Provérbios 22:11-29

The Pure In Heart, Etc.

Pro 22:11-29

"He that loveth pureness of heart, for the grace of [or, and hath grace in] his lips the king shall be his friend" [Lit., "He that loveth pureness of heart, his lips are gracious, the king is his friend"] ( Pro 22:11 ).

This would seem to be the lower level of the holy word spoken upon the mount "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God." This proverb sets forth the image of a man whose pure heart finds an equivalent or correspondence in the grace or favour of his lips. We may take it in this way: when the heart is pure the speech will be clean; when the spirit is right with God, language will be lifted above all equivocation or double-meaning will be simple, direct, true, sincere; when the soul is holy the language will rise into music. Good men are known by their speech; they are not rough in words, or crude in tone, or boisterous in claim; they do not lift up their voice, nor cry, nor strive with the clamour of conscious weakness; they speak quietly, graciously, gently, hopefully; so much so indeed at times that their very gentleness may be mistaken by the superficial for weakness, whereas it is the very perfection and refinement of strength. Only weak men are boisterous; only men who are uncertain of their intellectual or moral position seek to make up by noise what is wanting in truth and equity. It would seem as if the pure heart were destined to bring kings into subjection. The king is to be the friend of the man who loves pureness and speaks music. Here is a hint of the ultimate triumph of moral power. No longer is the king to be amazed and fascinated by mere thunder and lightning, by iron and chariots and horses; his ear is to be entranced by heart-music; he is to say, This is the voice of heaven; he is to admit that the man who can so speak must have been schooled and cultured in the very sanctuary of heaven.

"The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets" ( Pro 22:13 ).

A singular illustration this, of how the decay of one faculty may be the beginning of the activity of another. Industry has gone down, but imagination has risen. The slothful man seeks to make up by excuse what is wanting in energy. How ridden by the nightmare is the slothful man's imagination! He sees foes in the air; he hears voices which none other can detect; he is wishful to impress upon his friends the fact that he himself is most willing to go out, yea, even eager to work, and prepared to undergo any amount of sacrifice, but he sees a lion, he is assured of a supreme difficulty, he is prepared to testify that his life is not worth a day's purchase should he attempt to work under such and such circumstances. He cannot fell a tree, but he can see a lion; he dare not encounter the cold, for he is sure that he would be slain by a foe. The man that is thus a lion-maker in his own imagination will soon bring himself under the subjection of his own diseased fancy; presently the lion will be real to him, although it will be imaginary to all who stand by and look on. Beyond a certain point fancy ceases, and fact begins, in the case of the diseased mind: literally there is no lion, but imaginatively and sympathetically the whole road is crowded with beasts of prey. To the man who is so diseased it is no relief to tell him that other people cannot see the lions; he sees them himself, he watches their open mouths, he is terrified by their gleaming eyes, he flees away from them as from pursuing death. Men should be careful how they permit any morbid influence to operate upon their fancy; health should be the first law of nature; every man should feel himself bound to attend to the laws of bodily health; for oftentimes through their observance alone can healthfulness of mind be sustained. So intimate is the relation between mind and body, that when the one is neglected the other falls into desuetude; and when the one is abused even in the sense of temporary enjoyment, the other goes down in quality, in force, in executive ability. "Know ye not that ye are the temples of the Holy Ghost?" Is not the body a consecrated sanctuary? You cannot laugh men out of their superstitions after a certain point. Christian trainers should take the mind early in hand, and see that it be disabused of all superstition; and not only so for negative work is not enough the mind should be inspired by sacred impulse and filled with pure and reverent thought When the mind is so guarded and so sustained it will be impossible for the fancy to create lions.

"He that oppresseth the poor to increase his riches, and he that giveth to the rich, shall surely come to want" ( Pro 22:16 ).

Read the passage: he that oppresseth the poor is really preparing for his own oppression; for he is giving to the rich, and in due time the rich will rule over him with a rod of iron. Here is the same great law whose operation we have watched with interest and thankfulness. For a time the great man seems to do what he pleases, to order the poor as if they were his dogs, forgetting that all the while he himself is only enabling some other man to rule over him with a like severity. All bribery is to be brought low, all oppression is to lick the dust, the great purpose of the kingdom of heaven is to bring in the Son of man, who shall rule in righteousness, in simplicity, and tenderness; all trickery of subordination, all tyranny shall be brought to destruction as in an instant, and man shall respect man because he first honours and loves God. No rich man can love the poor man, no poor man can love the rich man, as simply between themselves: the second commandment follows the first, and is to be approached through the first, and is accessible only through the first, and the first commandment is Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind and strength; then afterwards it shall be easy, yea a supreme delight, to love one's neighbour as one's self.

From the seventeenth verse we are enjoined to hear the words of the wise. The word "wise" being in the plural number, it has been supposed that what follows is a collection of proverbs or sacred sayings, rather than the exhortation of the mind of Solomon alone. There is a concensus of wisdom. In all ages and in all lands wisdom, though speaking in different words, has invariably spoken in the same sense. Truth is one. No matter in what language it may be spoken, or by what local colouring it may be affected, the great consequence, the profound philosophy, is the same: truth and love, pureness and compassion, divine communion and self-sacrifice, rightness with God and rightness with men, these things God hath put together, and no man shall put them asunder without feeling that he has incurred a just and tremendous penalty. There is nothing more corroborative of truth than the fact that come whence it may, from what land or in what language soever, it all ends in the same grand injunction do right, and be happy; be pure, and be at rest; aspire towards heaven, and thus adjust all earthly relations: in philosophy, in eloquence, in prophetic vision, in poetic numbers, this holy wisdom has been taught in all the ages and in all the lands blessed by the higher civilisation.

From the twenty-second verse we have words that come along the way of the marketplace, that address men in their counting-houses and in their mercantile relations. Here is the grand philosophy of socialism: how the words roll on in the noblest music:

"Rob not the poor, because he is; poor: neither oppress the afflicted in the gate: for the Lord will plead their cause, and spoil the soul of those that spoiled them" ( Pro 22:22-23 ).

"Be not thou one of them that strike hands, or of them that are sureties for debts. If thou hast nothing to pay, why should he take away thy bed from under thee? Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand before kings; he shall not stand before mean men" ( Pro 22:26-29 ).

Thus again (for the point should never be omitted) we have the best proof of the inspiration of the Bible in its human injunctions, in its comprehensible economies of life. We have seen that if the mantle was taken in pledge it had to be restored before sundown for the poor man to sleep in; but it would appear from injunctions such as these that the law had been evaded, and the poor had been exposed to nakedness and cold because of their poverty. What law of God is there that has not been evaded or perverted? Have we not a genius of disobedience? How wonderfully inventive is the mind in blunting the point of the law or in escaping the edge of the sword when some selfish purpose is to be gained! Even in the days of Solomon, and long before, the stones marking the boundaries of the fields were thrown down in order that men might increase their estates. Is not this the daily battle of life? What is business in many an instance but a throwing down of ancient landmarks and breaking up of honourable boundaries, a confusion of division lines, so that the strong may oppress the weak? Whatever is possible to honest industry we should aim to realise. Industry has a right to the rewards of its own labour. The industrious man is more than he appears to be; he is not only a labourer in the dust, he is not a mere toiler in the mud; he is a servant of God, he is a minister of heaven, he is an exponent of an abiding and a beneficent law: such a man shall have honour even amongst his fellow-men; the industrious man shall attend upon kings as their minister, and kings shall be glad to be served by a man who has proved his honourableness, not in some grand temporary heroic effort, but in the simple toil and daily discipline of life.

Note

"Section Pro 22:17-24 contains a collection of proverbs marked by certain peculiarities. These are: 1. The structure of the verses, which is not so regular as in the preceding section, Pro 10:1 to Proverbs 22:16 . We find verses of eight, seven, or six words mixed with others of eleven (Proverbs 22:29 ; Proverbs 23:31 , Pro 23:35 ), fourteen ( Pro 23:29 ), and eighteen words ( Pro 24:12 ). The equality of the verse members is very much disturbed, and there is frequently no trace of parallelism. 2. A sentence is seldom completed in one verse, but most frequently in two; three verses are often closely connected (Proverbs 23:1-3 , Proverbs 23:6-8 , Pro 23:19-21 ), and sometimes as many as five ( Pro 24:30-34 ). 3. The form of address, "my son," which is so frequent in the first nine chapters, occurs also here in Proverbs 23:19 , Proverbs 23:26 ; Proverbs 24:13 ; and the appeal to the hearer is often made in the second person. Ewald regards this section as a kind of appendix to the earliest collection of the proverbs of Solomon, added not long after the introduction in the first nine chapters, though not by the same author. He thinks it probable that the compiler of this section added also the collection of proverbs which was made by the learned men of the court of Hezekiah, to which he wrote the superscription in Proverbs 25:1 . This theory of course only affects the date of the section in its present form. When the proverbs were written there is nothing to determine. Bertheau maintains that they in great part proceeded from one poet, in consequence of a peculiar construction which he employs to give emphasis to his presentation of a subject or object by repeating the pronoun (Proverbs 22:19 ; Proverbs 23:14-15 , Proverbs 23:19-20 , Proverbs 23:28 ; Proverbs 24:6 , Proverbs 24:27 , Pro 24:32 ). The compiler himself appears to have added Pro 22:17-21 as a kind of introduction. Another addition ( Pro 24:23-34 ) is introduced with 'these also belong to the wise,' and contains apparently some of 'the words of the wise' to which reference is made in Proverbs 1:6 . Jahn regards it as a collection of proverbs not by Solomon. Hensler says it is an appendix to a collection of doctrines which is entirely lost and unknown; and with regard to the previous part of the section Pro 22:17 to Proverbs 24:22 , he leaves it uncertain whether or not the author was a teacher to whom the son of a distinguished man was sent for instruction." Smith's Dictionary of the Bible.