A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will perish. [Proverbs 19:9] Proverbs has a habit of repeating itself. Just as Psalm 14:1-3 and Psalm 53:1-3 are nearly identical, so Proverbs will on occasion repeat verses. By the rules of common sense, we can guess that these repetitions are important.…
Whoever gets sense loves his own soul; he who keeps understanding will discover good. [Proverbs 19:8] In an age of anti-intellectual emotionalism and anti-emotional intellectualism, Scripture provides the sanity which both sides recoil from (Ps. 10:4). The balance is difficult and not merely quantitative. Sinful man abhors it, in part because it resists making excuses…
All a poor man’s brothers hate him; how much more do his friends go far from him! He pursues them with words, but does not have them. [Proverbs 19:7] When we read a verse in Scripture, our common instinct is to set ourselves in the righteous man’s place. In this case, that means casting ourselves…
Many seek the favor of a generous man, and everyone is a friend to a man who gives gifts. [Proverbs 19:6] Money can’t buy love, they say, but that’s manifestly false. People ‘buy’ friendship and love all the time. The grossest forms of this, of course, are sex slavery, prostitution, and pseudo-prostitution. We live in…
Living in a world of information flooding requires the proper navigation equipment. Imagine you’re riding a surging river over cataracts, eddies, and waterfalls. If you don’t have means and methods of sorting through the excessive propaganda, separating it from the truth, you will get sucked under the swirls and get bashed against the rocks. Starting…
Our children carry the effects of our stress into their bodies as we prepare them for the world. A Yale study suggests that better stress management can lower our children’s risk of obesity and its poor health outcomes. As parents, we strive for our children to have a better life than we have lived, whether…
A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape. [Proverbs 19:5] I might, as I have probably done in other parts of this series, focus on the ways in which God has woven this into the earth, and to some extent, those mechanisms will appear here. But today…
Wealth brings many new friends, but a poor man is deserted by his friend. [Proverbs 19:4] No man has more friends than when his star is in ascendance, when his hand is on the scepter, when his paycheck is freshly cashed. A ‘fair-weather friend’ is a common sight. The halls of power flock with them.…
When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the Lord. [Proverbs 19:3] When we hit our rock bottom, we will do anything except admit that we’re to blame. This talent we inherited from Adam, and this talent we pass along to our children. Everybody can be to blame, except myself.…
Desire without knowledge is not good, and whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way. [Proverbs 19:2] The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. It’s a dangerous thing to desire without knowing what we desire, a recipe for folly, destruction, and disaster. Yet we’re all too prone to the…