.

And every time around the loop, it gives less and demands more.

God also gives us cycles. Evening and morning. Work and rest. Seedtime and harvest. Sabbath and worship. His cycles sustain life.

But when we try to regulate our lives by something other than God and the order He has given us, we create counterfeit cycles. We return again and again to things that promise life but cannot give it.

Augustine famously prayed, “Our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

That is the problem.

We are looking for rest in something that cannot give rest.

Wine is the immediate subject of Proverbs 23, but the pattern reaches much further. Drugs can do it. Money can do it. Fame can do it. Sex can do it. Anything we ask to give us the life that only God can give us becomes another turn around the same loop.

It looks good.

It promises something.

It goes down smoothly.

And in the end, it bites.

The only way out of the doom loop is the Lord Jesus Christ. He does not merely give us another thing to consume. He brings us back into the order for which we were created.

Instead of endlessly returning to the poisoned well, we return morning and evening to the Word of God.

We hear His voice.

We receive His gifts.

And we find our rest in Him.

“Blows that wound cleanse away evil; strokes make clean the innermost parts.”

(Proverbs 20:30 ESVi)

Some wounds are medicine.

Proverbs is not telling parents how hard to spank their children. It is describing the painful discipline by which evil is sometimes driven out of us. A superficial wound requires superficial treatment. But evil reaches into the “innermost parts,” and sometimes God’s medicine must reach there too.

We naturally assume that if something hurts, it must be bad. Scripture does not. “It is good for me that I was afflicted” (Ps. 119:71). The furnace burns the silver because the dross must come out. The surgeon cuts because the disease must come out. And sometimes the blow that wounds us is the very blow through which God cleanses us.

“Whoever keeps the commandment keeps his life; he who despises his ways will die.”

This brings us up against a tension that we have in the Christian life between law and gospel.

How can keeping the commandments keep your life if you cannot keep the commandments? What is the author of Proverbs saying here? Is he literally saying, “Keep the commandments so that you may live”? If so, this would seem to break down the distinction between law and gospel. The law tells us what God commands and what we ought to do; the gospel announces what God has done to save sinners. In that sense, Scripture can be understood in terms of command and promise between law and gospel.

The Hebrew word for “keep” is shamar: to keep, guard, or observe. It is the same word used in Genesis 2:15

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

Keeping was part of man’s vocation in the garden. It was not to earn his place in the garden. Man was to exercise dominion. Proverbs here is looking back to that Adamic vocation.

If we read this keeping as meritorious earning we miss what the text is saying. I don’t think the grammar here is: keep the commandments in order to get life. It is: keep the commandments because you have life.

The Old Testament often speaks in this evidentiary mode. Keeping the commandments is the evidence of life. It is not how you obtain life; it is what life looks like when you live by faith. This same way of presenting the Gospel is found in the book of James.

The law does not save you. But if you despise God’s commandments, you are not living by faith. If you live by faith, you will keep his commandments. This keeping of the law is not meritorious. It is the evidence of life.

So we can read the proverb this way: keep the commandments by faith, and keep your life. But if you despise his ways and you reject his commandments and refuse to walk by faith then you will die.

The keeping of the law is not the merit of life.

It is the evidence of life.

“A servant who deals wisely will rule over a son who acts shamefully and will share the inheritance as one of the brothers.” Proverbs 17:2.

When you see this, you have to put it in its Sitz im Leben, as they say in German. What is the life setting? What is the cultural context of this proverb? Because if you take it out of its Hebraic context and read it according to our modern family situation, you can easily misunderstand what is being said.

Today, especially in blended families, you could imagine a situation where there is favoritism between one person’s children and the children of the other spouse. Then you could read this proverb as saying that someone who does not naturally belong to the family could end up receiving the inheritance that, under a strict reckoning, should have belonged to the natural-born son. The son behaves shamefully, so he gets disinherited, and the servant takes his place.

But that is not really the Hebraic picture.

You have to go back to the family farm. The inheritance was not simply a pile of money to be divided up so that everybody could take his share, sell the land, and go somewhere else. The family farm remained the family farm. The land, the household, and the inheritance belonged together.

So imagine someone who, through providential circumstances, is landless and becomes attached to another household. Perhaps the father belongs to the tribe of Joseph. His sons belong to that family and have their place within its inheritance. But this servant comes into the household and proves himself more faithful in working the farm than one of the natural-born sons.

What happens?

The proverb says, “A servant who deals wisely will rule over a son who acts shamefully.”

That does not mean the son gets kicked off the land. He is still a son. Nor does it mean that working under someone else is somehow beneath him. Everybody has to work. Everybody has a place. Everybody has to work together to make the family farm work.

The problem is that this particular son is not doing what a son should be doing. He has not shown himself capable of carrying the responsibility that should ordinarily belong to him.

So the faithful servant may become the foreman. He may be entrusted with managing the farm, while the son works under his direction. The servant who does not bear the family name may actually be ruling over the son who does.

But that does not necessarily have to be permanent. Hopefully the son learns. Hopefully, by working faithfully under someone who knows how to manage the farm, he learns how the farm works. He grows in wisdom and responsibility and is eventually able to take on greater responsibility within the family structure.

Then the proverb says that the wise servant “will share the inheritance as one of the brothers.” Again, I don’t think we should imagine the farm being chopped up and everybody walking away with his piece. The firstborn ordinarily received the double portion because he was becoming, in a sense, the new father of the household, the administrator of the estate. He had greater responsibility for keeping the household and its property functioning as a whole.

So this proverb is not really about somebody getting disinherited. It is about faithfulness and responsibility within the household.

The servant is not elevated because service is beneath the son. And the son is not degraded simply because he has to serve. Everybody serves. Everybody works. The difference is that the wise servant has shown himself capable of carrying a responsibility that the shameful son, at least for the moment, has not.

And yet they are all working the same land. They are all participating in this one household economy. The farm has to work.

So the point is not that the son ceases to be a son. The point is that sonship does not excuse shameful living, and being a servant does not prevent a faithful man from being entrusted with authority.

The man called servant may find himself ruling. The man called son may find himself serving. And perhaps, through that service, the son will learn what it means to live faithfully as a son.