Proverbs 3:11 - Exposition

My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord. The teacher, in Proverbs 3:11 and Proverbs 3:12 , passes to another phase of life. The thought of prosperity suggests the opposite one of adversity. Abundant prosperity shall flow from honouring Jehovah, but he sometimes and not unfrequently sends affliction, and, indeed, without this life would be incomplete. The object of the exhortation is, as Delitzsch states, to show that, as in prosperity God should not be forgotten, so one should not suffer himself to be estranged by days of adversity. Submission is counselled on the ground that, when Jehovah afflicts, he does so in the spirit of love, and for good. The "chastening" and "correction," though presenting God in an attitude of anger, are in reality not the punishment of an irate God. The verse before us is evidently copied from Job 5:17 , "Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth, therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty;" and the whole passage is cited again in the Epistle to the Hebrews ( Hebrews 12:5 , Hebrews 12:6 ). It has been said that Job 5:11 expresses the problem of the Book of Job, and verse 12 its solution (Delitzsch). Despise not ( altimas ); Vulgate, ne abjicias ; LXX ; μὴ ὀλιγώρει . The verb mass is first "to reject," and then "to despise and contemn." The Targum Jonathan puts the thought in a stronger form, ne execreris, "do not curse." They despise the chastening of Jehovah who, when they see his hand in it, do not humbly and submissively bow, but resist and become refractory, or, as it is expressed in Proverbs 19:3 , when their "heart fretteth against the Lord." Job, notwithstanding his bitter complaints, was on the whole, and in his better moments, an example of the proper state of mind under correction (see Job 1:21 ; Job 2:10 ). Jonah, in treating contemptuously the procedure of God, is an exemplification of the contrary spirit, which is condemned implicitly in the text (Wardlaw). Chastening ( musar ); i.e. correction not by reproof only, as in Proverbs 6:23 and Proverbs 8:30 ; but by punishment also. as in Proverbs 13:24 ; Proverbs 22:15 . The meaning here is expressed by the LXX . παιδεία , which is "instruction by punishment," discipline, or schooling (cf. Vulgate, disciplina ) . Neither be weary ( al-takots ); i.e. do not loathe, abhor, feel disgust nor vexation towards. The expression, "do not loathe," is a climax to the other, "despise not." It represents a more deeply seated aversion to Jehovah's plans. Gesenius takes the primary meaning of kuts to be that of vomiting. The word before us certainly denotes loathing or nausea, and is used in this sense by the Israelites in their complaints against God and against Moses in Numbers 21:5 (cf. Genesis 27:46 ). The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, in quoting the passage, adopts the LXX . reading, μὴ ὀκλύου , "nor faint;" Vulgate, ne deficias, i.e. "do not give way to despondency." Correction . This word, like musar above, has a twofold meaning of either punishment or chastening, as in Psalms 73:14 ; or reproof, as in Proverbs 1:23 ; Proverbs 25:1-28 :30; Proverbs 5:12 ; Proverbs 27:5 ; Proverbs 29:15 , where it also occurs. It is here used in the former sense. To loathe the correction of Jehovah is to allow it to completely estrange us from him. We faint under it when, by dwelling on or brooding over, or bemoaning the trial, the spirit sinks to faintness. To faint at correction ignores the belief in the truth that "all things work together for good to them that love God."