Today, I am reading and commenting on Proverbs 14-17.
I could do my entire blog on just a couple of these proverbs, and that is what I am going to do. I prefer to find themes for the entire passage, or something which links everything together. However, today I am going to pull just a couple of these proverbs out and talk about them. So, let’s start with this one:
“There is a way that appears to be right,
but in the end it leads to death.”
This one is perhaps the scariest. It tells us that there are paths we can follow which seem right, but are not. However, this reminds me of one of my hobbies, playing Tabletop Roleplaying Games. In such games one of the players is known as the Gamemaster, whose job it is to tell the story for the rest of the players and act as a referee to ensure that the players are following the rules. From time to time in describing the situation the players must take part in the Gamemaster will say some thing like, “The room APPEARS empty,” or “The chest does not APPEAR trapped.” Most players have learned to treat such things as a red flag and be on the alert for what comes next. In much the same way, the proverb writer is warning us to be alert when something feels right, when our emotions tell us it is the right thing to do. That is when we must engage our logic and compare it to what God says is right. Which leads us to the second one of today’s proverbs I want to write about:
“Commit to the Lord whatever you do,
and he will establish your plans.”
We cannot go far wrong if we seek with all of our actions to bring glory to God and not to ourselves. If you do whatever you do in order to bring glory to God, with no thought to your own interests, you will avoid the path which the first of these warns against. in fact, the third of the proverbs which I wanted to write about today expands on this them:
“Better a little with righteousness
than much gain with injustice.”
Seek righteousness rather than reward and you need not fear that you are on the wrong path. I started out thinking that what I would write on each of these proverbs would stand alone, but, as you can see, once I started writing I realized that they linked together to teach us.
I want to leave you with a thought from the proverb writer which challenges me every time I come across it:
“Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent,
and discerning if they hold their tongues.”
As you might guess, keeping silent is not one of my gifts.
I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.
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Many people take the Song of Solomon as an allegory for our relationship with Christ. That has never worked for me, although I can see it when someone else makes the connections. Others take it as a tale describing the love of a particular couple. That seems closer to the motivation for writing it. However, I think it represents an allegory about what we should seek in a romantic relationship. In fact, the central lesson I think we should take from it is this “Do not awaken love until is so desires,” or as other translation render it, “Do not awaken love until it is ready.” The love being referred to here is erotic love, not the love which God commands us to have for our neighbor. While the love we are commanded to have for our neighbor should be part of what we feel when we awaken erotic love, there is a physical part of the love being talked about here that is not part of that love. The Song of Solomon makes clear that erotic love is not ready to be awakened until both parties feel it. These two lovers were irresistibly attracted to one another.
