Proverbs 14:1-2

Women: Wise and Foolish, Etc.

Pro 14:1-12

It would appear, then, that there are foolish women. The Bible pays no attention to mere civility or courtesy; it stands upon truth, and speaks with frankness and even bluntness concerning evil persons, whether men or women, whether kings or subjects. The Book of Proverbs does not spare the king, though supposed to have been written largely by a royal writer. This is a characteristic of the Bible which begets confidence in its integrity and in the pureness of its purpose. The foolish woman does not know that she is plucking down her house; she thinks, on the contrary, she is building it up; by unwise energy, by self-assertion, by thoughtless speeches, by words flung like firebrands, she is doing unutterable mischief, not only to herself, but to her husband and her family. There are, on the other hand, wise women who are quietly and solidly building the house night and day: they make no demonstration; the last characteristic that could be supposed to attach to them would be that of ostentation; they measure the whole day, they number its hours, they apportion its work; every effort they make is an effort which has been reasoned out before it was begun; every word is looked at before it is uttered, every company is estimated before it is entrusted with confidence; in this way the wise woman consolidates her house. How many ministers have been ruined by foolish wives who have not known how to speak to the people of the congregation; wives who have been foolishly haughty, foolishly reserved, or foolishly talkative; women who have retired when they ought to have gone forward, and gone forward when they should have retired; women utterly without sense. On the other hand, how many ministers have been made by their wives; wives who knew how to speak the healing word, how to apply kind words to every necessity that has arisen in church life; women who have kept their houses well, and have looked well to the ways of their children, and who without ever being eloquent have never ceased to be persuasive. Whether any foolish woman can ever be made wise is a question to which it would be rash to return a reply. The thing that is lacking cannot be numbered. The only thing that appears to be immediately possible is for the foolish woman to be taught to hold her tongue: even if she could do that, she might be supposed to be a considerable distance on the way to wisdom. But who can stop the loose mouth? who can tell the clamorous heart to be still when its very heaven is in foaming speech, in gossip, in the exchange of opinions, and in the multiplication of criticism? It would seem as if it lay with man himself to determine whether the house should be built or thrown down. Yet such is only an appearance, it is not the deepest reality of the case: "Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it," for the walls are thrown down in the nighttime, and the roof is carried away by the wind. Whilst, however, we acknowledge this to be the fundamental and the ultimate truth, there is a great middle space within which human energy is called upon to work and human patience to endure. If a man has become unhappily attached to a foolish woman, he should remember how much of the responsibility is with himself. In proportion as his wife is foolish, he ought to redouble his own wisdom. If any man has been guided by the living God to the election of a wise partner in life, let him remember that a good wife is from the Lord, and let him not throw upon the woman a burden greater than she can bear; she is wise, true, prudent, full of the spirit of economy, a very genius of understanding; but for that very reason she ought to be spared from undue pressure as to engagements and duties and responsibilities. The husband should be the head of the wife in the sense of sustaining the load of life, and giving her what he can of ease, joy, and peace.

"A scorner seeketh wisdom, and findeth it not: but knowledge is easy unto him that understandeth. Go from the presence of a foolish man, when thou perceivest not in him the lips of knowledge" ( Pro 14:6-7 ).

Everything depends upon the spirit with which we work. This is true in intellectual toil, and it is true in religious pursuits. "Ask, and it shall be given you," means that the asking should be executed in the right spirit and with the right intent; it must not be a mere use of words, an eloquence of empty wind, but the expression of a deep and earnest desire. "A scorner seeketh wisdom" that is to say, he seeks it vainly, that he may acquire a name in society, that he may seem to be wise upon formal occasions, that he may not be looked down upon by those who are his superiors in understanding and acquisition; but in so far as he is animated by the wrong spirit all his seeking ends in emptiness; he comes back from the harvest-field without a single sheaf. Wisdom will not speak to the scornful spirit; wisdom is solemn, just, divine; wisdom cometh down from above, and hath about her all the air and light and blessedness of heaven; to the scorner, the contemptuous man, the frivolous person, the sneerer who turns all life into bitterness, she has no communication to make; on the other hand, how easy is knowledge to him that understandeth! he seems to have the right of entry into the sanctuary of understanding; he is known there, he is welcomed there, he brings with him the spirit of reverence and of hopefulness; he comes as a worshipper rather than as a man who is in quest of merely selfish enjoyment. The foolish man is to be left to himself; if we tarry in his presence we confer a false reputation upon him, for men seeing us in his society may suppose that he is a wise man, and therefore to be honoured. Find a man who is talking frivolity, who is misunderstanding the universe of which he is a citizen, who ignores all that is solemn and profound in life, then let that man be taught by the dreariness and coldness of solitude that he has offended the spirit of society. In such a way only can the foolish man be brought to consideration; so long as he is the centre of a circle, or in the companionship of another man, he loses himself in a kind of dissipation; but when every man avoids him because of his folly, he may begin to ask why it is that he is thus left alone.

"Fools make a mock at sin" ( Pro 14:9 ).

They do not understand it; they regard it as a mere accident, as a root of pleasure, as a blossom that comes and goes within one sunny day; they do not estimate the awfulness of sin aright, as an offence against God, against the universe, against all things holy, pure, and beautiful. Sin is not a merely metaphysical action, something that occurs far back in the mind, and that relates to something inexpressibly high; sin is concrete: sin is visible in its results; sin brings with it darkness, shame, fear; sin sunders man from man by making every man suspect his neighbour; sin is not a cloud in the heavens only, it is a great shadow which rests upon the whole earth. Find a man who mocks sin, and you find a fool. How easy it is to mock the intoxicated man! how easy to turn to frivolous uses the adventures of the gambler and the schemer! how easy to laugh at that which has a humorous aspect, although its root be one of blackness and horrible shame! We are called upon not to look at the mere accidents of the sin, but at the sin itself. Notice that in this text we are not looking at particular sins, as lying, drunkenness, dishonesty, and the like, but we are looking at a generic term "sin." We are not to suppose that one sin is greater than another, that one commandment is greater than another; we are to feel that every sin is an abomination to God, and every commandment is golden in the estimation of the Spirit of the sanctuary. There are no little sins; there are no little virtues; there are no minor pieties: the character of the universe is one; it is equally holy at every point; he who breaks one law injures the whole circle of duty, and proves himself to be capable of breaking out of that circle at any point that may suit him at the moment. Sins are not to be estimated by number, as if we should say one sin amounts to little, and two sins are hardly to be accounted of; we are to look at each sin as involving all other sin, as carrying with it the whole burden and frown of God's judgment and anger. This may appear to be exaggerating some sins, and so it may be so far as they are accidentally concerned, but there can be no accidental relations of sin towards the living God, all relations are vital and abiding.

"The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy" ( Pro 14:10 ).

Man can shield himself from the closest scrutiny of the most friendly or the most hostile eyes. The heart can conduct all its wondrous ministry of life, and thought, and purpose, without any one ever dreaming of all the tragedy that is exciting and exhausting its solitudes. Sometimes a smile is made to cover the bitterest distress. Observers can see the smile only, and judging by that they conclude that the heart is in a state of contentment, whereas at the very moment it is undergoing the very agony of perdition. What is true of distress is true also of joy. It is not always convenient to reveal the joy that is in the heart, because it may be misunderstood, or attempts may be made to pervert it, or to make it the medium of communications of a destructive or injurious nature: it is desirable, therefore, that the heart should eat many a feast in secret, and delight itself without being overlooked by strangers and foes, and sometimes even by friends. A most noticeable thing is this, that life has its quiet sanctuaries, its innermost recesses, where no human eye can penetrate, and where it can be really its very self, without danger of misconstruction by ill-informed or malignant criticism. It is in secret that we eat the sweetest bread: it is within the sanctuary of our uninvaded imagination that we create new heavens and a new earth, and project ourselves into the sunny future, on which there rests no burden, no cloud, no shadow of fear. "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." We are not to conceive that the exclusion of human criticism means also the exclusion of divine judgment. "All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." We must remember that it is he, even the living One, who has enabled us to enjoy all the delights of shelter and security from intrusive observation. He has made us, and not we ourselves, and in his wondrous creation of our system he has made provision for solitude, even in the midst of a crowd, and for concealment even from the eyes that look upon us with the most loving anxiety. All this should be regarded as fraught with moral significance. Life is more than the word that is upon the lip. Worship is more than the language in which it seeks to express itself. Music has always something more to say than can be uttered through the few notes that are at its disposal. Man looketh on the outward appearance, continually comes to false and rash conclusions regarding his brother man; but because the Lord looketh on the heart, and knows the innermost thought of every soul, we may rejoice in the assurance that his judgment will be complete and gracious. With the heart's riches no man may intermeddle. From the treasure-house of that heart no thief can steal. Let us be rich, therefore, in heart-wealth, laying up within us all the wisdom of God that is accessible to us through the medium of his revelation, and feeding ourselves with the bread of life; then, though heart and flesh do fail in a physical sense, and all outward things be marked by traces of sorrow, there shall be in our deepest being a peace like the calm of God, a hope brighter than the sun at noonday. Bitterness and joy seem to be the two words which sum up human experience. Every heart has its moments of bitterness; even youth has its hot tears, its stings, its disappointments, its failures in all manner of hopeful attempt: manhood has its fuller sorrow, its deeper melancholy, its sadder depression, because the life sees more, and is capable of bearing more than in days of infancy and in youth: it would seem as if old age alone could lay claim to the realest and ripest joy; there is so much behind it, and there is yet so much in front of it, that it can strike an average, and form a true valuation of life, and look forward with buoyant expectancy to the revelation of mornings and summers, undreamt-of even by the imagination of poetry.

"The house of the wicked shall be overthrown: but the tabernacle of the upright shall flourish" ( Pro 14:11 ).

Here, again, the reason alike of overthrow and of prosperity is profoundly moral. We are not to fix attention upon the word "house" or the word "tabernacle," but upon the word "wicked and the word "upright," for in these moral terms the whole meaning of the passage is conveyed. The wicked man builds his house out of plumb, or he builds it upon the sands, or he erects it in utter ignorance of the laws of nature, and the consequence is overthrow beyond the hope of reconstruction. The tabernacle of the upright would seem by its very name to be a sacred place, for "tabernacle" is associated with the presence of God, is sanctified by the ark of the covenant, and is looked upon with favour from above. Wherever the upright man dwells he creates a tabernacle. No matter how poor the roof which covers his head, there is an inner roof, rich with stars, surcharged with the very benediction of God's own heart and love. What is our dwelling-place? Is it a commodious house built by the hand only? or is it a tabernacle created according to a divine specification? Every man builds his own house, and the wind and rain and flood will test every man's building, whether it is founded upon the sand or upon the immovable rock: "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found." "The ungodly are like the chaff which the wind driveth away. Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous." Where the house has been built for God, God himself never forsakes it. He breaks the bread of poverty, and turns it into a feast; he transmutes the tears of sorrow into jewels of joy; by day he is an all-illuminating light, and by night he is a fire alike of defence and of comfort. The happiest place on all the earth should be the good man's house, for it is sanctified with prayer, it is resonant with praise, it stands on the very highway which leads to eternal blessedness: it is a halting-place on the road to heaven, and the angels come out to meet us upon it, and conduct us day by day, and mile by mile, to the city of light, the temple of peace.

"There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death" ( Pro 14:12 ).

Beware, then, not to look exclusively at appearances, at beginnings, or at attempts. In order to form a correct judgment we ought to have the complete case before us. If the road be fifty miles long, it may be apparently right for forty-nine of them, and because it is right for so large a proportion of the distance, we may hastily conclude it must be right even to the very end. Against this delusion we are cautioned in the text. It is the last mile that dips down into bottomless abysses. It is when we think we are just at home that we begin to fall away into darkness, uncertainty, and despair. Ships have been lost within sight of land. Men have fallen back in their old age, the very time when they seemed to be ripening for heaven, and have lost all the accumulation of virtue and honour stored up through a long lifetime. We have to deal continually with deceptive appearances: the summer morning would seem to end in winter night: the first draught which we are tempted to take means exhilaration, the next means excitement, the next means violence, and the last means extermination. It is never to be supposed that because the first draught is harmless, therefore the last will be harmless too. The harm is in the very draught itself, how pleasant soever it may be to the palate at the time of drinking. The text holds good in commerce, in theological thought, in moral conduct, in social relationships; indeed, it holds good along the whole circle of human relation and experience. What is the lesson which such a state of affairs conveys to the wise and understanding heart? It is that life should be spent in a temper of caution; when we seem most secure we may be most exposed to danger; not only is our enemy a roaring lion, whose voice can be heard from afar, he is also a cunning and silent serpent, drawing himself towards us without making any demonstration, and not revealing himself until he is within striking distance. How awful is the expression "the ways of death"! No man returns from those ways to tell how crooked they are, how full of all manner of horror and distress, and how swiftly they dip into pits that are bottomless, abysses that are without measure, darkness that is uttermost and appalling. We begin to die when we begin to do wrong. Awful is the thought that it may be impossible to return along the way which we have trodden so mirthfully: we suppose that we can at any moment retrace our steps, and find our way back into an earlier experience, when we knew naught of the bitterness of sin and the sting of divine judgment. Every step we take in a wrong direction disqualifies us from advancing in an upward movement. We lose strength in this downward travel. Even when we would return we cannot recollect the prayers with which we once communed with heaven; we cannot speak the language of the upper world; we are afraid indeed to look upward lest some avenging angel should strike our vision with darts of fire.