Proverbs
3:1-10: THE SECRET OF WELL-BEING
The first ten verses of this passage
form a series of five couplets, which enforce on the young various phases of
goodness by their tendency to secure happiness or blessedness of various
sorts. The underlying axiom is that, in a world ruled by a good Being,
obedience must lead to well-being; but while that is in the general true,
exceptions do occur, and good men do encounter evil times. Therefore the
glowing promises of these verses are followed by two verses which deal with
the explanation of good men’s afflictions, as being results and tokens of
God’s fatherly love.
The first couplet is general in
character. It inculcates obedience to the precepts of the teacher, and gives
as reason the assurance that thereby long life and peace will be secured.
True to the Old Testament conception of revelation as a law, the teacher
sets obedience in the forefront. He is sure that his teaching contains the
sufficient guide for conduct, and coincides with the divine will. He calls,
in the first instance, for inward willing acceptance of His commandments;
for it is the heart, not primarily the hands, which he desires should ‘keep’
them. The mother of all graces of conduct is the bowing of the will to
divine authority. The will is the man, and where it ceases to lift itself up
in self-sacrificing and self-determining rebellion, and dissolves into
running waters of submission, these will flow through the life and make it
pure. To obey self is sin, to obey God is righteousness. The issues of such
obedience are ‘length of days . . . and peace.’
Even if we allow for the difference
between the Old and the New Testaments, it remains true that a life
conformed to God’s will tends to longevity, and that many forms of sin do
shorten men’s days. Passion and indulged appetites eat away the very flesh,
and many a man’s ‘bones are full of the sin of his youth.’ The profligate
has usually ‘a short life,’ whether he succeeds in making it ‘merry’ or not.
‘Peace’ is a wide word, including all
well-being. Ease-loving Orientals, especially when living in warlike times,
naturally used the phrase as a shorthand expression for all good. Busy
Westerns, torn by the distractions and rapid movement of modern life, echo
the sigh for repose which breathes in the word. ‘There is no joy but calm,’
and the sure way to deepest peace is to give up self-will and live in
obedience.
The second couplet deals with our
relations to one another, and puts forward the two virtues of
‘loving-kindness and truth’—that is truth, or faithfulness—as all-inclusive.
They are the two which are often jointly ascribed to God, especially in the
Psalms. Our attitude to one another should be moulded in God’s to us all.
The tiniest crystal has the same facets and angles as the largest. The giant
hexagonal pillars of basalt, like our Scottish Staffa, are identical in form
with the microscopic crystals of the same substance. God is our Pattern;
goodness is likeness to Him.
These graces are to be bound about the
neck, perhaps as an ornament, but more probably as a yoke by which the
harnessed ox draws its burden. If we have them, they will fit us to bear one
another’s burdens, and will lead to all human duties to our fellows.
These graces are also to be written on
the ‘table of the heart’; that is, are to be objects of habitual meditation
with aspiration. If so, they will come to sight in life. He who practises
them will ‘find favour with God and man,’ for God looks with complacency on
those who display the right attitude to men; and men for the most part treat
us as we treat them. There are surly natures which are not won by kindness,
like black tarns among the hills, that are gloomy even in sunshine, and
requite evil for good; but the most of men reflect our feelings to them.
‘Good understanding’ is another
result. It is ‘found’ when it is attributed to us, so that the expression
substantially means that the possessors of these graces will win the
reputation of being really wise, not only in the fallible judgment of men,
but before the pure eyes of the all-seeing God. Really wise policy coincides
with loving-kindness and truth.
The remaining couplets refer to our
relations to God. The New Testament is significantly anticipated in the
pre-eminence given to trust; that is, faith. Nor less significant and
profound is the association of self-distrust with trust in the Lord. The two
things are inseparable. They are but the under and upper sides of one thing,
or like the two growths that come from a seed—one striking downwards becomes
the root; one piercing upwards becomes the stalk. The double attitude of
trust and distrust finds expression in acknowledging Him in all our ways;
that is, ordering our conduct under a constant consciousness of His
presence, in accordance with His will, and in dependence on His help.
Such a relation to God will certainly,
and with no exceptions, issue in His ‘directing our paths,’ by which is
meant that He will be not only our Guide, but also our Roadmaker, showing us
the way and clearing obstacles from it. Calm certitude follows on
willingness to accept God’s will, and whoever seeks only to go where God
sends him will neither be left doubtful whither he should go, nor find his
road blocked.
The fourth couplet is, in its first
part, in inverted parallelism with the third; for it begins with
self-distrust, and proceeds thence to ‘fear of the Lord,’ which corresponds
to, and is, in fact, but one phase of, trust in Him. It is the reverent awe
which has no torment, and is then purest when faith is strongest. It
necessarily leads to departing from evil. Morality has its roots in
religion. There is no such magnet to draw men from sin as the happy fear of
God, which is likewise faith. Whoever separates devoutness from purity of
life, this teacher does not. He knows nothing of religion which permits
association with iniquity. Such conduct will tend to physical well-being,
and in a deeper sense will secure soundness of life. Godlessness is the true
sickness. He only is healthy who has a healthy, because healed, soul.
The fifth couplet appears at first as
being a drop to a lower region. A regulation of the Mosaic law may strike
some as out of place here. But it is to be remembered that our modern
distinction of ceremonial and moral law was non-existent for Israel, and
that the command has a wider application than to Jewish tithes. To ‘honour
God with our substance’ is not necessarily to give it away for religious
purposes, but to use it devoutly and as He approves.
Christianity has more to say about the
distribution, as well as the acquisition, of wealth, than professing
Christians, especially in commercial communities, practically recognise.
This precept grips us tight, and is much more than a ceremonial regulation.
Many causes besides the devout use of property tend to wealth in our highly
artificial state of society. The world tries to get it by shrewdness,
unscrupulousness, and by many other vices which are elevated to the rank of
virtues; but he who honours the Lord in getting and spending will generally
have as much as his true needs and regulated desires require.
Proverbs 3:11-24:
THE GIFTS OF HEAVENLY WISDOM
The repetition of the words ‘my son’
at the beginning of this passage marks a new section, which extends to verse
20 , inclusively, another section being similarly marked as commencing in
verse 21 . The fatherly counsels of these early chapters are largely
reiterations of the same ideas, being line upon line. ‘To write the same
things to you, to me indeed is not grievous, but for you it is safe.’ Many
strokes drive the nail home. Exhortations to get Wisdom, based upon the
blessings she brings, are the staple of the whole. If we look carefully at
the section ( vers. 11-20 ), we find in it a central core ( vers. 13-18 ),
setting forth the blessings which Wisdom gives, preceded by two verses,
inculcating the right acceptance of God’s chastisements which are one chief
means of attaining Wisdom, and followed by two verses ( vers. 19, 20 ),
which exalt her as being divine as well as human. So the portraiture of her
working in humanity is framed by a prologue and epilogue, setting forth two
aspects of her relation to God; namely, that she is imparted by Him through
the discipline of trouble, and that she dwells in His bosom and is the agent
of His creative work.
The prologue, then, points to sorrow
and trouble, rightly accepted, as one chief means by which we acquire
heavenly Wisdom. Note the profound insight into the meaning of sorrows. They
are ‘instruction’ and ‘reproof.’ The thought of the Book of Job is here
fully incorporated and assimilated. Griefs and pains are not tokens of
anger, nor punishments of sin, but love-gifts meant to help to the
acquisition of wisdom. They do not come because the sufferers are wicked,
but in order to make them good or better. Tempests are meant to blow us into
port. The lights are lowered in the theatre that fairer scenes may become
visible on the thin screen between us and eternity. Other supports are
struck away that we may lean hard on God. The voice of all experience of
earthly loss and bitterness is, ‘Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore
get Wisdom.’ God himself becomes our Schoolmaster, and through the voice of
the human teacher we hear His deeper tones saying, ‘My son, despise not the
chastening.’
Note, too, the assurance that all
discipline is the fruit of Fatherly love. How many sad hearts in all ages
these few words have calmed and braced! How sharp a test of our childlike
spirit our acceptance of them, when our own hearts are sore, is! How deep
the peace which they bring when really believed! How far they go to solve
the mystery of pain, and turn darkness into a solemn light!
Note, further, that the words ‘despise’ and ‘be weary’ both imply rather
rejection with loathing, and thus express unsubmissive impatience which gets
no good from discipline. The beautiful rendering of the Septuagint, which
has been made familiar by its adoption in Hebrews, makes the two words
express two opposite faults. They ‘despise’ who steel their wills against
the rod, and make as if they did not feel the pain; they ‘faint’ who
collapse beneath the blows, which they feel so much that they lose sight of
their purpose. Dogged insensibility and utter prostration are equally
harmful. He who meets life’s teachings, which are a Father’s correction,
with either, has little prospect of getting Wisdom.
Then follows the main part of this
section ( vers. 13-18 ),—the praise of Wisdom as in herself most precious,
and as bestowing highest good. ‘The man that findeth Wisdom’ reminds us of
the peasant in Christ’s parable, who found treasure hidden in a field, and
the ‘merchandise’ in verse 14 , of the trader seeking goodly pearls. But the
finding in verse 13 is not like the rustic’s in the parable, who was seeking
nothing when a chance stroke of his plough or kick of his heel laid bare the
glittering gold. It is the finding which rewards seeking. The figure of
acquiring by trading, like that of the pearl-merchant in the companion
parable, implies pains, effort, willingness to part with something in order
to attain.
The nature of the price is not here in
question. We know who has said, ‘I counsel thee to buy of Me gold tried in
the fire.’ We buy heavenly Wisdom when we surrender ourselves. The price is
desire to possess, and willingness to accept as an undeserved, unearned
gift. But that does not come into view in our lesson. Only this is strongly
put in it—that this heavenly Wisdom outshines all jewels, outweighs all
wealth, and is indeed the only true riches. ‘Rubies’ is probably rather to
be taken as ‘corals,’ which seem to have been very highly prized by the
Jews, and, no doubt, found their way to them from the Indian Ocean via the
Red Sea. The word rendered ‘things thou canst desire’ is better taken as
meaning ‘jewels.’
This noble and conclusive depreciation
of material wealth in comparison with Wisdom, which is not merely
intellectual, but rests on the fear of the Lord, and is goodness as well as
understanding, never needed preaching with more emphasis than in our day,
when more and more the commercial spirit invades every region of life, and
rich men are the aristocrats and envied types of success. When will England
and America believe the religion which they profess, and adjust their
estimates of the best things accordingly? How many so-called Christian
parents would think their son mad if he said, ‘I do not care about getting
rich; my goal is to be wise with God’s Wisdom’? How few of us order our
lives on the footing of this old teacher’s lesson, and act out the belief
that Wisdom is more than wealth! The man who heaps millions together, and
masses it, fails in life, however a vulgar world and a nominal church may
admire and glorify him. The man who wins Wisdom succeeds, however bare may
be his cupboard, and however people may pity him for having failed in life,
because he has not drawn prizes in the Devil’s lottery. His blank is a
prize, and their prizes are blanks. This decisive subordination of material
to spiritual good is too plainly duty and common sense to need being dwelt
upon; but, alas! like a great many other most obvious, accepted truths, it
is disregarded as universally as believed.
The inseparable accompaniments of
Wisdom are next eloquently described. The picture is the poetical clothing
of the idea that all material good will come to him who despises it all and
clasps Wisdom to his heart. Some things flow from Wisdom possessed as usual
consequences; some are inseparable from her. The gift in her right hand is
length of days; that in her left, which, by its position, is suggested as
inferior to the former, is wealth and honour—two goods which will attend the
long life. No doubt such promises are to be taken with limitations; but
there need be no doubt that, on the whole, loyal devotion to and real
possession of heavenly Wisdom do tend in the direction of lengthening lives,
which are by it delivered from vices and anxieties which cut many a career
short, and of gathering round silver hairs reverence and troops of friends.
These are the usual consequences, and
may be fairly brought into view as secondary encouragements to seek Wisdom.
But if she is sought for the sake of getting these attendant blessings, she
will not be found. She must be loved for herself, not for her dowry, or she
will not be won. At the same time, the overstrained and fantastic morality,
which stigmatises regard to the blessed results of a religious life as
selfishness, finds no support in Scripture, as it has none in common sense.
Would there were more of such selfishness!
Sometimes Wisdom’s hands do not hold
these outward gifts. But the connection between her and the next blessings
spoken of is inseparable. Her ways are pleasantness and peace. ‘In
keeping’—not for keeping—‘her commandments is great reward.’ Inward delight
and deep tranquillity of heart attend every step taken in obedience to
Wisdom. The course of conduct so prescribed will often involve painful
crucifying of the lower nature, but its pleasure far outweighs its pain. It
will often be strewn with sharp flints, or may even have red-hot
ploughshares laid on it, as in old ordeal trials; but still it will be
pleasant to the true self. Sin is a blunder as well as a crime, and
enlightened self-interest would point out the same course as the highest law
of Wisdom. In reality, duty and delight are co-extensive. They are two names
for one thing—one taken from consideration of its obligation; the other,
from observation of its issues. ‘Calm pleasures there abide.’ The only
complete peace, which fills and quiets the whole man, comes from obeying
Wisdom, or what is the same thing, from following Christ. There is no other
way of bringing all our nature into accord with itself, ending the war
between conscience and inclination, between flesh and spirit. There is no
other way of bringing us into amity with all circumstances, so that
fortunate or adverse shall be recognised as good, and nothing be able to
agitate us very much. Peace with ourselves, the world, and God, is always
the consequence of listening to Wisdom.
The whole fair picture is summed up in
verse 18 : ‘She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.’ This is a
distinct allusion to the narrative of Genesis. The flaming sword of the
cherub guard is sheathed, and access to the tree, which gives immortal life
to those who eat, is open to us. Mark how that great word ‘life’ is here
gathering to itself at least the beginnings of higher conceptions than those
of simple existence. It is swelling like a bud, and preparing to open and
disclose the perfect flower, the life which stands in the knowledge of God
and the Christ whom He has sent. Jesus, the incarnate Wisdom, is Himself
‘the Tree of Life in the midst of the paradise of God.’ The condition of
access to it is ‘laying hold’ by the outstretched hand of faith, and keeping
hold with holy obstinacy of grip, in spite of all temptations to slack our
grasp. That retaining is the condition of true blessedness.
Verses 19 and 20 invest the idea of
Wisdom with still loftier sublimity, since they declare that it is an
attribute of God Himself by which creation came into being. The meaning of
the writer is inadequately grasped if we take it to be only that creation
shows God’s Wisdom. This personified Wisdom dwells with God, is the agent of
creation, comes with invitations to men, may be possessed by them, and
showers blessings on them. The planet Neptune was divined before it was
discovered, by reason of perturbations in the movements of the exterior
members of the system, unaccountable unless some great globe of light,
hitherto unseen, were swaying them in their orbits. Do we not see here like
influence streaming from the unrisen light of Christ? Personification
prepares for Incarnation. There is One who has been with the Father from the
beginning, by whom all things came into being, whose voice sounds to all,
who is the Tree of Life, whom we may all possess, and with whose own peace
we may be peaceful and blessed for evermore.
Verses 21-24 belong to the next
section of the great discourse or hymn. They add little to the preceding.
But we may observe the earnest exhortation to let wisdom and understanding
be ever in sight. Eyes are apt to stray and clouds to hide the sun. Effort
is needed to counteract the tendency to slide out of consciousness, which
our weakness imposes on the most certain and important truths. A Wisdom
which we do not think about is as good or as bad as non-existent for us. One
prime condition of healthy spiritual life is the habit of meditation,
thereby renewing our gaze upon the facts of God’s revelation and the bearing
of these on our conduct.
The blessings flowing from Wisdom are
again dilated on, from a somewhat different point of view. She is the giver
of life. And then she adorns the life she gives. One has seen homely faces
so refined and glorified by the fair soul that shone through them as to be,
‘as it were, the face of an angel.’ Gracefulness should be the outward token
of inward grace. Some good people forget that they are bound to ‘adorn the
doctrine.’ But they who have drunk most deeply of the fountain of Wisdom
will find that, like the fabled spring, its waters confer strange
loveliness. Lives spent in communion with Jesus will be lovely, however
homely their surroundings, and however vulgar eyes, taught only to admire
staring colours, may find them dull. The world saw ‘no beauty that they
should desire Him,’ in Him whom holy souls and heavenly angels and the
divine Father deemed ‘fairer than the sons of men’!
Safety and firm footing in active life
will be ours if we walk in Wisdom’s ways. He who follows Christ’s footsteps
will tread surely, and not fear foes. Quiet repose in hours of rest will be
his. A day filled with happy service will be followed by a night full of
calm slumber, ‘Whether we sleep or wake, we live’ with Him; and, if we do
both, sleeping and waking will be blessed, and our lives will move on gently
to the time when days and nights shall melt into one, and there will be no
need for repose; for there will be no work that wearies and no hands that
droop. The last lying down in the grave will be attended with no terrors.
The last sleep there shall be sweet; for it will really be awaking to the
full possession of the personal Wisdom, who is our Christ, our Life in
death, our Heaven in heaven.
Proverbs
4:10-19 THE TWO PATHS
This passage includes much more than
temperance or any other single virtue. It is a perfectly general exhortation
to that practical wisdom which walks in the path of righteousness. The
principles laid down here are true in regard to drunkenness and abstinence,
but they are intended to receive a wider application, and to that wider
application we must first look. The theme is the old, familiar one of the
two paths, and the aim is to recommend the better way by setting forth the
contrasted effects of walking in it and in the other.
The general call to listen in verse 10
is characteristically enforced by the Old Testament assurance that obedience
prolongs life. That is a New Testament truth as well; for there is nothing
more certain than that a life in conformity with God’s will, which is the
same thing as a life in conformity with physical laws, tends to longevity.
The experience of any doctor will show that. Here in England we have
statistics which prove that total abstainers are a long-lived people, and
some insurance offices construct their tables accordingly.
After that general call to listen
comes, in verse 11 , the description of the path in which long life is to be
found. It is ‘the way of Wisdom’—that is, that which Wisdom prescribes, and
in which therefore it is wise to walk. It is always foolish to do wrong. The
rough title of an old play is The Devil is an Ass , and if that is not true
about him, it is absolutely true about those who listen to his lies. Sin is
the stupidest thing in the universe, for it ignores the plainest facts, and
never gets what it flings away so much to secure.
Another aspect of the path is
presented in the designation ‘paths of uprightness,’ which seems to be
equivalent to those which belong to, or perhaps which consist of,
uprightness. The idea of straightness or evenness is the primary meaning of
the word, and is, of course, appropriate to the image of a path. In the
moral view, it suggests how much more simple and easy a course of rectitude
is than one of sin. The one goes straight and unswerving to its end; the
other is crooked, devious, intricate, and wanders from the true goal. A
crooked road is a long road, and an up-and-down road is a tiring road.
Wisdom’s way is straight, level, and steadily approaches its aim.
In verse 13 the image of the path is
dropped for the moment, and the picture of the way of uprightness and its
travellers is translated into the plain exhortation to keep fast hold of
‘instruction,’ which is substantially equivalent to the queenly Wisdom of
these early chapters of Proverbs. The earnestness of the repeated
exhortations implies the strength of the forces that tend to sweep us,
especially those of us who are young, from our grasp of that Wisdom. Hands
become slack, and many a good gift drops from nerveless fingers; thieves
abound who will filch away ‘instruction,’ if we do not resolutely hold tight
by it. Who would walk through the slums of a city holding jewels with a
careless grasp, and never looking at them? How many would he have left if he
did? We do not need to do anything to lose instruction. If we will only do
nothing to keep it, the world and our own hearts will make sure that we lose
it. And if we lose it, we lose ourselves; for ‘she is thy life,’ and the
mere bodily life, that is lived without her, is not worth calling the life
of a man.
Verses 14 to 17 give the picture of
the other path, in terrible contrast with the preceding. It is noteworthy
that, while in the former the designation was the ‘path of uprightness’ or
of ‘wisdom,’ and the description therefore was mainly of the characteristics
of the path, here the designation is ‘the path of the wicked ,’ and the
description is mainly of the travellers on it. Righteousness was dealt with,
as it were, in the abstract; but wickedness is too awful and dark to be
painted thus, and is only set forth in the concrete, as seen in its doers.
Now, it is significant that the first exhortation here is of a negative
character. In contrast with the reiterated exhortations to keep wisdom, here
are reiterated counsels to steer clear of evil. It is all about us, and we
have to make a strong effort to keep it at arm’s-length. ‘Whom resist’ is
imperative. True, negative virtue is incomplete, but there will be no
positive virtue without it. We must be accustomed to say ‘No,’ or we shall
come to little good. An outer belt of firs is sometimes planted round a
centre of more tender and valuable wood to shelter the young trees; so we
have to make a fence of abstinences round our plantation of positive
virtues. The decalogue is mostly prohibitions. ‘So did not I, because of the
fear of God’ must be our motto. In this light, entire abstinence from
intoxicants is seen to be part of the ‘way of Wisdom.’ It is one, and, in
the present state of England and America, perhaps the most important, of the
ways by which we can ‘turn from’ the path of the wicked and ‘pass on.’
The picture of the wicked in verses 16
and 17 is that of very grossly criminal sinners. They are only content when
they have done harm, and delight in making others as bad as themselves. But,
diabolical as such a disposition is, one sees it only too often in full
operation. How many a drunkard or impure man finds a fiendish pleasure in
getting hold of some innocent lad, and ‘putting him up to a thing or two,’
which means teaching him the vices from which the teacher has ceased to get
much pleasure, and which he has to spice with the condiment of seeing an
unaccustomed sinner’s eagerness! Such people infest our streets, and there
is only one way for a young man to be safe from them,—‘avoid, pass not by,
turn from, and pass on.’ The reference to ‘bread’ and ‘wine’ in verse 17
seems simply to mean that the wicked men’s living is won by their
‘wickedness,’ which procures bread, and by their ‘violence,’ which brings
them wine. It is the way by which these are obtained that is culpable. We
may contrast this foul source of a degraded living with verse 13 , where
‘instruction’ is set forth as ‘the life’ of the upright.
Verses 18 and 19 bring more closely
together the two paths, and set them in final, forcible contrast. The phrase
‘the perfect day’ might be rendered, vividly though clumsily, ‘the steady of
the day’—that is, noon, when the sun seems to stand still in the meridian.
So the image compares the path of the just to the growing brightness of
morning dawn, becoming more and more fervid and lustrous, till the climax of
an Eastern midday. No more sublime figure of the continuous progress in
goodness, brightness, and joy, which is the best reward of walking in the
paths of uprightness, can be imagined; and it is as true as it is sublime.
Blessed they who in the morning of their days begin to walk in the way of
wisdom; for, in most cases, years will strengthen their uprightness, and to
that progress there will be no termination, nor will the midday sun have to
decline westward to diminishing splendour or dismal setting, but that
noontide glory will be enhanced, and made eternal in a new heaven. The
brighter the light, the darker the shadow. That blaze of growing glory,
possible for us all, makes the tragic gloom to which evil men condemn
themselves the thicker and more doleful, as some dungeon in an Eastern
prison seems pitch dark to one coming in from the blaze outside. ‘How great
is that darkness!’ It is the darkness of sin, of ignorance, of sorrow, and
what adds deeper gloom to it is that every soul that sits in that shadow of
death might have been shining, a sun, in the spacious heaven of God’s love.
Proverbs 4:12 MONOTONY AND CRISES
The old metaphor likening life to a
path has many felicities in it. It suggests constant change, it suggests
continuous progress in one direction, and that all our days are linked
together, and are not isolated fragments; and it suggests an aim and an end.
So we find it perpetually in this Book of Proverbs. Here the ‘way’ has a
specific designation, ‘the way of Wisdom’—that is to say, the way which
Wisdom teaches, and the way on which Wisdom accompanies us, and the way
which leads to Wisdom. Now, these two clauses of my text are not merely an
instance of the peculiar feature of Hebrew poetry called parallelism, in
which two clauses, substantially the same, occur, but with a little pleasing
difference. ‘When thou goest’—that is, the monotonous tramp, tramp, tramp of
slow walking along the path of an uneventful daily life, the humdrum ‘one
foot up and another foot down’ which makes the most of our days. ‘When thou
runnest’—that points to the crises, the sudden spurts, the necessarily brief
bursts of more than usual energy and effort and difficulty. And about both
of them, the humdrum and the exciting, the monotonous and the startling, the
promise comes that if we walk in the path of Wisdom we shall not get
disgusted with the one and we shall not be overwhelmed by the other. ‘When
thou walkest, thy steps shall not be straitened; when thou runnest, thou
shalt not stumble.’
But before I deal with these two
clauses specifically, let me recall to you the condition, and the sole
condition, upon which either of them can be fulfilled in our daily lives.
The book from which my text is taken is probably one of the very latest in
the Old Testament, and you catch in it a very significant and marvellous
development of the Old Testament thought. For there rises up, out of these
early chapters of the Book of Proverbs, that august and serene figure of the
queenly Wisdom, which is more than a personification and is less than a
person and a prophecy. It means more than the wise man that spoke it saw; it
means for us Christ, ‘the Power of God and the Wisdom of God.’ And so
instead of keeping ourselves merely to the word of the Book of Proverbs, we
must grasp the thing that shines through the word, and realise that the
writer’s visions can only become realities when the serene and august Wisdom
that he saw shimmering through the darkness took to itself a human Form, and
‘the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.’
With that heightening of the meaning
of the phrase, ‘the path of Wisdom’ assumes a heightened meaning too, for it
is the path of the personal Wisdom, the Incarnate Wisdom, Christ Himself.
And what does it then come to be to obey this command to walk in the way of
Wisdom? Put it into three sentences. Let the Christ who is not only wise,
but Wisdom, choose your path, and be sure that by the submission of your
will all your paths are His, and not only yours. Make His path yours by
following in His steps, and do in your place what you think Christ would
have done if He had been there. Keep company with Him on the road. If we
will do these three things—if we will say to Him, ‘Lord, when Thou sayest
go, I go; when Thou biddest me come, I come; I am Thy slave, and I rejoice
in the bondage more than in all licentious liberty, and what Thou biddest me
do, I do’—if you will further say, ‘As Thou art, so am I in the world’—and
if you will further say, ‘Leave me not alone, and let me cling to Thee on
the road, as a little child holds on by her mother’s skirt or her father’s
hand,’ then, and only then, will you walk in the path of Wisdom.
Now, then, these three
things—submission of will, conformity of conduct, closeness of
companionship—these three things being understood, let us look for a moment
at the blessings that this text promises, and first at the promise for long
uneventful stretches of our daily life. That, of course, is mainly the
largest proportion of all our lives. Perhaps nine-tenths at least of all our
days and years fall under the terms of this first promise, ‘When thou
walkest.’ For many miles there comes nothing particular, nothing at all
exciting, nothing new, nothing to break the plod, plod, plod along the road.
Everything is as it was yesterday, and the day before that, and as it will
be to-morrow, and the day after that, in all probability. ‘The trivial
round, the common task’ make up by far the largest percentage of our lives.
It is as in wine, the immense proportion of it is nothing but water, and
only a small proportion of alcohol is diffused through the great mass of the
tamer liquid.
Now, then, if Jesus Christ is not to
help us in the monotony of our daily lives, what, in the name of common
sense, is His help good for? If it is not true that He will be with us, not
only in the moments of crisis, but in the long commonplace hours, we may as
well have no Christ at all, for all that I can see. Unless the trivial is
His field, there is very little field for Him, in your life or mine. And so
it should come to all of us who have to take up this daily burden of small,
monotonous, constantly recurring, and therefore often wearisome, duties, as
even a more blessed promise than the other one, that ‘when thou walkest, thy
steps shall not be straitened.’
I remember hearing of a man that got
so disgusted with having to dress and undress himself every day that he
committed suicide to escape from the necessity. That is a very extreme form
of the feeling that comes over us all sometimes, when we wake in a morning
and look before us along the stretch of dead level, which is a great deal
more wearisome when it lasts long than are the cheerful vicissitudes of up
hill and down dale. We all know the deadening influence of a habit. We all
know the sense of disgust that comes over us at times, and of utter
weariness, just because we have been doing the same things day after day for
so long. I know only one infallible way of preventing the common from
becoming commonplace, of preventing the small from becoming trivial, of
preventing the familiar from becoming contemptible, and it is to link it all
to Jesus Christ, and to say, ‘For Thy sake, and unto Thee, I do this’; then,
not only will the rough places become plain, and the crooked things
straight, and not only will the mountains be brought low, but the valleys of
the commonplace will be exalted. ‘Thy steps shall not be straitened.’ ‘I
will make his feet as hind’s feet,’ says one of the old prophets. What a
picture of light, buoyant, graceful movement that is! And each of us may
have that, instead of the grind, grind, grind! tramp, tramp, tramp! along
the level and commonplace road of our daily lives, if we will. Walk in the
path of Christ, with Christ, towards Christ, and ‘thy steps shall not be
straitened.’
Now, there is another aspect of this
same promise—viz. if we thus are in the path of Incarnate Wisdom, we shall
not feel the restrictions of the road to be restraints. ‘Thy steps shall not
be straitened’; although there is a wall on either side, and the road is the
narrow way that leads to life, it is broad enough for the sober man, because
he goes in a straight line, and does not need half the road to roll about
in. The limits which love imposes, and the limits which love accepts, are
not narrowing. ‘I will walk at liberty, for—I do as I like.’ No! that is
slavery; but, ‘I will walk at liberty, for I keep Thy precepts’; and I do
not want to go vagrantising at large, but limit myself thankfully to the way
which Thou dost mark out. ‘Thy steps shall not be straitened.’ So much for
the first of these promises.
Now what about the other one? ‘When
thou runnest, thou shalt not stumble.’
As I have said, the former promise
applies to the hours and the years of life. The latter applies to but a few
moments of each man’s life. Cast your thoughts back over your own days, and
however changeful, eventful, perhaps adventurous, and as we people call it,
romantic, some parts of our lives may have been, yet for all that you can
put the turning-points, the crises that have called for great efforts, and
the gathering of yourselves up, and the calling forth of all your powers to
do and to dare, you can put them all inside of a week, in most cases. ‘When
thou runnest, thou shalt not stumble.’ The greater the speed, the greater
the risk of stumbling over some obstacle in the way. We all know how many
men there are that do very well in the uneventful commonplaces of life, but
bring them face to face with some great difficulty or some great trial, and
there is a dismal failure. Jesus Christ is ready to make us fit for anything
in the way of difficulty, in the way of trial, that can come storming upon
us from out of the dark. And He will make us so fit if we follow the
injunctions to which I have already been referring. Without His help it is
almost certain that when we have to run, our ankles will give, or there will
be a stone in the road that we never thought of, and the excitement will
sweep us away from principle, and we shall lose our hold on Him; and then it
is all up with us.
There is a wonderful saying in one of
the prophets, which uses this same metaphor of my text with a difference,
where it speaks of the divine guidance of Israel as being like that of a
horse in the wilderness. Fancy the poor, nervous, tremulous creature trying
to keep its footing upon the smooth granite slabs of Sinai. Travellers dare
not take their horses on mountain journeys, because they are highly nervous
and are not sure-footed enough. And, so says the old prophet, that gracious
Hand will be laid on the bridle, and hold the nervous creature’s head up as
it goes sliding over the slippery rocks, and so He will bring it down to
rest in the valley. ‘Now unto Him that is able to keep us from stumbling,’
as is the true rendering, ‘and to present us faultless . . . be glory.’
Trust Him, keep near Him, let Him choose your way, and try to be like Him in
it; and whatever great occasions may arise in your lives, either of sorrow
or of duty, you will be equal to them.
But remember the virtue that comes out
victorious in the crisis must have been nourished and cultivated in the
humdrum moments. For it is no time to make one’s first acquaintance with
Jesus Christ when the eyeballs of some ravenous wild beast are staring into
ours, and its mouth is open to swallow us. Unless He has kept our feet from
being straitened in the quiet walk, He will not be able to keep us from
stumbling in the vehement run.
One word more. This same distinction
is drawn by one of the prophets, who adds another clause to it. Isaiah, or
the author of the second portion of the book which goes by his name, puts in
wonderful connection the two thoughts of my text with analogous thoughts in
regard to God, when he says, ‘Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, that
the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth,
fainteth not, neither is weary?’ and immediately goes on to say, ‘They that
wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall run and not be
weary, they shall walk and not faint.’ So it is from God, the unfainting and
the unwearied, that the strength comes which makes our steps buoyant with
energy amidst the commonplace, and steadfast and established at the crises
of our lives. But before these two great promises is put another one: ‘They
shall mount up with wings as eagles,’ and therefore both the other become
possible. That is to say, fellowship with God in the heavens, which is made
possible on earth by communion with Christ, is the condition both of the
unwearied running and of unfainting walking. If we will keep in the path of
Christ, He will take care of the commonplace dreary tracts and of the brief
moments of strain and effort, and will bring us at last where He has gone,
if, looking unto Him, we ‘run with patience the race,’ and walk with
cheerfulness the road, ‘that is set before us.’
Proverbs
4:18 FROM DAWN TO NOON
‘Then shall the righteous shine forth
as the sun in the kingdom of their father.’— MATT. 13: 43 .
The metaphor common to both these
texts is not infrequent throughout Scripture. In one of the oldest parts of
the Old Testament, Deborah’s triumphal song, we find, ‘Let all them that
love Thee be as the sun when he goeth forth in his might.’ In one of the
latest parts of the Old Testament, Daniel’s prophecy, we read, ‘They that be
wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many
to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.’ Then in the New Testament
we have Christ’s comparison of His servants to light, and the great promise
which I have read as my second text. The upshot of them all is this—the most
radiant thing on earth is the character of a good man. The world calls men
of genius and intellectual force its lights. The divine estimate, which is
the true one, confers the name on righteousness.
But my first text follows out another
analogy; not only brightness, but progressive brightness, is the
characteristic of the righteous man.
We are to think of the strong Eastern
sun, whose blinding light steadily increases till the noontide. ‘The perfect
day’ is a somewhat unfortunate translation. What is meant is the point of
time at which the day culminates, and for a moment, the sun seems to stand
steady, up in those southern lands, in the very zenith, raying down ‘the
arrows that fly by noonday.’ The text does not go any further, it does not
talk about the sad diminution of the afternoon. The parallel does not hold;
though, if we consult appearance and sense alone, it seems to hold only too
well. For, sadder than the setting of the suns, which rise again to-morrow,
is the sinking into darkness of death, from which there seems to be no
emerging. But my second text comes in to tell us that death is but as the
shadow of eclipse which passes, and with it pass obscuring clouds and
envious mists, and ‘then shall the righteous blaze forth like the sun in
their Heavenly Father’s kingdom.’
And so the two texts speak to us of
the progressive brightness, and the ultimate, which is also the progressive,
radiance of the righteous.
I. In looking at them together, then,
I would notice, first, what a Christian life is meant to be.
I must not linger on the lovely
thoughts that are suggested by that attractive metaphor of life. It must be
enough, for our present purpose, to say that the light of the Christian
life, like its type in the heavens, may be analysed into three beams—purity,
knowledge, blessedness. And these three, blended together, make the pure
whiteness of a Christian soul.
But what I wish rather to dwell upon
is the other thought, the intention that every Christian life should be a
life of increasing lustre, uninterrupted, and the natural result of
increasing communion with, and conformity to, the very fountain itself of
heavenly radiance.
Remember how emphatically, in all
sorts of ways, progress is laid down in Scripture as the mark of a religious
life. There is the emblem of my text. There is our Lord’s beautiful one of
vegetable growth: ‘First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the
ear.’ There is the other metaphor of the stages of human life, ‘babes in
Christ,’ young men in Him, old men and fathers. There is the metaphor of the
growth of the body. There is the metaphor of the gradual building up of a
structure. We are to ‘edify ourselves together,’ and to ‘build ourselves up
on our most holy faith.’ There is the other emblem of a race—continual
advance as the result of continual exertion, and the use of the powers
bestowed upon us.
And so in all these ways, and in many
others that I need not now touch upon, Scripture lays it down as a rule that
life in the highest region, like life in the lowest, is marked by continual
growth. It is so in regard to all other things. Continuity in any kind of
practice gives increasing power in the art. The artisan, the blacksmith with
his hammer, the skilled artificer at his trade, the student at his subject,
the good man in his course of life, and the bad man in his, do equally show
that use becomes second nature. And so, in passing, let me say what
incalculable importance there is in our getting habit, with all its mystical
power to mould life, on the side of righteousness, and of becoming
accustomed to do good, and so being unfamiliar with evil.
Let me remind you, too, how this
intention of continuous growth is marked by the gifts that are bestowed upon
us in Jesus Christ. He gives us—and it is by no means the least of the gifts
that He bestows—an absolutely unattainable aim as the object of our efforts.
For He bids us not only be ‘perfect, as our Father in Heaven is perfect,’
but He bids us be entirely conformed to His own Self. The misery of men is
that they pursue aims so narrow and so shabby that they can be attained, and
are therefore left behind, to sink hull down on the backward horizon. But to
have before us an aim which is absolutely unreachable, instead of being, as
ignorant people say, an occasion of despair and of idleness, is, on the
contrary, the very salt of life. It keeps us young, it makes hope immortal,
it emancipates from lower pursuits, it diminishes the weight of sorrows, it
administers an anaesthetic to every pain. If you want to keep life fresh,
seek for that which you can never fully find.
Christ gives us infinite powers to
reach that unattainable aim, for He gives us access to all His own fullness,
and there is more in His storehouses than we can ever take, not to say more
than we can ever hope to exhaust. And therefore, because of the aim that is
set before us, and because of the powers that are bestowed upon us to reach
it, there is stamped upon every Christian life unmistakably as God’s purpose
and ideal concerning it, that it should for ever and for ever be growing
nearer and nearer, as some ascending spiral that ever circles closer and
closer, and yet never absolutely unites with the great central Perfection
which is Himself.
So, brethren, for every one of us, if
we are Christian people at all, ‘this is the will of God, even your
perfection.’
II. Consider the sad contrast of too
many Christian lives.
I would not speak in terms that might
seem to be reproach and scolding. The matter is far too serious, the disease
far too widespread, to need or to warrant any exaggeration. But, dear
brethren, there are many so-called and, in a fashion, really Christian
people to whom Christ and His work are mainly, if not exclusively, the means
of escaping the consequences of sin—a kind of ‘fire-escape.’ And to very
many it comes as a new thought, in so far as their practical lives are
concerned, that these ought to be lives of steadily increasing deliverance
from the love and the power of sin, and steadily increasing appropriation
and manifestation of Christ’s granted righteousness. There are, I think,
many of us from whom the very notion of progress has faded away. I am sure
there are some of us who were a great deal farther on on the path of the
Christian life years ago, when we first felt that Christ was anything to us,
than we are to-day. ‘When for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need
that one teach you which be the first principles of the oracles of God.’
There is an old saying of one of the
prophets that a child would die a hundred years old, which in a very sad
sense is true about very many folk within the pale of the Christian Church
who are seventy-year-old babes still, and will die so. Suns ‘growing
brighter and brighter until the noonday!’ Ah! there are many of us who are a
great deal more like those strange variable stars that sometimes burst out
in the heavens into a great blaze, that brings them up to the brightness of
stars of the first magnitude, for a day or two; and then they dwindle until
they become little specks of light that the telescope can hardly see.
And there are hosts of us who are
instances, if not of arrested, at any rate of unsymmetrical, development.
The head, perhaps, is cultivated; the intellectual apprehension of
Christianity increases, while the emotional, and the moral, and the
practical part of it are all neglected. Or the converse may be the case; and
we may be full of gush and of good emotion, and of fervour when we come to
worship or to pray, and our lives may not be a hair the better for it all.
Or there may be a disproportion because of an exclusive attention to conduct
and the practical side of Christianity, while the rational side of it, which
should be the basis of all, and the emotional side of it, which should be
the driving power of all, are comparatively neglected.
So, dear brethren! what with
interruptions, what with growing by fits and starts, and long, dreary
winters like the Arctic winters, coming in between the two or three days of
rapid, and therefore brief and unwholesome, development, we must all, I
think, take to heart the condemnation suggested by this text when we compare
the reality of our lives with the divine intention concerning them. Let us
ask ourselves, ‘Have I more command over myself than I had twenty years ago?
Do I live nearer Jesus Christ today than I did yesterday? Have I more of His
Spirit in me? Am I growing? Would the people that know me best say that I am
growing in the grace and knowledge of my Lord and Saviour?’ Astronomers tell
us that there are dark suns, that have burnt themselves out, and are
wandering unseen through the skies. I wonder if there are any extinguished
suns of that sort listening to me at this moment.
III. How the divine purpose concerning
us may be realised by us.
Now the Alpha and the Omega of this,
the one means which includes all other, is laid down by Jesus Christ Himself
in another metaphor when He said, ‘Abide in Me, and I in you; so shall ye
bring forth much fruit.’ Our path will brighten, not because of any radiance
in ourselves, but in proportion as we draw nearer and nearer to the Fountain
of heavenly radiance.
The planets that move round the sun,
further away than we are on earth, get less of its light and heat; and those
that circle around it within the limits of our orbit, get proportionately
more. The nearer we are to Him, the more we shall shine. The sun shines by
its own light, drawn indeed from the shrinkage of its mass, so that it gives
away its very life in warming and illuminating its subject-worlds. But we
shine only by reflected light, and therefore the nearer we keep to Him the
more shall we be radiant.
That keeping in touch with Jesus
Christ is mainly to be secured by the direction of thought, and love, and
trust to Him. If we follow close upon Him we shall not walk in darkness. It
is to be secured and maintained very largely by what I am afraid is much
neglected by Christian people of all sorts nowadays, and that is the
devotional use of their Bibles. That is the food by which we grow. It is to
be secured and maintained still more largely by that which I, again, am
afraid is but very imperfectly attained to by Christian people now, and that
is, the habit of prayer. It is to be secured and maintained, again, by the
honest conforming of our lives, day by day, to the present amount of our
knowledge of Him and of His will. Whosoever will make all his life the
manifestation of his belief, and turn all his creed into principles of
action, will grow both in the comprehensiveness, and in the depths of his
Christian character. ‘Ye are the light in the Lord.’ Keep in Him, and you
will become brighter and brighter. So shall we ‘go from strength to
strength, till we appear before God in Zion.’
IV. Lastly, what brighter rising will
follow the earthly setting?
My second text comes in here. Beauty,
intellect, power, goodness; all go down into the dark. The sun sets, and
there is left a sad and fading glow in the darkening pensive sky, which may
recall the vanished light for a little while to a few faithful hearts, but
steadily passes into the ashen grey of forgetfulness.
But ‘then shall the righteous blaze
forth like the sun, in their Heavenly Father’s kingdom.’ The momentary
setting is but apparent. And ere it is well accomplished, a new sun swims
into the ‘ampler ether, the diviner air’ of that future life, ‘and with new
spangled beams, flames in the forehead of the morning sky.’
The reason for that inherent
brightness suggested in our second text is that the soul of the righteous
man passes from earth into a region out of which we ‘gather all things that
offend, and them that do iniquity.’ There are other reasons for it, but that
is the one which our Lord dwells on. Or, to put it into modern scientific
language, environment corresponds to character. So, when the clouds have
rolled away, and no more mists from the undrained swamps of selfishness and
sin and animal nature rise up to hide the radiance, there shall be a fuller
flood of light poured from the re-created sun.
That brightness thus promised has for
its highest and most blessed character that it is conformity to the Lord
Himself. For, as you may remember, the last use of this emblem that we find
in Scripture refers not to the servant but to the Master, whom His beloved
disciple in Apocalyptic vision saw, with His ‘countenance as the sun shining
in his strength.’ Thus ‘we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He
is.’ And therefore that radiance of the sainted dead is progressive, too.
For it has an infinite fulness to draw upon, and the soul that is joined to
Jesus Christ, and derives its lustre from Him, cannot die until it has
outgrown Jesus and emptied God. The sun will one day be a dark, cold ball.
We shall outlast it.
But, brethren, remember that it is
only those who here on earth have progressively appropriated the brightness
that Christ bestows who have a right to reckon on that better rising. It is
contrary to all probability to believe that the passage from life can change
the ingrained direction and set of a man’s nature. We know nothing that
warrants us in affirming that death can revolutionise character. Do not
trust your future to such a dim peradventure. Here is a plain truth. They
who on earth are as ‘the shining light that shineth more and more unto the
perfect day,’ shall, beyond the shadow of eclipse, shine on as the sun does,
behind the opaque, intervening body, all unconscious of what looks to mortal
eyes on earth an eclipse, and ‘shall blaze out like the sun in their
Heavenly Father’s kingdom.’ For all that we know and are taught by
experience, religious and moral distinctions are eternal. ‘He that is
righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is filthy, let him be
filthy still.’
Proverbs
4:23: KEEPING AND KEPT
The former of these texts imposes a
stringent duty, the latter (1Peter 1:6) promises divine help to perform it.
The relation between them is that between the Law and the Gospel. The Law
commands, the Gospel gives power to obey. The Law pays no attention to man’s
weakness, and points no finger to the source of strength. Its office is to
set clearly forth what we ought to be, not to aid us in becoming so. ‘Here
is your duty, do it’ is, doubtless, a needful message, but it is a chilly
one, and it may well be doubted if it ever rouses a soul to right action.
Moralists have hammered away at preaching self-restraint and a close watch
over the fountain of actions within from the beginning, but their
exhortations have little effect unless they can add to their icy injunctions
the warmth of the promise of our second text, and point to a divine Keeper
who will make duty possible. We must be kept by God, if we are ever to
succeed in keeping our wayward hearts.
I. Without our guarding our hearts, no noble life is possible.
The Old Testament psychology differs
from our popular allocation of certain faculties to bodily organs. We use
head and heart, roughly speaking, as being respectively the seats of thought
and of emotion. But the Old Testament locates in the heart the centre of
personal being. It is not merely the home of the affections, but the seat of
will, moral purpose. As this text says, ‘the issues of life’ flow from it in
all the multitudinous variety of their forms. The stream parts into many
heads, but it has one fountain. To the Hebrew thinkers the heart was the
indivisible, central unity which manifested itself in the whole of the
outward life. ‘As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.’ The heart is the
man. And that personal centre has a moral character which comes to light in,
and gives unity and character to, all his deeds.
That solemn thought that every one of
us has a definite moral character, and that our deeds are not an accidental
set of outward actions but flow from an inner fountain, needs to be driven
home to our consciences, for most of the actions of most men are done so
mechanically, and reflected on so little by the doers, that the conviction
of their having any moral character at all, or of our incurring any
responsibility for them, is almost extinct in us, unless when something
startles conscience into protest.
It is this shrouded inner self to
which supreme care is to be directed. All noble ethical teaching concurs in
this—that a man who seeks to be right must keep, in the sense both of
watching and of guarding, his inner self. Conduct is more easily regulated
than character—and less worth regulating. It avails little to plant watchers
on the stream half way to the sea. Control must be exercised at the source,
if it is to be effectual. The counsel of our first text is a commonplace of
all wholesome moral teaching since the beginning of the world. The phrase
‘with all diligence’ is literally ‘above all guarding,’ and energetically
expresses the supremacy of this keeping. It should be the foremost,
all-pervading aim of every wise man who would not let his life run to waste.
It may be turned into more modern language, meaning just what this ancient
sage meant, if we put it as, ‘Guard thy character with more carefulness than
thou dost thy most precious possessions, for it needs continual
watchfulness, and, untended, will go to rack and ruin.’ The exhortation
finds a response in every heart, and may seem too familiar and trite to bear
dwelling on, but we may be allowed to touch lightly on one or two of the
plain reasons which enforce it on every man who is not what Proverbs very
unpolitely calls ‘a fool.’
That guarding is plainly imposed as
necessary, by the very constitution of our manhood. Our nature is evidently
not a republic, but a monarchy. It is full of blind impulses, and hungry
desires, which take no heed of any law but their own satisfaction. If the
reins are thrown on the necks of these untamed horses, they will drag the
man to destruction. They are only safe when they are curbed and bitted, and
held well in. Then there are tastes and inclinations which need guidance and
are plainly meant to be subordinate. The will is to govern all the lower
self, and conscience is to govern the will. Unmistakably there are parts of
every man’s nature which are meant to serve, and parts which are appointed
to rule, and to let the servants usurp the place of the rulers is to bring
about as wild a confusion within as the Ecclesiast lamented that he had seen
in the anarchic times when he wrote—princes walking and beggars on
horseback. As George Herbert has it—
‘Give not thy humours way;
God gave them to thee under lock and key.’
Then, further, that guarding is
plainly imperative, because there is an outer world which appeals to our
needs and desires, irrespective altogether of right and wrong and of the
moral consequences of gratifying these. Put a loaf before a starving man and
his impulse will be to clutch and devour it, without regard to whether it is
his or no. Show any of our animal propensities its appropriate food, and it
asks no questions as to right or wrong, but is stirred to grasp its natural
food. And even the higher and nobler parts of our nature are but too apt to
seek their gratification without having the license of conscience for doing
so, and sometimes in defiance of its plain prohibitions. It is never safe to
trust the guidance of life to tastes, inclinations, or to anything but clear
reason, set in motion by calm will, and acting under the approbation of ‘the
Lord Chief Justice, Conscience.’
But again, seeing that the world has
more evil than good in it, the keeping of the heart will always consist
rather in repelling solicitations to yielding to evil. In short, the power
and the habit of sternly saying ‘No’ to the whole crowd of tempters is
always the main secret of a noble life. ‘He that hath no rule over his own
spirit is like a city broken down and without walls.’
II. There is no effectual guarding
unless God guards.
The counsel in Proverbs is not mere
toothless moral commonplace, but is associated, in the preceding chapter,
with fatherly advice to ‘let thine heart keep my commandments’ and to ‘trust
in the Lord with all thine heart.’ The heart that so trusts will be safely
guarded, and only such a heart will be. The inherent weakness of all
attempts at self-keeping is that keeper and kept being one and the same
personality, the more we need to be kept the less able we are to effect it.
If in the very garrison are traitors, how shall the fortress be defended?
If, then, we are to exercise an effectual guard over our characters and
control over our natures, we must have an outward standard of right and
wrong which shall not be deflected by variations in our temperature. We need
a fixed light to steer towards, which is stable on the stable shore, and is
not tossing up and down on our decks. We shall cleanse our way only when we
‘take heed thereto, according to Thy word.’ For even God’s viceroy within,
the sovereign conscience, can be warped, perverted, silenced, and is not
immune from the spreading infection of evil. When it turns to God, as a
mirror to the sun, it is irradiated and flashes bright illumination into
dark corners, but its power depends on its being thus lit by radiations from
the very Light of Life. And if we are ever to have a coercive power over the
rebellious powers within, we must have God’s power breathed into us, giving
grip and energy to all the good within, quickening every lofty desire,
satisfying every aspiration that feels after Him, cowing all our evil and
being the very self of ourselves.
We need an outward motive which will
stimulate and stir to effort. Our wills are lamed for good, and the world
has strong charms that appeal to us. And if we are not to yield to these,
there must be somewhere a stronger motive than any that the sorceress world
has in its stores, that shall constrainingly draw us to ways that, because
they tend upward, and yield no pabulum for the lower self, are difficult for
sluggish feet. To the writer of this Book of Proverbs the name of God bore
in it such a motive. To us the name of Jesus, which is Love, bears a yet
mightier appeal, and the motive which lies in His death for us is strong
enough, and it alone is strong enough, to fire our whole selves with
enthusiastic, grateful love, which will burn up our sloth, and sweep our
evil out of our hearts, and make us swift and glad to do all that may please
Him. If there must be fresh reinforcements thrown into the town of Mansoul,
as there must be if it is not to be captured, there is one sure way of
securing these. Our second text tells us whence the relieving force must
come. If we are to keep our hearts with all diligence, we must be ‘kept by
the power of God,’ and that power is not merely to make diversion outside
the beleaguered fortress which may force the besiegers to retreat and give
up their effort, but is to enter in and possess the soul which it wills to
defend. It is when the enemy sees that new succours have, in some mysterious
way, been introduced, that he gives up his siege. It is God in us that is
our security.
III. There is no keeping by God
without faith.
Peter was an expert in such matters,
for he had had a bitter experience to teach him how soon and surely
self-confidence became self-despair. ‘Though all should forsake Thee, yet
will not I,’ was said but a few hours before he denied Jesus. His faith
failed, and then the divine guard that was keeping his soul passed thence,
and, left alone, he fell.
That divine Power is exerted for our
keeping on condition of our trusting ourselves to Him and trusting Him for
ourselves. And that condition is no arbitrary one, but is prescribed by the
very nature of divine help and of human faith. If God could keep our souls
without our trust in Him He would. He does so keep them as far as is
possible, but for all the choicer blessings of His giving, and especially
for that of keeping us free from the domination of our lower selves, there
must be in us faith if there is to be in God help. The hand that lays hold
on God in Christ must be stretched out and must grasp His warm, gentle, and
strong hand, if the tingling touch of it is to infuse strength. If the
relieving force is victoriously to enter our hearts, we must throw open the
gates and welcome it. Faith is but the open door for God’s entrance. It has
no efficacy in itself any more than a door has, but all its blessedness
depends on what it admits into the hidden chambers of the heart.
I reiterate what I have tried to show
in these poor words. There is no noble life without our guarding our hearts;
there is no effectual guarding unless God guards; there is no divine
guarding unless through our faith. It is vain to preach self-governing and
self-keeping. Unless we can tell the beleaguered heart, ‘The Lord is thy
Keeper; He will keep thee from all evil; He will keep thy soul,’ we only add
one more impossible command to a man’s burden. And we do not apprehend nor
experience the divine keeping in its most blessed and fullest reality,
unless we find it in Jesus, who is ‘able to keep us from falling, and to
present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy.’
Proverbs 5:22 THE CORDS OF SIN
‘His own iniquities shall take the
wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins.’—
PROVERBS v. 22 .
In Hosea’s tender picture of the
divine training of Israel which, alas! failed of its effect, we read, ‘I
drew them with cords of a man,’ which is further explained as being ‘with
bands of love.’ The metaphor in the prophet’s mind is probably that of a
child being ‘taught to go’ and upheld in its first tottering steps by
leading-strings. God drew Israel, though Israel did not yield to the
drawing. But if these gentle, attractive influences, which ever are raying
out from Him, are resisted, another set of cords, not now sustaining and
attracting, but hampering and fettering, twine themselves round the
rebellious life, and the man is like a wild creature snared in the hunter’s
toils, enmeshed in a net, and with its once free limbs restrained. The
choice is open to us all, whether we will let God draw us to Himself with
the sweet manlike cords of His educative and forbearing love, or, flinging
off these, which only foolish self-will construes into limitations, shall
condemn ourselves to be prisoned within the narrow room of our own sins. We
may choose which condition shall be ours, but one or other of them must be
ours. We may either be drawn by the silken cord of God’s love or we may be
‘holden by the cords’ of our sins.
In both clauses of our text evil deeds
done are regarded as having a strange, solemn life apart from the doer of
them, by which they become influential factors in his subsequent life. Their
issues on others may be important, but their issues on him are the most
important of all. The recoil of the gun on the shoulder of him who fired it
is certain, whether the cartridge that flew from its muzzle wounded anything
or not. ‘His own iniquities shall take the wicked’—they ring him round, a
grim company to whom he has given an independent being, and who have now
‘taken’ him prisoner and laid violent hands on him. A long since forgotten
novel told of the fate of ‘a modern Prometheus,’ who made and put life into
a dreadful creature in man’s shape, that became the curse of its creator’s
life. That tragedy is repeated over and over again. We have not done with
our evil deeds when we have done them, but they, in a very terrible sense,
begin to be when they are done. We sow the seeds broadcast, and the seed
springs up dragon’s teeth.
The view of human experience set
forth, especially in the second clause of this text, directs our gaze into
dark places, into which it is not pleasant to look, and many of you will
accuse me of preaching gloomily if I try to turn a reflective eye inwards
upon them, but no one will be able to accuse me of not preaching truly. It
is impossible to enumerate all the cords that make up the net in which our
own evil doings hold us meshed, but let me point out some of these.
I. Our evil deeds become evil habits.
We all know that anything once done
becomes easier to do again. That is true about both good and bad actions,
but ‘ill weeds grow apace,’ and it is infinitely easier to form a bad habit
than a good one. The young shoot is green and flexible at first, but it soon
becomes woody and grows high and strikes deep. We can all verify the
statement of our text by recalling the tremors of conscience, the
self-disgust, the dread of discovery which accompanied the first commission
of some evil deed, and the silence of undisturbed, almost unconscious
facility, that accompanied later repetitions of it. Sins of sense and animal
passion afford the most conspicuous instances of this, but it is by no means
confined to these. We have but to look steadily at our own lives to be aware
of the working of this solemn law in them, however clear we may be of the
grosser forms of evil deeds. For us all it is true that custom presses on us
‘with a weight, heavy as frost and deep almost as life,’ and that it is as
hard for the Ethiopian to change his skin or the leopard his spots as for
those who ‘are accustomed to do evil’ to ‘do good.’
But experience teaches not only that
evil deeds quickly consolidate into evil habits, but that as the habit grips
us faster, the poor pleasure for the sake of which the acts are done
diminishes. The zest which partially concealed the bitter taste of the once
eagerly swallowed morsel is all but gone, but the morsel is still sought and
swallowed. Impulses wax as motives wane, the victim is like an ox tempted on
the road to the slaughter-house at first by succulent fodder held before it,
and at last driven into it by pricking goads and heavy blows. Many a man is
so completely wrapped in the net which his own evil deeds have made for him,
that he commits the sin once more, not because he finds any pleasure in it,
but for no better reason than that he has already committed it often, and
the habit is his master.
There are many forms of evil which
compel us to repeat them for other reasons than the force of habit. For
instance, a fraudulent book-keeper has to go on making false entries in his
employer’s books in order to hide his peculations. Whoever steps on to the
steeply sloping road to which self-pleasing invites us, soon finds that he
is on an inclined plane well greased, and that compulsion is on him to go
on, though he may recoil from the descent, and be shudderingly aware of what
the end must be. Let no man say, ‘I will do this doubtful thing once only,
and never again.’ Sin is like an octopus, and if the loathly thing gets the
tip of one slender filament round a man, it will envelop him altogether and
drag him down to the cruel beak.
Let us then remember how swiftly deeds
become habits, and how the fetters, which were silken at first, rapidly are
exchanged for iron chains, and how the craving increases as fast as the
pleasure from gratifying it diminishes. Let us remember that there are many
kinds of evil which seem to force their own repetition, in order to escape
their consequences and to hide the sin. Let us remember that no man can
venture to say, ‘This once only will I do this thing.’ Let us remember that
acts become habits with dreadful swiftness, and let us beware that we do not
forge chains of darkness for ourselves out of our own godless deeds.
II. Our evil deeds imprison us for
good.
The tragedy of human life is that we
weave for ourselves manacles that fetter us from following and securing the
one good for which we are made. Our evil past holds us in a firm grip. The
cords which confine our limbs are of our own spinning. What but ourselves is
the reason why so many of us do not yield to God’s merciful drawings of us
to Himself? We have riveted the chains and twined the net that holds us
captive, by our own acts. It is we ourselves who have paralysed our wills,
so that we see the light of God but as a faint gleam far away, and dare not
move to follow the gleam. It is we who have smothered or silenced our
conscience and perverted our tastes, and done violence to all in us that
‘thirsteth for God, even the living God.’ Alas! how many of us have let some
strong evil habit gain such a grip of us that it has overborne our higher
impulses, and silenced the voice within us that cries out for the living
God! We are kept back from Him by our worse selves, and whoever lets that
which is lowest in him keep him from following after God, who is his
‘being’s end and aim,’ is caught and prisoned by the cords woven and knitted
out of his sins. Are there none of us who know, when they are honest with
themselves, that they would have been true Christians long since, had it not
been for one darling evil that they cannot make up their minds to cast off?
Wills disabled from strongly willing the good, consciences silenced as when
the tongue is taken out of a bell-buoy on a shoal, tastes perverted and set
seeking amid the transitory treasures of earth for what God only can give
them, these are the ‘cords’ out of which are knotted the nets that hold so
many of us captive, and hinder our feet from following after God, even the
living God, in following and possessing whom is the only liberty of soul,
the one real joy of life.
III. Our evil deeds work their own
punishment.
I do not venture to speak of the
issues beyond the grave. It is not for a man to press these on his brethren.
But even from the standpoint of this Book of Proverbs, it is certain that
‘the righteous shall be recompensed in the earth, much more the wicked and
the sinner.’ Probably it was the earthly consequences of wrongdoing that
were in the mind of the proverb-maker. And we are not to let our Christian
enlightenment as to the future rob us of the certainty, written large on
human life here and now, that with whatever apparent exceptions in regard to
prosperous sin and tried righteousness, it is yet true that ‘every
transgression and disobedience receives its just recompense of reward.’ Life
is full of consequences of evil-doing. Even here and now we reap as we have
sown. Every sin is a mistake, even if we confine our view to the
consequences sought for in this life by it, and the consequences actually
encountered. ‘A rogue is a roundabout fool.’ True, we believe that there is
a future reaping so complete that it makes the partial harvests gathered
here seem of small account. But the framer of this proverb, who had little
knowledge of that future, had seen enough in the meditative survey of this
present to make him sure that the consequences of evil-doing were certain,
and in a very true sense, penal. And leaving out of sight all that lies in
the dark beyond, surely if we sum up the lamed aspirations, the perverted
tastes, the ossifying of noble emotions, the destruction of the balance of
the nature, the blinding of the eye of the soul, the lowering and narrowing
of the whole nature, and many another wound to the best in man that come as
the sure issue of evil deeds, we do not need to doubt that every sinful man
is miserably ‘holden with the cords of his sin.’ Life is the time for
sowing, but it is a time for reaping too, and we do not need to wait for
death to experience the truth of the solemn warning that ‘he who soweth to
the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption.’ Let us, then, do no deeds
without asking ourselves, What will the harvest be? and if from any deeds
that we have done we have to reap sorrow or inward darkness, let us be
thankful that by experience our Father is teaching us how bitter as well as
evil a thing it is to forsake Him, and cast off His fear from our wayward
spirits.
IV. The cords can be loosened.
Bitter experience teaches that the
imprisoning net clings too tightly to be stripped from our limbs by our own
efforts. Nay rather, the net and the captive are one, and he who tries to
cast off the oppression which hinders him from following that which is good
is trying to cast off himself. The desperate problem that fronts every
effort at self-emendation has two bristling impossibilities in it: one, how
to annihilate the past; one, how to extirpate the evil that is part of my
very self, and yet to keep the self entire. The very terms of the problem
show it to be insoluble, and the climax of all honest efforts at making a
clean thing of an unclean by means within reach of the unclean thing itself,
is the despairing cry, ‘O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me out
of the body of this death?’ But to men writhing in the grip of a sinful
past, or paralysed beyond writhing, and indifferent, because hopeless, or
because they have come to like their captivity, comes one whose name is ‘the
Breaker,’ whose mission it is to proclaim liberty to the captives, and whose
hand laid on the cords that bind a soul, causes them to drop harmless from
the limbs and sets the bondsman free. Many tongues praise Jesus for many
great gifts, but His proper work, and that peculiar to Himself alone, is His
work on the sin and the sins of the world. He deals with that which no man
can deal with for himself or by his own power. He can cancel our past, so
that it shall not govern our future. He can give new power to fight the old
habits. He can give a new life which owes nothing to the former self, and is
free from taint from it. He can break the entail of sin, the ‘law of the
spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ can make any of us, even him who is most
tied and bound by the chain of his sins, ‘free from the law of sin and
death.’ We cannot break the chains that fetter us, and our own struggles,
like the plungings of a wild beast caught in the toils, but draw the bonds
tighter. But the chains that cannot be broken can be melted, and it may
befall each of us as it befell the three Hebrews in the furnace, when the
king ‘was astonished’ and asked, ‘Did not we cast three men bound into the
midst of the fire?’ and wonderingly declared, ‘Lo, I see four men loose
walking in the midst of the fire, and the aspect of the fourth is like a son
of the gods.’
Proverbs 8:21: WISDOM’S GIFT
‘That I may cause those that love me
to inherit substance.’— PROVERBS viii. 21 .
The word here rendered ‘substance’ is
peculiar. Indeed, it is used in a unique construction in this passage. It
means ‘being’ or ‘existence,’ and seems to have been laid hold of by the
Hebrew thinkers, from whom the books commonly called ‘the Wisdom Books’
come, as one of their almost technical expressions. ‘Substance’ may be used
in our translation in its philosophical meaning as the supposed reality
underlying appearances, but if we observe that in the parallel following
clause we find ‘treasures,’ it seems more likely that in the text, it is to
be taken in its secondary, and much debased meaning of wealth, material
possessions. But the prize held out here to the lovers of heavenly wisdom is
much more than worldly good. In deepest truth, the being which is theirs is
God Himself. They who love and seek the wisdom of this book possess Him, and
in possessing Him become possessed of their own true being. They are owners
and lords of themselves, and have in their hearts a fountain of life,
because they have God dwelling with and in them.
I. The quest which always finds.
‘Those who love wisdom’ might be a
Hebrew translation of ‘philosopher,’ and possibly the Jewish teachers of
wisdom were influenced by Greece, but their conception of wisdom has a
deeper source than the Greek had, and what they meant by loving it was a
widely different attitude of mind and heart from that of the Greek
philosopher. It could never be said of the disciples of a Plato that their
quest was sure to end in finding what they sought. Many a man then, and many
a man since, and many a man to-day, has ‘followed knowledge, like a sinking
star,’ and has only caught a glimmer of a far-off and dubious light. There
is only one search which is certain always to find what it seeks, and that
is the search which knows where the object of it is, and seeks not as for
something the locality of which is unknown, but as for that which the place
of which is certain. The manifold voices of human aims cry, ‘Who will show
us any good?’ The seeker who is sure to find is he who prays, ‘Lord, lift
Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us.’ The heart that truly and
supremely affects God is never condemned to seek in vain. The Wisdom of this
book herself is presented as proclaiming, ‘They that seek me earnestly shall
find me,’ and humble souls in every age since then have set to their seal
that the word is true to their experience. For there are two seekers in
every such case, God and man. ‘The Father seeketh such to worship Him,’ and
His love goes through the world, yearning and searching for hearts that will
turn to Him. The shepherd seeks for the lost sheep, and lays it on his
shoulders to bear it back to the fold. Jesus Christ is the incarnation of
the seeking love of God. And the human seeker finds God, or rather is found
by God, for no aspiration after Him is vain, no longing unresponded to, no
effort to find Him unresponded to. We have as much of God as we wish, as
much as our desires have fitted us to receive. The all-penetrating
atmosphere enters every chink open to it, and no seeking soul has ever had
to say, ‘I sought Him but found Him not.’
Is there any other quest of which the
same can be said? Are not all paths of human effort strewed with the
skeletons of men who have fretted and toiled away their lives in vain
attempts to grasp aims that have eluded their grip? Do we not all know the
sickness of disappointed effort, or the sadder sickness of successful
effort, which has secured the apparent good and found it not so good after
all? The Christian life is, amid all the failures of human effort, the only
life in which the seeking after good is but a little less blessed than the
finding of it is, and in which it is always true that ‘he that seeketh
findeth.’ Nor does such finding deaden the spirit of seeking, for in every
finding there is a fresh discovery of new depths in God, and a consequent
quickening of desire to press further into the abyss of His Being, so that
aspiration and fruition ever beget each other, and the upward, Godward
progress of the soul is eternal.
II. The finding that is always
blessed.
We have seen that being is the gift
promised to the lovers of wisdom, and that the promise may either be
referred to the possession of God, who is the fountain of all being, or to
the true possession of ourselves, which is a consequence of our possession
of Him. In either aspect, that possession is blessedness. If we have God, we
have real life. We truly own ourselves when we have God. We really live when
God lives in us, the life of our lives. We are ourselves, when we have
ceased to be ourselves, and have taken God to be the Self of ourselves.
Such a life, God-possessing, brings
the one good which corresponds to our whole nature. All other good is
fragmentary, and being fragmentary is inadequate, as men’s restless search
after various forms of good but too sadly proves. Why does the merchantman
wander over sea and land seeking for many goodly pearls? Because he has not
found one of great price, but tries to make up by their number for the
insufficiency of each. But the soul is made, not to find its wealth in the
manifold but in the one, and no aggregation of incompletenesses will make up
completeness, nor any number of partial satisfactions of this and the other
appetite or desire make a man feel that he has enough and more than enough.
We must have all good in one Person, if we are ever to know the rest of full
satisfaction. It will be fatal to our blessedness if we have to resort to a
hundred different sources for different supplies. The true blessedness is
simple and yet infinitely complex, for it comes from possessing the one
Person in whom dwell for us all forms of good, whether good be understood as
intellectual or moral or emotional. That which cannot be everything to the
soul that seeks is scarcely worth the seeking, and certainly is not wisely
proposed as the object of a life’s search, for such a life will be a failure
if it fails to find its object, and scarcely less tragically, though perhaps
less conspicuously, a failure if it finds it. All other good is but
apparent; God is the one real object that meets all man’s desires and needs,
and makes him blessed with real blessedness, and fills the cup of life with
the draught that slakes thirst and satisfies the thirstiest.
III. The blessedness that always
lasts.
He who finds God, as every one of us
may find Him, in Christ, has found a Good that cannot change, pass, or grow
stale. His blessedness will always last, as long as he keeps fast hold of
that which he has, and lets no man take his crown.
For the Christian’s good is the only
one that does not intend to grow old and pall. We can never exhaust God. We
need never grow weary of Him. Possession robs other wealth of its glamour,
and other pleasures of their poignant sweetness. We grow weary of most good
things, and those which we have long had, we generally find get somewhat
faded and stale. Habit is a fatal enemy to enjoyment. But it only adds to
the joy which springs from the possession of God in Christ. Swedenborg said
that the oldest angels look the youngest, and they who have longest
experience of the joy of fellowship with God are they who enjoy each
instance of it most. We can never drink the chalice of His love to the
dregs, and it will be fresh and sparkling as long as we have lips that can
absorb it. He keeps the good wine till the last.
The Christian’s good is the only good
which cannot be taken away. Loss and change beggars the millionaire
sometimes, and the possibility of loss shadows all earthly good with pale
foreboding. Everything that is outside the substance of the soul can be
withdrawn, but the possession of God in Christ is so intimate and inward, so
interwoven with the very deepest roots of the Christian’s personal being,
that it cannot be taken out from these by any shocks of time or change.
There is but one hand that can end that possession and that is his own. He
can withdraw himself from God, by giving himself over to sin and the world.
He can empty the shrine and compel the indwelling deity to say, as the
legend told was heard in the Temple the night before Roman soldiers
desecrated the Holy of Holies: Let us depart. But besides himself, ‘neither
things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other
creature’ has power to take away that faithful God to whom a poor soul
clings, and in whom whoso thus clings finds its unchangeable good.
The Christian’s good is the only one
from which we cannot be taken. A grim psalm paints for us the life and end
of men ‘who trust in the multitude of their possessions,’ and whose ‘inward
thought is that they have founded families that will last.’ It tells how
‘this their way is folly,’ and yet is approved with acclamations by the
crowd. It lets us see the founder of a family, the possessor of broad acres,
going down to the grave, carrying nothing away, stripped of his glory and
with Death for his shepherd, who has driven his flock from pleasant pastures
here into the dreariness of Sheol. But that shepherd has a double office.
Some he separates from all their possessions, hopes, and joys. Some he,
stern though his aspect and harsh though his guidance, leads up to the green
pastures of God, and as the last messenger of the love of God in Christ,
unites the souls that found God amid the distractions of earth with the God
whom they will know better and possess more fully and blessedly, amid the
unending felicities and progressive blessednesses of Heaven.
Proverbs 8:30-31 WISDOM AND CHRIST
‘Then I was by him, as one brought up
with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; 31.
Rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth; and my delights were with the
sons of men.’— PROVERBS viii. 30, 31
There is a singular difference between
the two portions of this Book of Proverbs. The bulk of it, beginning with
chapter x. , contains a collection of isolated maxims which may be described
as the product of sanctified common sense. They are shrewd and homely, but
not remarkably spiritual or elevated. To these is prefixed this introductory
portion, continuous, lofty in style, and in its personification of divine
wisdom, rising to great sublimity both of thought and of expression. It
seems as if the main body of the book had been fitted with an introduction
by another hand than that of the compilers of the various sets of proverbial
sayings. It is apparently due to an intellectual movement, perhaps not
uninfluenced by Greek thought, and chronologically the latest of the
elements composing the Old Testament scriptures. In place of the lyric
fervour of prophets, and the devout intuition of psalmists, we have the
praise of Wisdom. But that noble portrait is no copy of the Greek
conception, but contains features peculiar to itself. She stands opposed to
blatant, meretricious Folly, and seeks to draw men to herself by lofty
motives and offering pure delights. She is not a person, but she is a
personification of an aspect of the divine nature, and seeing that she is
held forth as willing to bestow herself on men, that queenly figure shadows
the great truth of God’s self-communication as being the end and climax of
all His revelation.
We are on the wrong tack when we look
for more or less complete resemblances between the ‘Wisdom’ of Proverbs and
the ‘Sophia’ of Greek thinkers. It is much rather an anticipation, imperfect
but real, of Jesus than a pale reflection of Greek thought. The way for the
perfect revelation of God in the incarnation was prepared by prophet and
psalmist. Was it not also prepared by this vision of a Wisdom which was
always with God, and yet had its delights with the sons of men, and whilst
‘rejoicing always before Him,’ yet rejoiced in the habitable parts of the
earth?
Let us then look, however imperfect
our gaze may be, at the self-revelation in Proverbs of the personified
divine Wisdom, and compare it with the revelation of the incarnate divine
Word.
I. The Self-revelation of Wisdom.
The words translated in Authorised
Version, ‘As one brought up with him,’ are rendered in Revised Version, ‘as
a master workman,’ and seem intended to represent Wisdom—that is, of course,
the divine Wisdom—as having been God’s agent in the creative act. In the
preceding context, she triumphantly proclaims her existence before His
‘works of old,’ and that she was with God, ‘or ever the earth was.’ Before
the everlasting mountains she was, before fountains flashed in the light and
refreshed the earth, her waters flowed. But that presence is not all, Wisdom
was the divine agent in creation. That thought goes beyond the ancient one:
‘He spake and it was done.’ Genesis regards the divine command as the cause
of creatural being. God said, ‘Let there be—and there was’: the forthputting
of His will was the impulse to which creatures sprang into existence at
response. That is a great thought, but the meditative thinker in our text
has pondered over the facts of creation, and notwithstanding all their
apparent incompletenesses and errors, has risen to the conclusion that they
can all be vindicated as ‘very good.’ To him, this wonderful universe is not
only the product of a sovereign will, but of one guided in its operations by
all-seeing Wisdom.
Then the relation of this divine
Wisdom to God is represented as being a continual delight and a childlike
rejoicing in Him, or as the word literally means, a ‘sporting’ in Him.
Whatever energy of creative action is suggested by the preceding figure of a
‘master workman,’ that energy had no effort. To the divine Wisdom creation
was an easy task. She was not so occupied with it as to interrupt her
delight in contemplating God, and her task gave her infinite satisfaction,
for she ‘rejoiced always’ before Him, and she rejoiced in His habitable
earth. The writer does not shrink from ascribing to the agent of creation
something like the glow of satisfaction that we feel over a piece of
well-done work, the poet’s or the painter’s rapture as he sees his thoughts
bodied forth in melody or glowing on canvas.
But there is a greater thought than
these here, for the writer adds, ‘and my delight was with the sons of men.’
It is noteworthy that the same word is used in the preceding verse. The
‘delight of the heavenly Wisdom in God’ is not unlike that directed to man.
‘The sons of men’ are the last, noblest work of Creation, and on them, as
the shining apex, her delight settles. The words describe not only what was
true when man came into being, as the utmost possible climax of creatural
excellence, but are the revelation of what still remains true.
One cannot but feel how in all this most striking disclosure of the depths
of God, a deeper mystery is on the verge of revelation. There is here, as we
have said, a personification, but there seems to be a Person shining
through, or dimly discerned moving behind, the curtain. Wisdom is the agent
of creation. She creates with ease, and in creating delights in God as well
as in her work, which calls for no effort in doing, and done, is all very
good. She delights most of all in the sons of men, and that delight is
permanent. Does not this unknown Jewish thinker, too, belong, as well as
prophet and psalmist, to those who went before crying, Hosanna to Him that
cometh in the name of the Lord? Let us turn to the New Testament and find an
answer to the question.
II. The higher revelation of the
divine Word.
There can be no doubt that the New
Testament is committed to the teaching that the Eternal Word of God, who was
incarnate in Jesus, was the agent of creation. John, in his profound
prologue to the Gospel, utters the deepest truths in brief sentences of
monosyllables, and utters them without a trace of feeling that they needed
proof. To him they are axiomatic and self evident. ‘All things were made by
Him.’ The words are the words of a child; the thought takes a flight beyond
the furthest reach of the mind of men. Paul, too, adds his Amen when he
proclaims that ‘All things have been created through Him and unto Him, and
He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.’ The writer of
Hebrews declares a Son ‘through whom also He made the worlds, and who
upholds all things by the word of His power’ and does not scruple at
transferring to Jesus the grand poetry of the Psalmist who hymned ‘Thou,
Lord, in the beginning, hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the
heavens are the work of Thy hands.’ We speak of things too deep for us when
we speak of persons in the Godhead, but yet we know that the Eternal Word,
which was from the beginning, was made flesh and dwelt among us. The
personified Wisdom of Proverbs is the personal Word of John’s prologue. John
almost quotes the former when he says ‘the same was in the beginning with
God.’ for his word recalls the grand declaration, ‘The Lord possessed me in
the beginning of His way . . . I was set up in the beginning or ever the
earth was.’ Then there are two beginnings, one lost in the depths of
timeless being, one, the commencement of creative activity, and that Word
was with God in the remotest, as in the nearer, beginning.
But the ancient vision of the Jewish
thinker anticipated the perfect revelation of the New Testament still
further, in its thought of an unbroken communion between the personified
Wisdom and God. That dim thought of perfect communion and interchange of
delights flashes into wondrous clearness when we think of Him who spake of
‘the glory which I had with Thee before the foundation of the world,’ and
calmly declared: ‘Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.’ Into
that depth of mutual love we cannot look, and our eyes are too dim-sighted
to bear the blaze of that flashing interchange of glory, but we shall rob
the earthly life of Jesus of its pathos and saving power, if we do not
recognise that in Him the personification of Proverbs has become a person,
and that when He became flesh, He not only took on Him the garment of
mortality, but laid aside ‘the visible robes of His imperial majesty,’ and
that His being found in fashion as a man was humbling Himself beyond all
humiliation that afterwards was His.
But still further, the Gospel reality
fills out and completes the personification of Proverbs in that it shows us
a divine person who so turned to ‘the sons of men’ that He took on Him their
nature and Himself bore their sicknesses. The Jewish writer had great
thoughts of the divine condescension, and was sure that God’s love still
rested on men, sinful as they were, but not even he could foresee the
miracle of long-suffering love in the Incarnate Jesus, and he had no power
of insight into the depths of the heart of God, that enabled him to foresee
the sufferings and death of Jesus. Till that supreme self-sacrifice was a
fact, it was inconceivable. Alas, now that it is a fact, to how many hearts
that need it most is it still incredible. But passing all anticipation as it
is, it is the root of all joy, the ground of all hope, and to millions of
sinful souls it is their only refuge, and their sovereign example and
pattern of life.
The Jewish thinker had a glimpse of a
divine wisdom which delighted in man, but he did not dream of the divine
stooping to share in man’s sorrows, or of its so loving humanity as to take
on itself its limitations, not only to pity these as God’s images, but to
take part of the same and to die. That man should minister to the divine
delight is wonderful, but that God should participate in man’s grief passes
wonder. Thereby a new tenderness is given to the ancient personification,
and the august form of the divine Wisdom softens and melts into the yet more
august and tender likeness of the divine Love. Nor is there only an
adumbration of the redeeming love of Jesus as He dwells among us here, but
we have to remember that Jesus delights in the sons of men when they love
Him back again. All the sweet mysteries of our loving communion with Him,
and of His joy in our faith, love, and obedience, all the secret treasures
of His self-impartation to, and abiding in, souls that open themselves to
His entrance, are suggested in that thought. We can minister to the joy of
Jesus, and when He is welcomed into any heart, and any man’s love answers
His, He sees of the travail of His soul and is satisfied.
III. The call of the personal Word to
each of us.
The Wisdom of Proverbs is portrayed in
her queenly dignity, as calling men to herself, and promising them the
satisfaction of all their needs. She describes herself that the description
may draw men to her. The self-revelation of God is His mightiest means of
attracting men to Him. We but need to know Him as He really is, in order to
love Him and cling to Him. A fairer form than hers has drawn near to us, and
calls us with tenderer invitations and better promises. The divine Wisdom
has become Man with ‘sweet human hands and lips and eyes.’ Such was His
delight in the sons of men that He emptied Himself of His glory, and
finished a greater work than that over which he presided when the mountains
were settled and the hills brought forth. Now He calls us, and His summons
is tenderer, and gives promise of loftier blessings than the call of Wisdom
was and did. She called to the simple, ‘Come eat ye of my bread, and drink
of the wine which I have mingled.’ He invites us: ‘If any man thirst, let
him come unto Me and drink,’ and He furnishes a table for us, and calls us
to eat of the bread which is His body broken for us, and to drink of the
wine which is His blood shed for many for the remission of sins. She
promises ‘riches and honour, yea, durable riches and righteousness.’ His
voice vibrates with sympathy, and calls the weary and heavy laden, of whom
she scarcely thinks, and offers to them a gift, which may seem humble enough
beside her more dazzling offers of fruit, better than gold and revenues,
better than choice silver, but which come closer to universal wants, the
gift of rest, which is really what all men long for, and none but they who
take His yoke upon them possess. ‘See that ye refuse not Him that speaketh,’
for if they escaped not when they refused her that spake through the Jewish
thinker’s lips of old, ‘much more shall not we escape, if we turn away from
Him that beseecheth us from heaven.’ Jesus is the power of God and the
wisdom of God, and it is in Him crucified that our weakness and our folly
are made strong and wise, and Wisdom’s ancient promise is fulfilled: ‘Whoso
findeth me findeth life, and shall obtain favour of the Lord.’
Proverbs 10:29 THE TWO-FOLD ASPECT OF THE DIVINE WORKING
‘The way of the Lord is strength to
the upright: but destruction shall be to the workers of iniquity.’— PROVERBS
x. 29 .
You observe that the words ‘shall be,’
in the last clause, are a supplement. They are quite unnecessary, and in
fact they rather hinder the sense. They destroy the completeness of the
antithesis between the two halves of the verse. If you leave them out, and
suppose that the ‘way of the Lord’ is what is spoken of in both clauses, you
get a far deeper and fuller meaning. ‘The way of the Lord is strength to the
upright; but destruction to the workers of iniquity.’ It is the same way
which is strength to one man and ruin to another, and the moral nature of
the man determines which it shall be to him. That is a penetrating word,
which goes deep down. The unknown thinkers, to whose keen insight into the
facts of human life we are indebted for this Book of Proverbs, had pondered
for many an hour over the perplexed and complicated fates of men, and they
crystallised their reflections at last in this thought. They have in it
struck upon a principle which explains a great many things, and teaches us a
great many solemn lessons. Let us try to get a hold of what is meant, and
then to look at some applications and illustrations of the principle.
I. First, then, let me just try to put
clearly the meaning and bearing of these words.
‘The way of the Lord’ means, sometimes
in the Old Testament and sometimes in the New, religion, considered as the
way in which God desires a man to walk. So we read in the New Testament of
‘the way’ as the designation of the profession and practice of Christianity;
and ‘the way of the Lord’ is often used in the Psalms for the path which He
traces for man by His sovereign will.
But that, of course, is not the
meaning here. Here it means, not the road in which God prescribes that we
should walk, but that road in which He Himself walks; or, in other words,
the sum of the divine action, the solemn footsteps of God through creation,
providence, and history. ‘His goings forth are from everlasting.’ ‘His way
is in the sea.’ ‘His way is in the sanctuary.’ Modern language has a whole
set of phrases which mean the same thing as the Jew meant by ‘the way of the
Lord,’ only that God is left out. They talk about the ‘current of events,’
‘the general tendency of things,’ ‘the laws of human affairs,’ and so on. I,
for my part, prefer the old-fashioned ‘Hebraism.’ To many modern thinkers
the whole drift and tendency of human affairs affords no sign of a person
directing these. They hear the clashing and grinding of opposing forces, the
thunder as of falling avalanches, and the moaning as of a homeless wind, but
they hear the sounds of no footfalls echoing down the ages. This ancient
teacher had keener ears. Well for us if we share his faith, and see in all
the else distracting mysteries of life and history, ‘the way of the Lord!’
But not only does the expression point
to the operation of a personal divine Will in human affairs, but it
conceives of that operation as one, a uniform and consistent whole. However
complicated, and sometimes apparently contradictory, the individual events
were, there was a unity in them, and they all converged on one result. The
writer does not speak of ‘ways,’ but of ‘the way,’ as a grand unity. It is
all one continuous, connected, consistent mode of operation from beginning
to end.
The author of this proverb believed
something more about the way of the Lord. He believed that although it is
higher than our way, still, a man can know something about it; and that
whatever may be enigmatical, and sometimes almost heart-breaking, in it, one
thing is sure—that as we have been taught of late years in another dialect,
it ‘makes for righteousness.’ ‘Clouds and darkness are round about Him,’ but
the Old Testament writers never falter in the conviction, which was the soul
of all their heroism and the life blood of their religion, that in the
hearts of the clouds and darkness, ‘Justice and judgment are the foundations
of His throne.’ The way of the Lord, says this old thinker, is hard to
understand, very complicated, full of all manner of perplexities and
difficulties, and yet on the whole the clear drift and tendency of the whole
thing is discernible, and it is this: it is all on the side of good.
Everything that is good, and everything that does good, is an ally of God’s,
and may be sure of the divine favour and of the divine blessing resting upon
it.
And just because that is so clear, the
other side is as true; the same way, the same set of facts, the same
continuous stream of tendency, which is all with and for every form of good,
is all against every form of evil. Or, as one of the Psalmists puts the same
idea, ‘The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and His ears are open
unto their cry. The face of the Lord is against them that do evil.’ The same
eye that beams in lambent love on ‘the righteous’ burns terribly to the evil
doer. ‘The face of the Lord’ means the side of the divine nature which is
turned to us, and is manifested by His self-revealing activity, so that the
expression comes near in meaning to ‘the way of the Lord,’ and the thought
in both cases is the same, that by the eternal law of His being, God’s
actions must all be for the good and against the evil.
They do not change, but a man’s
character determines which aspect of them he sees and has to experience.
God’s way has a bright side and a dark. You may take which you like. You can
lay hold of the thing by whichever handle you choose. On the one side it is
convex, on the other concave. You can approach it from either side, as you
please. ‘The way of the Lord’ must touch your ‘way.’ Your cannot alter that
necessity. Your path must either run parallel in the same direction with
His, and then all His power will be an impulse to bear you onward; or it
must run in the opposite direction, and then all His power will be for your
ruin, and the collision with it will crush you as a ship is crushed like an
egg-shell, when it strikes an iceberg. You can choose which of these shall
befall you.
And there is a still more striking
beauty about the saying, if we give the full literal meaning to the word
‘strength.’ It is used by our translators, I suppose, in a somewhat archaic
and peculiar signification, namely, that of a stronghold. At all events the
Hebrew means a fortress, a place where men may live safe and secure; and if
we take that meaning, the passage gains greatly in force and beauty. This
‘way of the Lord’ is like a castle for the shelter of the shelterless good
man, and behind those strong bulwarks he dwells impregnable and safe. Just
as a fortress is a security to the garrison, and a frowning menace to the
besiegers or enemies, so the ‘name of the Lord is a strong tower,’ and the
‘way of the Lord’ is a fortress. If you choose to take shelter within it,
its massive walls are your security and your joy. If you do not, they frown
down grimly upon you, a menace and a terror. How differently, eight hundred
years ago, Normans and Saxons looked at the square towers that were built
all over England to bridle the inhabitants! To the one they were the sign of
the security of their dominion; to the other they were the sign of their
slavery and submission. Torture and prison-houses they might become;
frowning portents they necessarily were. ‘The way of the Lord’ is a castle
fortress to the man that does good, and to the man that does evil it is a
threatening prison, which may become a hell of torture. It is ‘ruin to the
workers of iniquity.’ I pray you, settle for yourself which of these it is
to be to you.
II. And now let me say a word or two
by way of application, or illustration, of these principles that are here.
First, let me remind you how the order
of the universe is such that righteousness is life and sin is death. This
universe and the fortunes of men are complicated and strange. It is hard to
trace any laws, except purely physical ones, at work. Still, on the whole,
things do work so that goodness is blessedness, and badness is ruin. That
is, of course, not always true in regard of outward things, but even about
them it is more often and obviously true than we sometimes recognise. Hence
all nations have their proverbs, embodying the generalised experience of
centuries, and asserting that, on the whole, ‘honesty is the best policy,’
and that it is always a blunder to do wrong. What modern phraseology calls
‘laws of nature,’ the Bible calls ‘the way of the Lord’; and the manner in
which these help a man who conforms to them, and hurt or kill him if he does
not, is an illustration on a lower level of the principle of our text. This
tremendous congeries of powers in the midst of which we live does not care
whether we go with it or against it, only if we do the one we shall prosper,
and if we do the other we shall very likely be made an end of. Try to stop a
train, and it will run over you and murder you; get into it, and it will
carry you smoothly along. Our lives are surrounded with powers, which will
carry our messages and be our slaves if we know how to command nature by
obeying it, or will impassively strike us dead if we do not.
Again, in our physical life, as a
rule, virtue makes strength, sin brings punishment. ‘Riotous living’ makes
diseased bodies. Sins in the flesh are avenged in the flesh, and there is no
need for a miracle to bring it about that he who sows to the flesh shall ‘of
the flesh reap corruption.’ God entrusts the punishment of the breach of the
laws of temperance and morality in the body to the ‘natural’ operation of
such breach. The inevitable connection between sins against the body and
disease in the body, is an instance of the way of the Lord—the same set of
principles and facts—being strength to one man and destruction to another.
Hundreds of young men in Manchester—some of whom are listening to me now, no
doubt—are killing themselves, or at least are ruining their health, by
flying in the face of the plain laws of purity and self-control. They think
that they must ‘have their fling,’ and ‘obey their instincts,’ and so on.
Well, if they must, then another ‘must’ will insist upon coming into
play—and they must reap as they have sown, and drink as they have brewed,
and the grim saying of this book about profligate young men will be
fulfilled in many of them. ‘His bones are full of the iniquity of his youth,
which shall lie down with him in the grave.’ Be not deceived, God is not
mocked, and His way avenges bodily transgressions by bodily sufferings.
And then, in higher regions, on the
whole, goodness makes blessedness, and evil brings ruin. All the powers of
God’s universe, and all the tenderness of God’s heart are on the side of the
man that does right. The stars in their courses fight against the man that
fights against Him; and on the other side, in yielding thyself to the will
of God and following the dictates of His commandments, ‘Thou shalt make a
league with the beasts of the field, and the stones of the field shall be at
peace with thee.’ All things serve the soul that serves God, and all war
against him who wars against his Maker. The way of the Lord cannot but
further and help all who love and serve Him. For them all things must work
together for good. By the very laws of God’s own being, which necessarily
shape all His actions, the whole ‘stream of tendency without us makes for
righteousness.’ In the one course of life we go with the stream of divine
activity which pours from the throne of God. In the other we are like men
trying to row a boat up Niagara. All the rush of the mighty torrent will
batter us back. Our work will be doomed to destruction, and ourselves to
shame. For ever and ever to be good is to be well. An eternal truth lies in
the facts that the same word ‘good’ means pleasant and right, and that sin
and sorrow are both called ‘evil.’ All sin is self-inflicted sorrow, and
every ‘rogue is a roundabout fool.’ So ask yourselves the question: ‘Is my
life in harmony with, or opposed to, these omnipotent laws which rule the
whole field of life?’ Still further, this same fact of the two-fold aspect
and operation of the one way of the Lord will be made yet more evident in
the future. It becomes us to speak very reverently and reticently about the
matter, but I can conceive it possible that the one manifestation of God in
a future life may be in substance the same, and yet that it may produce
opposite effects upon oppositely disposed souls. According to the old
mystical illustration, the same heat that melts wax hardens clay, and the
same apocalypse of the divine nature in another world may to one man be life
and joy, and to another man may be terror and despair. I do not dwell upon
that; it is far too awful a thing for us to speak about to one another, but
it is worth your taking to heart when you are indulging in easy
anticipations that of course God is merciful and will bless and save
everybody after he dies. Perhaps—I do not go any further than a
perhaps—perhaps God cannot, and perhaps if a man has got himself into such a
condition as it is possible for a man to get into, perhaps, like light upon
a diseased eye, the purest beam may be the most exquisite pain, and the
natural instinct may be to ‘call upon the rocks and the hills to fall upon
them’ and cover them up in a more genial darkness from that Face, to see
which should be life and blessedness.
People speak of future rewards and
punishments as if they were given and inflicted by simple and divine
volition, and did not stand in any necessary connection with holiness on the
one hand or with sin on the other. I do not deny that some portion of both
bliss and sorrow may be of such a character. But there is a very important
and wide region in which our actions here must automatically bring
consequences hereafter of joy or sorrow, without any special retributive
action of God’s.
We have only to keep in view one or
two things about the future which we know to be true, and we shall see this.
Suppose a man with his memory of all his past life perfect, and his
conscience stimulated to greater sensitiveness and clearer judgment, and all
opportunities ended of gratifying tastes and appetites, whose food is in
this world, while yet the soul has become dependent on them for ease and
comfort, What more is needed to make a hell? And the supposition is but the
statement of a fact. We seem to forget much; but when the waters are drained
off all the lost things will be found at the bottom. Conscience gets dulled
and sophisticated here. But the icy cold of death will wake it up, and the
new position will give new insight into the true character of our actions.
You see how often a man at the end of life has his eyes cleared to see his
faults. But how much more will that be the case hereafter! When the rush of
passion is past, and you are far enough from your life to view it as a
whole, holding it at arm’s length, you will see better what it looks like.
There is nothing improbable in supposing that inclinations and tastes which
have been nourished for a lifetime may survive the possibility of indulging
them in another life, as they often do in this; and what can be worse than
such a thirst for one drop of water, which never can be tasted more? These
things are certain, and no more is needed to make sin produce, by necessary
consequence, misery, and ruin; while similarly, goodness brings joy, peace,
and blessing.
But again, the self-revelation of God
has this same double aspect.
‘The way of the Lord’ may mean His
process by which He reveals His character. Every truth concerning Him may be
either a joy or a terror to men. All His ‘attributes’ are builded into ‘a
strong tower, into which the righteous runneth, and is safe,’ or else they
are builded into a prison and torture-house. So the thought of God may
either be a happy and strengthening one, or an unwelcome one. ‘I remembered
God, and was troubled’ says one Psalmist. What an awful confession—that the
thought of God disturbed him! The thought of God to some of us is a very
unwelcome one, as unwelcome as the thought of a detective to a company of
thieves. Is not that dreadful? Music is a torture to some ears: and there
are people who have so alienated their hearts and wills from God that the
Name which should be ‘their dearest faith’ is not only their ‘ghastliest
doubt,’ but their greatest pain. O brethren, the thought of God and all that
wonderful complex of mighty attributes and beauties which make His Name
should be our delight, the key to all treasures, the end of all sorrows, our
light in darkness, our life in death, our all in all. It is either that to
us, or it is something that we would fain forget. Which is it to you?
Especially the Gospel has this double
aspect. Our text speaks of the distinction between the righteous and evil
doers; but how to pass from the one class to the other, it does not tell us.
The Gospel is the answer to that question. It tells us that though we are
all ‘workers of iniquity,’ and must, therefore, if such a text as this were
the last word to be spoken on the matter, share in the ruin which smites the
opponent of the divine will, we may pass from that class; and by simple
faith in Him who died on the Cross for all workers of iniquity, may become
of those righteous on whose side God works in all His way, who have all His
attributes drawn up like an embattled army in their defence, and have His
mighty name for their refuge.
As the very crown of the ways of God,
the work of Christ and the record of it in the Gospel have most eminently
this double aspect. God meant nothing but the salvation of the whole world
when He sent us this Gospel. His ‘way’ therein was pure, unmingled,
universal love. We can make that great message untroubled blessing by simply
accepting it. Nothing more is needed but to take God at His word, and to
close with His sincere and earnest invitation. Then Christ’s work becomes
the fortress in which we are guarded from sin and guilt, from the arrows of
conscience, and the fiery darts of temptation. But if not accepted, then it
is not passive, it is not nothing. If rejected, it does more harm to a man
than anything else can, just because, if accepted, it would have done him
more good. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. The pillar which
symbolised the presence of God sent down influences on either side; to the
trembling crowd of the Israelites on the one hand, to the pursuing ranks of
the Egyptians on the other; and though the pillar was one, opposite effects
streamed from it, and it was ‘a cloud and darkness to them, but it gave
light by night to these.’ Everything depends on which side of the pillar you
choose to see. The ark of God, which brought dismay and death among false
gods and their worshippers, brought blessing into the humble house of Obed
Edom, the man of Gath, with whom it rested for three months before it was
set in its place in the city of David. That which is meant to be the savour
of life unto life must either be that or the savour of death unto death.
Jesus Christ is something to each of
us. For you who have heard His name ever since you were children, your
relation to Him settles your condition and your prospects, and moulds your
character. Either He is for you the tried corner-stone, the sure foundation,
on which whosoever builds will not be confounded, or He is the stone of
stumbling, against which whosoever stumbles will be broken, and which will
crush to powder whomsoever it falls upon, ‘This Child is set for the rise’
or for the fall of all who hear His name. He leaves no man at the level at
which He found him, but either lifts him up nearer to God, and purity and
joy, or sinks him into an ever-descending pit of darkening separation from
all these. Which is He to you? Something He must be—your strength or your
ruin. If you commit your souls to Him in humble faith, He will be your
peace, your life, your Heaven. If you turn from His offered grace, He will
be your pain, your death, your torture. ‘What maketh Heaven, that maketh
hell.’ Which do you choose Him to be?
Proverbs
12:1-15 THE MANY-SIDED CONTRAST OF WISDOM AND FOLLY
The verses of the present passage are
a specimen of the main body of the Book of Proverbs. They are not a
building, but a heap. The stones seldom have any mortar between them, and
connection or progress is for the most part sought in vain. But one great
antithesis runs through the whole—the contrast of wisdom or righteousness
with folly or wickedness. The compiler or author is never weary of setting
out that opposition in all possible lights. It is, in his view, the one
difference worth noting between men, and it determines their whole character
and fortunes. The book traverses with keen observation all the realm of
life, and everywhere finds confirmation of its great principle that goodness
is wisdom and sin folly.
There is something extremely
impressive in this continual reiteration of that contrast. As we read, we
feel as if, after all, there were nothing in the world but it and its
results. That profound sense of the existence and far-reaching scope of the
division of men into two classes is not the least of the benefits which a
thoughtful study of Proverbs brings to us. In this lesson it is useless to
attempt to classify the verses. Slight traces of grouping appear here and
there; but, on the whole, we have a set of miscellaneous aphorisms turning
on the great contrast, and setting in various lights the characters and
fates of the righteous and the wicked.
The first mark of difference is the
opposite feeling about discipline. If a man is wise, he will love
‘knowledge’; and if he loves knowledge, he will love the means to it, and
therefore will not kick against correction. That is another view of trials
from the one which inculcates devout submission to a Father. It regards only
the benefits to ourselves. If we want to be taught anything, we shall not
flinch from the rod. There must be pains undergone in order to win knowledge
of any sort, and the man who rebels against these shows that he had rather
be comfortable and ignorant than wise. A pupil who will not stand having his
exercises corrected will not learn his faults. On the other hand, hating
reproof is ‘brutish’ in the most literal sense; for it is the characteristic
of animals that they do not understand the purpose of pain, and never
advance because they do not. Men can grow because they can submit to
discipline; beasts cannot improve because, except partially and in a few
cases, they cannot accept correction.
The first proverb deals with wisdom or
goodness in its inner source; namely, a docile disposition. The two next
deal with its consequences. It secures God’s favour, while its opposite is
condemned; and then, as a consequence of this, the good man is established
and the wicked swept away. The manifestations of God’s favour and its
opposite are not to be thrown forward to a future life. Continuously the
sunshine of divine love falls on the one man, and already the other is
condemned. It needs some strength of faith to look through the shows of
prosperity often attending plain wickedness, and believe that it is always a
blunder to do wrong.
But a moderate experience of life will
supply many instances of prosperous villainy in trade and politics which
melted away like mist. The shore is strewn with wrecks, dashed to pieces
because righteousness did not steer. Every exchange gives examples in
plenty. How many seemingly solid structures built on wrong every man has
seen in his lifetime crumble like the cloud masses which the wind piles in
the sky and then dissipates! The root of the righteous is in God, and
therefore he is firm. The contrast is like that of Psalm i. —between the
tree with strong roots and waving greenery, and the chaff, rootless, and
therefore whirled out of the threshing-floor.
The universal contrast is next applied
to women; and in accordance with the subordinate position they held in old
days, the bearing of her goodness is principally regarded as affecting her
husband. That does not cover the whole ground, of course. But wherever there
is a true marriage, the wife will not think that woman’s rights are
infringed because one chief issue of her beauty of virtue is the honour and
joy it reflects upon him who has her heart. ‘A virtuous woman’ is not only
one who possesses the one virtue to which the phrase has been so miserably
confined, but who is ‘a woman of strength’—no doll or plaything, but
‘A perfect woman, nobly planned
To warn, to comfort, and command.’
The gnawing misery of being fastened
like two dogs in a leash to one who ‘causes shame’ is vividly portrayed by
that strong figure, that she is like ‘rottenness in his bones,’ eating away
strength, and inflicting disfigurement and torture.
Then come a pair of verses describing
the inward and outward work of the two kinds of men as these affect others.
The former verses dealt with their effects on the actors; the present, with
their bearing on others. Inwardly, the good man has thoughts which
scrupulously keep the balance true and are just to his fellows, while the
wicked plans to deceive for his own profit. When thoughts are translated
into speech, deceit bears fruit in words which are like ambushes of
murderers, laying traps to destroy, while the righteous man’s words are like
angels of deliverance to the unsuspecting who are ready to fall into the
snare. Selfishness, which is the root of wickedness, will be cruelty and
injustice when necessary for its ends. The man who is wise because God is
his centre and aim will be merciful and helpful. The basis of philanthropy
is religion. The solemn importance attached to speech is observable. Words
can slay as truly as swords. Now that the press has multiplied the power of
speech, and the world is buzzing with the clatter of tongues, we all need to
lay to heart the responsibilities and magic power of spoken and printed
words, and ‘to set a watch on the door of our lips.’
Then follow a couple of verses dealing
with the consequences to men themselves of their contrasted characters. The
first of these ( verse 7 ) recurs to the thought of verse 3, but with a
difference. Not only the righteous himself, but his house, shall be
established. The solidarity of the family and the entail of goodness are
strongly insisted on in the Old Testament, though limitations are fully
recognised. If a good man’s son continues his father’s character, he will
prolong his father’s blessings; and in normal conditions, a parent’s wisdom
passes on to his children. Something is wrong when, as is so often the case,
it does not; and it is not always the children’s fault.
The overthrow of the wicked is set in
striking contrast with their plots to overthrow others. Their mischief comes
back, like an Australian boomerang, to the hand that flings it; and
contrariwise, delivering others is a sure way of establishing one’s self.
Exceptions there are, for the world-scheme is too complicated to be
condensed into a formula; but all proverbs speak of the average usual
results of virtue and vice, and those of this book do the same. Verse 8
asserts that, on the whole, honour attends goodness, and contempt
wickedness. Of course, companions in dissipation extol each other’s vices,
and launch the old threadbare sneers at goodness. But if wisdom were not set
uppermost in men’s secret judgment, there would be no hypocrites, and their
existence proves the truth of the proverb.
Verse 9 seems suggested by ‘despised’
in verse 8 . There are two kinds of contempt—one which brands sin
deservedly, one which vulgarly despises everybody who is not rich. A man
need not mind, though his modest household is treated with contempt, if
quiet righteousness reigns in it. It is better to be contented with little,
and humble in a lowly place, than to be proud and hungry, as many were in
the writer’s time and since. A foolish world set on wealth may despise, but
its contempt breaks no bones. Self-conceit is poor diet.
This seems to be the first of a little
cluster of proverbs bearing on domestic life. It prefers modest mediocrity
of station, such as Agur desired. Its successor shows how the contrasted
qualities come out in the two men’s relation to their domestic animals.
Goodness sweeps a wide circle touching the throne of God and the stall of
the cattle. It was not Coleridge who found out that ‘He prayeth best who
loveth best’ but this old proverb-maker; and he could speak the thought
without the poet’s exaggeration, which robs his expression of it of half its
value. The original says ‘knoweth the soul’ which may indeed mean,
‘regardeth the life’ but rather seems to suggest sympathetic interest in
leading to an understanding of the dumb creature, which must precede all
wise care for its well-being. It is a part of religion to try to enter into
the mysterious feelings of our humble dependants in farmyard and stable. On
the other hand, for want of such sympathetic interest, even when the
‘wicked’ means to be kind, he does harm; or the word rendered ‘tender
mercies’ may here mean the feelings (literally, ‘bowels’) which, in their
intense selfishness, are cruel even to animals.
Verse 11 has no connection with the preceding, unless the link is common
reference to home life and business. It contrasts the sure results of honest
industry with the folly of speculation. The Revised Version margin ‘vain
things’ is better than the text ‘vain persons,’ which would give no
antithesis to the patient tilling of the first clause. That verse would make
an admirable motto to be stretched across the Stock Exchange, and like
places on both sides of the Atlantic. How many ruined homes and heart-broken
wives witness in America and England to its truth! The vulgar English
proverb, ‘What comes over the Devil’s back goes under his belly,’ says the
same thing. The only way to get honest wealth is to work for it. Gambling in
all its forms is rank folly.
So the next proverb ( verse 12 )
continues the same thought, and puts it in a somewhat difficult phrase. It
goes a little deeper than the former, showing that the covetousness which
follows after vain things, is really wicked lusting for unrighteous gain.
‘The net of evildoer’s is better taken as in the margin (Rev. Ver.) ‘prey’
or ‘spoil,’ and the meaning seems to be as just stated. Such hankering for
riches, no matter how obtained, or such envying of the booty which
admittedly has been won by roguery, is a mark of the wicked. How many
professing church members have known that feeling in thinking of the
millions of some railway king! Would they like the proverb to be applied to
them?
The contrast to this is ‘the root of
the righteous yields fruit,’ or ‘shoots forth,’ We have heard ( verse 3 )
that it shall never be moved, being fixed in God; now we are told that it
will produce all that is needful. A life rooted in God will unfold into all
necessary good, which will be better than the spoil of the wicked. There are
two ways of getting on—to struggle and fight and trample down rivals; one,
to keep near God and wait for him. ‘Ye fight and war; ye have not, because
ye ask not.’
The next two proverbs have in common a
reference to the effect of speech upon the speaker. ‘In the transgression of
the lips is an evil snare’; that is, sinful words ensnare their utterer, and
whoever else he harms, he himself is harmed most. The reflex influence on
character of our utterances is not present to us, as it should be. They
leave stains on lips and heart. Thoughts expressed are more definite and
permanent thereby. A vicious thought clothed in speech has new power over
the speaker. If we would escape from that danger, we must be righteous, and
speak righteousness; and then the same cause will deepen our convictions of
‘whatsoever things are lovely and of good report.’
Verse 14 insists on this opposite side
of the truth. Good words will bring forth fruit, which will satisfy the
speaker, because, whatever effects his words may have on others, they will
leave strengthened goodness and love of it in himself. ‘If the house be
worthy, your peace shall rest upon it; if not, it shall return to you
again.’ That reaction of words on oneself is but one case of the universal
law of consequences coming back on us. We are the architects of our own
destinies. Every deed has an immortal life, and returns, either like a raven
or a dove, to the man who sent it out on its flight. It comes back either
croaking with blood on its beak, or cooing with an olive branch in its
mouth. All life is at once sowing and reaping. A harvest comes in which
retribution will be even more entire and accurate.
The last proverb of the passage gives
a familiar antithesis, and partially returns to the thought of verse 1 . The
fool has no standard of conduct but his own notions, and is absurdly
complacent as to all his doings. The wise seeks better guidance than his
own, and is docile, because he is not so ridiculously sure of his
infallibility. No type of weak wickedness is more abominable to the
proverbialist than that of pert self-conceit, which knows so little that it
thinks it knows everything, and is ‘as untameable as a fly.’ But in the
wisest sense, it is true that a mark of folly is self-opinionativeness; that
a man who has himself for teacher has a fool for scholar; that the test of
wisdom is willingness to be taught; and, especially, that to bring a docile,
humble spirit to the Source of all wisdom, and to ask counsel of God, is the
beginning of true insight, and that the self-sufficiency which is the
essence of sin, is never more fatal than when it is ignorant of guilt, and
therefore spurns a Saviour.
