- 1 day ago
This discussion with the Common Sense Bible Study crew on Proverbs 21 delves into various aspects of wisdom, justice, and righteous living. We explore how the proverbs address long-term consequences of today's actions, the significance of righteous behavior over mere sacrifice, and the impact of leadership on society. Key verses like Proverbs 21:1, 3, 9, and 27 are examined, discussing their relevance to modern life, particularly in political and social contexts. The concept of true justice and mercy, proper relationships within the household, and the role of leaders in shaping morality are extensively covered. The idea that God ultimately directs outcomes despite human actions is a recurring theme.
From Jay Carper at Common Sense Bible Study (https://CommonSenseBibleStudy.com) and American Torah (https://www.AmericanTorah.com).
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From Jay Carper at Common Sense Bible Study (https://CommonSenseBibleStudy.com) and American Torah (https://www.AmericanTorah.com).
This content is free, but I accept contributions via Paypal at https://jaycarper.com/paypal.
Send me a friend request on The Torah Network: https://jaycarper.com/ttn
Follow me on X: https://jaycarper.com/twitter
Follow me on Facebook: https://jaycarper.com/fbat
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LearningTranscript
00:00Proverbs 21.
00:30Proverbs 21.
01:00The righteous one observes the house of the wicked.
01:02He throws the wicked down to ruin.
01:04Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.
01:10A gift in secret averts anger and a concealed bribe of strong wrath.
01:15When justice is done, it is a joy to the righteous, but terror to evildoers.
01:19One who wanders from the way of good sense will rest in the assembly of the dead.
01:24Whoever loves pleasure will be a poor man.
01:27He who loves wine and oil will not be rich.
01:30The wicked is a ransom for the righteous and the traitor for the upright.
01:34It is better to live in a desert land than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman.
01:39Precious treasure and oil are in a wise man's dwelling, but a foolish man devours it.
01:44Whoever pursues righteousness and kindness will find life, righteousness, and honor.
01:50A wise man scales the city of the mighty and brings down the stronghold in which they trust.
01:54Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble.
01:59Goffer is the name of the arrogant, haughty man who acts with arrogant pride.
02:03The desire of the sluggard kills him, for his hand refuses to labor.
02:08All day long he craves and craves, but the righteous gives and does not hold back.
02:13The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination.
02:16How much more when he brings it with evil intent?
02:18The false witness will perish, but the word of a man who hears will endure.
02:23A wicked man puts on a bold face, but the upright gives thought to his ways.
02:28No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the Lord.
02:33The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord.
02:37Yeah, that last one is a pretty famous proverb.
02:41A pattern I noticed in this chapter is that a lot of these have to do with the long-term results of behavior today.
02:49Whether it's the sluggard who starves in the future, or someone who speaks a false witness today and it comes back to bite him later.
02:57Or plans that we set today that don't turn out the way that we expect them to years down the road.
03:05So there seems to be a consistent theme throughout this chapter.
03:09Not maybe in every proverb, but in a lot of them.
03:12Starting from the, let's start with the four questions here.
03:16What proverb speaks to you, what puzzles you, what surprises you, and what offends you?
03:21Scott and Daniel, are there any proverbs in here that particularly stand out to you, that really speak to you?
03:28I've always enjoyed Proverbs 3.
03:30To do righteous and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.
03:37I mean, that's his part.
03:39It's for us to not apologize, you know, do something and apologize later for it.
03:45What's that phrase?
03:47Whereby you will do something and then ask for forgiveness?
03:50Yeah, I know what you mean.
03:51I'm not sure about the phrase, but I know what you're talking about.
03:54Yeah.
03:54Yeah, that's just the antithesis of who he is, you know.
03:59Yeah, and this proverb is repeated in other words further down.
04:0427.
04:05Yeah, 27.
04:06The sacrifice of the wicked is an abomination.
04:09How much more when he brings it with evil intent?
04:12Yeah, and this is the counterpoint.
04:15It's not that God needs sacrifice.
04:18No.
04:19Sacrifice is for our benefit.
04:20And if we're not bringing it with the right heart, not really doing anything for us.
04:26Can you think of modern applications to this?
04:28We don't have a temple or an altar right now.
04:31So there's not a lot that we're not bringing offerings to the temple.
04:34Now, how can this principle apply for today?
04:40I think verse 3 is probably a little bit easier to see than verse 27.
04:45Sorry, go ahead, Daniel.
04:47I was going to say here in verse 3,
04:50to do the righteousness and justice is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.
04:55Is that the one we're talking about, right?
04:57Yes.
04:59Sacrifice depends.
05:00An unwanted sacrifice would be wanting to put our selfish ambitions before righteousness and justice.
05:10I know there's so many people in certain parties that want to make the sacrifices to do their,
05:17to get their agendas passed and to do their agendas.
05:23And they forego righteousness and justice of God.
05:28I've seen that pattern going on with our political system that's going on right now.
05:36The furthering of agendas versus the furthering of God's agenda and what he wants.
05:45So that's what I, that's something I see that's relevant to today.
05:50Yeah, I think there are a couple of other proverbs in this chapter that, that relate to that.
05:58I don't remember which one.
06:01Verse 20, 21.
06:04Whoever pursues righteousness and kindness in the word there is chesed,
06:08will find life, righteousness, and honor.
06:10And a lot of people think that it's kind to encourage things that make people feel better.
06:18They've got their own ideas of what justice is.
06:21The term social justice.
06:24Leveling out the playing field is the, the ultimate goal because then everyone feels the same.
06:30Nobody feels like they're less than somebody else.
06:32Or if somebody really passionately wants to live in this particular way, then we should encourage them because that's who they are.
06:40And that's being nice.
06:42But nice isn't the same as chesed or God's kindness.
06:48The actual Hebrew word behind that word.
06:52And in God's righteousness, in his, sometimes it's kind to be harsh and to make people hurt.
07:00But you think God loved Israel, loves Israel still.
07:05And he shows them chesed by removing the wicked from their midst.
07:10That's an important part of kindness.
07:13If somebody has cancer, if somebody has a brain tumor that makes them feel amazing,
07:19the right thing to do is not to let the brain cancer keep growing because it makes them feel better.
07:24The right thing to do is remove it.
07:26And it's the same thing with all of, a lot of these things that people today want to call justice and mercy and kindness.
07:35They're really not.
07:36They're the opposite.
07:37Make people feel good right now, but destroy their lives later.
07:41And I think the goal or the point that he's trying to make is, I think his preference would have been to never have a sacrificial world, right?
07:51Or a system.
07:53He would have rather have had obedience.
07:55There's a number of plays and science fiction movies or books, I should say, or short stories whereby the current population is dealing with some sort of supernatural being, right?
08:11And they inquire of the natural being, where do you come from?
08:16Or what is it that sets you apart?
08:19And they, in essence, go to the, we had an experience in the garden like you did, but we obeyed.
08:26And so it's a modern day story hook, but it is interesting because that I think was his hope and his goal wasn't for us to fall.
08:40It was for us to, to obey.
08:43Now he knew what was going to happen and he created this system to address that and atone for that.
08:49But he's coming back and when he does, he's going to want obedience.
08:56I believe personally that the sacrificial system still will exist to rectify because when he's back, people will fall away.
09:07So to me, that's, it's suggestive of even when he's back, people are going to struggle with, with their free will.
09:17So, but the ideal is for us to obey.
09:23Yeah.
09:24Most, not most, out of the five kinds of sacrifices, two of them were designed to give some kind of temporary fix for mistakes.
09:37And yeah, it would be much better if we never made the mistakes that necessitate the sacrifice in the first place.
09:43So those two verses, three and 27 are talking about the same thing, but from, from opposite sides.
09:50Verse three is saying, it would be better to just live a righteous life.
09:54So you don't need to do the sacrifices.
09:57And verse 27 is saying, if you need to do the sacrifices, make sure that you are intending to live a righteous life.
10:05That you are repenting from the thing that you did, caused you to make sacrifice.
10:10If you're just coming for confession and you're going to go right back out and do the same thing again.
10:15What's the point in that?
10:16Don't even bother.
10:17I don't think God forgives people who are not repenting.
10:21And I'd also don't think that means that we have to be perfect.
10:24You repent from something doesn't mean you're never going to do it again.
10:27It means that you are intending never to do it again.
10:30You're going to do your best, but we are weak.
10:33We are flawed people and we are going to do those things.
10:38Because it's just who we are.
10:41Now, what about you, Daniel?
10:42Do you have one proverb in here that really stood out to you?
10:45Yes, it was verse one, actually.
10:49Okay.
10:50It is an interesting one.
10:51I had to look at some of the Hebrew words on that one to figure out what it was really saying.
10:57What are your thoughts on it?
10:59I know that there's a scripture that says,
11:04Out of our belly shall flow streams of living water.
11:09I think that was, and I was not expecting it to be the king's heart that the water was coming out of instead of his gut.
11:17But that was something that caught me, puzzled me, caught me off guard on that one.
11:25The heart, I guess the heart is connected to the belly in one sense, but I don't know.
11:32That's hebraic thought that I'm unaware of as far as that goes.
11:37But I know.
11:40Go ahead.
11:41Sorry.
11:41Daniel, who do you think is turning the stream wherever he will?
11:47The king or God?
11:49God, for sure.
11:52So am I interpreting this correctly?
11:56That the king is full of ideas on how to go about things, but God orders it aright?
12:03I believe that's maybe, I do believe that's the gist of it, but I think there's more to this than meets the eye.
12:16The king's heart, of course.
12:18Go ahead.
12:19I was thinking of it from a different angle, but I think these are, the way that I was thinking of it is certainly related.
12:27But I was thinking that the stream, I don't remember what the Hebrew word there is, but it specifically refers to a man-made stream, not just a mountain stream or a spring, but to a canal.
12:42So this is something that has been purposefully made.
12:46And we can dig a canal or we can appoint a king, but God is the one who turns him to his will, who makes the king do what needs to be done.
12:57And sometimes that's leading the nation into further evil, giving them more of what they want.
13:03Sometimes it's correcting the nation.
13:05But I think one of the things that we can learn from that is, especially looking at the examples of Pharaoh and Saul, that the more power you have over other people, the less free will you have.
13:19Within the boundaries of that canal, the water can splash around all at once, but God is still going to direct it to his purposes so that things work out the way that he wants them to.
13:29But your interpretation there, Daniel, which I really like, gives another implication in that the water isn't just the king's heart, but the things that flow from the king's heart so that he is a source of life and justice to the people.
13:47And that's his purpose for living.
13:48So if he is a good king, then that's what he does.
13:52And God helps him to do that.
13:54I think that's a really great picture.
13:55But is not the king representative of the people?
14:01Yeah.
14:01Like you get the government you deserve sort of thing.
14:04Yeah.
14:06Maybe not in a kingship so much because sometimes the people were saddled with an unjust king, but there's a correlation between the king and his subjects because they are subject to his will.
14:22Yeah, it's a positive feedback loop that the king reflects the state of the people, but then the king can help guide the state of the people, move it in better or worse directions.
14:36And God has a strong hand in which way it's going to go.
14:39And I suspect that when you get an evil king who just makes things worse, like we've got right now, it's possibly because God wants to, like he did with the Canaanites, he wants their wickedness to come to its fullness so that he can then move on to judgment.
14:58What he told Adam when they were, not Adam, what he told Abraham when they were approaching Sodom, or rather not what he told Abraham, but the negotiation that went on, how God said that he wouldn't destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if there were even 10 righteous people in the city.
15:16Like, but there weren't, but there weren't, turned out that there was one at most, maybe, maybe three at most, but probably just one.
15:26Yeah, I don't think the daughters.
15:28Yeah, it doesn't really seem like it.
15:30So God's, I think that God probably gave Sodom a wicked ruler because the city was wicked and he needed it to move closer to that point where he could pass judgment.
15:41Like, even God couldn't convict the innocent.
15:44So he gave people more opportunities to dig their heels in and become wicked, to do more of what they were already intent on doing.
15:53Sometimes a ruler will evoke from his people their true heart, whether that ruler is good or evil, go to Hitler.
16:06There was some massively brave and honorable people within the German population that held against this evil.
16:18But for the most part, the population embraced what was being peddled.
16:24That was a spark to evoke from the people what their true colors were.
16:34Yeah, and people ask, how can God allow the Holocaust?
16:38One of the purposes for that, obviously, was to move the Jews back to Israel, push them in that direction.
16:46At least that seems like that was one of God's purposes.
16:49But another purpose, it could have been to complete that wickedness of the German people of the day.
16:56Make sure that they showed their true colors to the whole world so that when we went and firebombed Dresden, wherever else we firebombed and destroyed, that nobody could question that this was something that had to be done.
17:12Or at least there were no excuses.
17:16Not that it was a nice thing to do, of course.
17:19I know there's something going on.
17:21I don't mean to interrupt.
17:22I noticed something, too.
17:24It's the king's heart.
17:26Is that lev in Hebrew there used?
17:30Or is it?
17:32Yeah, lev.
17:33Okay.
17:34That's interesting because in Hebraic, the heart is not the one in the chest.
17:38It's your mind.
17:40So it's your soul, your emotions.
17:42Everything is there in your mind.
17:47And it's in the hand of the Lord.
17:51And He's manipulating the minds by presenting options and choices in their minds of good things to do.
18:07It's like He's testing them.
18:09It almost seems it's like a test.
18:12God appoints leaders, of course.
18:15And this is a testing of these leaders.
18:19And He's turning it which way He wants because He's trying to find out if they're going to be obedient to Him.
18:30The living water has potential because it comes from God.
18:38Myim Kaim comes from God.
18:40And what we do with that Myim Kaim, if we abuse it, if we misuse it, then God is going to cut us off.
18:53That man-made is cut off.
18:56He's going to dam it up.
18:57He's going to reroute that water to another leader that He's going to try to appoint.
19:04So that's just my extra thoughts on this as I look at it again.
19:12Yeah.
19:13And I was just looking at the Hebrew word there for stream also.
19:18And interestingly, that word is Peleg.
19:21Does that sound familiar?
19:23Yeah.
19:23Yeah.
19:24Yep.
19:24So that's the name of the ancestor of or the descendant of Noah, the descendant of Shem, too, I think.
19:32When Genesis says his name was Peleg because in his days was the earth divided.
19:37And his name can mean split or division, and apparently it can mean canal, too.
19:44And if that name, if the days that the earth was divided, if the purpose of that was, if that was a result of the Tower of Babel and Nimrod's actions, that's the same thing.
19:58God allows their wickedness to come to fruition so that then He can pass judgment.
20:04And the judgment was dividing them up.
20:07And it's very similar with other nations, peoples throughout history.
20:12The Canaanites weren't just conquered by Israel.
20:15They were scattered.
20:17And the tribes of the Amalekites that were out in the desert between Babylon and Judea that caused so many problems later on were probably largely made up of Canaanite refugees or their descendants.
20:30So when a people's wickedness comes to that point where God needs to step in and pass judgment, He gives them a ruler who completes the job, who guides them into, lets them do what they really want to do.
20:45And then He destroys and scatters them.
20:48Maybe He uses another nation to do that, maybe a natural disaster, or maybe He scrambles their language.
20:53So if you take that approach and walk it backwards, is not a king or ruler's purpose to refine His people?
21:09Yeah.
21:10To refine them, either refine them as dross or refine them as silver, one of the two.
21:14Right.
21:15Yeah, we're reading verse 1, Lisa.
21:18We talked a little bit about verse 3 and then went back to verse 1.
21:20Okay, thanks.
21:22I'm traveling, so I'm just going to be listening.
21:26Okay, that's right.
21:28I know verse 9 is the one that I thought stood out to me.
21:32And I mentioned this to Scott earlier.
21:36You're on the roof, right?
21:36It's an awkward one to talk about.
21:37Right now, right?
21:38So far, I've avoided the roof.
21:41So it's better to live in a corner of the house stop than in a house shared with a quarrelsome wife.
21:45You know, most people want to read that and say, well, that's misogynistic.
21:52They usually focus on the quarrelsome wife.
21:54But why is she quarrelsome?
21:56That's the big question.
21:57Yeah, that's the real question, I think.
21:59Because if most of these proverbs are advice from a father to son, and most of the proverbs in this particular chapter are talking about, what did you do years ago that has brought you to this circumstance?
22:11That puts a whole other light on this verse.
22:15And in my personal experience, if a man is indecisive, if he is passive and isn't being that king from verse 1, where he's refining his family and moving it in a positive direction, then that creates insecurity.
22:35It creates confusion and problems in the household.
22:39And years down the road, now you've got a wife who is stressed out on pins and needles and maybe thinking of her husband, whether consciously or not, as the enemy because he's the source of her insecurity.
22:54And so now he ends up on the roof because he can't live in the house with his wife that he was supposed to be protecting and providing for and guiding all these years and neglected.
23:05Symbolically, that's very interesting because if the man or the husband is to be the cover, then this is alluding to a location that is a cover.
23:20The roof is a cover over the household.
23:22So it's something poetic.
23:26Yeah, that is interesting.
23:27I hadn't thought of it that way.
23:29But yeah, it's kind of like saying, if you don't choose to be the roof, we're going to send you up to be the roof anyways.
23:36Yeah.
23:37And all the problems that happen, he is responsible for them.
23:42Some people are just quarrelsome by nature.
23:44And I'm not saying that every problem in a house is the husband or father's fault.
23:49It's not true because every person is their – they're all their own people and they make their own choices.
23:57And every person has – exists on a continuum of passive to aggressive or lots of other different scales too.
24:07But on the whole, if there are consistent pathologies in a house, he usually does go back somewhere to the husband.
24:17I hate this verse.
24:18There was something that should have been done years ago or a pattern that has been creating a problem that maybe we don't know what – we don't know what the pattern is.
24:29Something has gone wrong somewhere along the line.
24:32It has not been correct.
24:32And that's how they end up in this situation at verse 9.
24:37I've got a question.
24:38Are verses 8, 9, and 10 connected there?
24:43I don't see an obvious connection other than the way that all the Proverbs are connected.
24:50There was – well, how many grammically were they connected?
24:55Do they run into each other?
24:57Because there's something I noticed.
25:00It just hit me.
25:02David was on the house – on the roof of the top of his palace when he saw Bathsheba.
25:09Right.
25:10So this almost sounds like Solomon acknowledging that it's the same kind of thing going on.
25:18And he realizes his dad wouldn't – should have maybe chose a different route than he should have when he was watching her on the rooftop bathing.
25:31Yeah.
25:32Then you've got to ask, why was he up there?
25:35Whether he was on the rooftop or not, I'm not sure.
25:38But he was definitely out checking things out where he shouldn't have been.
25:42Yeah.
25:42And what brought him to this place – oh, you can look at his relationship with Meikle or Mitchell or whatever her name is.
25:50I can never figure out how to pronounce that one.
25:52And not Mitchell, but Meikle probably.
25:56That relationship was broken from the very beginning.
25:59Yeah.
26:00And it really seems like it was because David was not being a husband to her.
26:05He won her by emasculating a bunch of Philistines and then left her behind while he went gallivanting around the country.
26:14Yeah.
26:14Partly because her father was trying to kill him, but excuses, excuses.
26:19But whatever the cause, they had a broken relationship.
26:23And she never had children.
26:25And he essentially put her away.
26:29That was just a mess.
26:31Yeah.
26:32If you also look at the structures of the houses they had back then, the corners were the unstable spots on the house, if I remember correctly.
26:41They were on the – if it's talking about what I think it's talking about, it's talking about the edge of the – it's talking about being on the edge of the housetop.
26:51It's not even talking about being in the center or close to stability.
26:55It's talking about being on the edge kind of thing, if that's what I'm reading into correctly here.
27:04The knoff?
27:06Knorr, for corner.
27:09I was thinking it might be knoff, like the four corners of the garments.
27:13Yeah.
27:13Yeah.
27:14Different word, but I don't know.
27:17No.
27:18I don't really know much about their architecture.
27:20Except that the rooftop was not an unusual place for people to be, really.
27:25Yeah.
27:25Just another room of the house.
27:27Yeah.
27:27The corners were unstable a little bit, though.
27:31They were kind of – I think they were kind of rounded off a little bit.
27:34I've looked at some of the Hebrew structures online, like different ancient sites and stuff.
27:41And in Israel, some of the ancient architecture of the way they built their homes, they were really square.
27:50Their building structures were kind of square at the top.
27:53So that could be why it says a corner, too.
27:57It's because it's kind of square up there.
28:00Yeah, I don't know.
28:03As far as the vocabulary and grammar between those three verses, I don't know of enough Hebrew to be able to tell anything.
28:11Oh, okay.
28:12If you take that approach that this is a reference to David, I would argue maybe not because it is saying it is better to live on the corner of the housetop than to live with a quarrelsome woman.
28:29So is it better to put yourself in a position of temptation than to live with a quarrelsome woman?
28:38I would think not.
28:40Just a thought.
28:42Yeah.
28:43That's true.
28:44But you put yourself in greater temptation when your house is not in order.
28:51But it says it is better.
28:52Because if you've got a bad relationship –
28:53Yeah, it's a warning to the son to make sure that his house is in order so that he doesn't have to go live on the rooftop.
29:01But one of the other dangers that are not directly addressed in this proverb is that if your relationship with your wife is broken, then you're going to have more temptations outside the home, too.
29:13Because you're going to have more incentive to be looking for somebody else.
29:16Because it's better to keep the relationship healthy from the very beginning rather than to get into that spot where you're ending up sleeping on the roof or in somebody else's bedroom.
29:29I see.
29:30That's interesting.
29:32Yeah, it's interesting where these things take us.
29:34I had experienced this probably January, whereby I met a couple, and I presume they were husband and wife.
29:46They weren't.
29:47They were boyfriend and girlfriend.
29:50She remained married for tax purposes.
29:54And the boyfriend-girlfriend actually had a relationship with the husband in that they would go on vacations together.
30:03And so you just see how unstable that is from a marriage or a family group where you introduce all of these ideas of supposed stability versus non.
30:22It's sad.
30:24Yeah, that's nuts.
30:26All right.
30:26Back to those four questions.
30:29Okay.
30:30In verse 13, whoever closes his ears to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered.
30:38How do you reconcile that with our modern society whereby we have all of these programs that the government is employing supposedly to help the poor?
30:52And you couple that with various churches that have their programs to help the poor and so forth.
31:00It's a convoluted setup now, I believe.
31:04Yeah, it is.
31:04And I think that's on purpose.
31:07Maybe I have a non-intuitive answer to that.
31:12Government welfare is a way to let people close their ears to the cry of the poor and pretend as if they're listening.
31:21They are letting somebody else deal with the poor instead of doing it themselves.
31:26And I am just as guilty as everybody else.
31:28I don't necessarily go out of my way to go find poor people to help.
31:33I don't have a lot of poor friends.
31:36And I don't know if that's a flaw of my own or if that's just the way that life has come about.
31:42But I do.
31:44It does bother me sometimes.
31:46And I'm opposed to government welfare programs.
31:49I think, you know, charity should be local first, family, then your local community.
31:54You know, very rarely should the government ever be involved in it, except as there's the one tie that the central storehouse in your own town.
32:04And that's not the federal government.
32:06That's your own little town government handling it.
32:08And that's about as far as I would allow government if I were in charge, of course.
32:13That's as far as I would allow the government to be involved in any kind of welfare programs.
32:17But am I willing to step up and take over those functions myself?
32:25To be totally honest, I haven't done it.
32:27So I don't really have any evidence that I would be.
32:29Other than a few forays out into a soup kitchen.
32:33It's hard to discern the poor now.
32:36Yeah, well, in America, who is really poor?
32:39I mean, some people are poor because they have mental illnesses and other problems that prevent them from holding jobs or end up on the street.
32:46And they're definitely poor.
32:49But it's interesting within this 21, you have reference to the consequence of not working.
32:58And now you have this tied in within the entire proverb.
33:05It's a flip side of it almost.
33:07Because there is a consequence that can lead to poverty.
33:11But I don't believe that's what this is talking about.
33:16Maybe I'm wrong.
33:17You mean verse 13?
33:19Yeah, verse 13 is suggesting that you need to listen to the cries of the poor.
33:25And when I hear that, I'm thinking of gleaning the fields and gleaning.
33:29And you have a setup so as to help people that are truly poor, but not people who refuse to work.
33:37The grasshopper and the ant type of thing.
33:40Yeah, definitely.
33:41I don't think that if they're able-bodied people and there's work to be done, I don't think they should be getting any kind of charity unless they're at least making an effort to do that work.
33:51There are lots of people who are unable to work, and that's a totally different story.
33:56But verse 13, I think, it is talking about those people who are truly disadvantaged.
34:01And in that particular culture, if you didn't own land, you were totally dependent on other people for your sustenance.
34:08Not for handouts, but for work.
34:11You had no right to demand work from anybody.
34:12You had a right to gleanings, so there was no reason for you to starve as long as people were allowing you your right to glean their fields.
34:24But yeah, it's not about people who are just – it's not about beggars who don't have any particular reason to be begging.
34:31And I think it's – the consequence, the second half, is about those relationships.
34:38If there are people who are suffering and legitimately unable to provide for themselves and you are ignoring them or you're contributing to that, not only does God see that and God will arrange things against you, but other people are going to see it too.
34:55And if you do come upon hard times, why should anybody else help you?
34:59And you've got to look at – your community has known you your whole life, and they're going to know who you are.
35:06And they're going to know that you were never willing to help anybody when they were down, so why should they help you now when you're down?
35:13It's not necessarily saying that that's good, but that's just the way people behave.
35:18Yeah, natural law of karma type of thing.
35:21I had one for the puzzles.
35:23Verse 18.
35:25I mean, it doesn't puzzle me now, but it did when I first read it.
35:28The wicked is a ransom for the righteous and a traitor for the upright.
35:33And my first thought was, Yeshua is a ransom for the wicked and the righteous, and he wasn't wicked.
35:39He's not a traitor.
35:40So how does that work?
35:41But thinking about the king and the ways that things are supposed to work, if the king is doing his job, his kindness towards his people is to save the righteous from the wicked.
35:58So the ransom for the life of the righteous is the punishment of the wicked.
36:06If somebody is a murderer, God says we're supposed to take their life, and it's not out of vengeance.
36:12We're not punishing them or making them suffer because they made somebody else suffer.
36:17That's not our job.
36:19But it is rescuing the remaining righteous.
36:23Those people who remain, who live in the land, the land is going to be poisoned by the innocent blood that is not atoned for.
36:30And the death of the murderer atones for blood of the victim, at least on the land, not necessarily on the blood that is on the murderer.
36:41So it's the execution of the wicked, or at least the wicked who are made to pay restitution for their crimes.
36:49Those are the ones who are paying a ransom for the lives of the righteous.
36:53They have to be removed for the sake of the other people.
36:56So it's a very practical proverb that sounds more lofty, I think, than it's intended.
37:02So when you have corruption of the justice system, and you do not have real justice dulled, then the entire society suffers because you do not have a standard that's upheld.
37:24I'm just thinking of our current society, and that is an explanation that makes perfect sense.
37:30So if you do not have justice meted out, then you now have all of these arguments that are basically encouraging crime or sin, evil, whatever term you want to use, because you have a corrupted system.
37:53Yeah, people are opposed to the death penalty for a few reasons.
37:57But, you know, the first one, the principal reason is that we don't have a right to take other people's lives, but that's just false.
38:06God is the one who decides what's right and wrong, and if he commands us to do something, then we have a right to do it.
38:12And the other reason, of course, is that our courts are corrupt, and we convict innocent people all the time.
38:19And it's not all the time.
38:21We're not always convicting innocent people of murder, but it does happen.
38:25But that's no different than in 1500 BC when God commanded murderers to be put to death.
38:32Their standards of evidence were much lower than ours.
38:36They didn't have DNA and fingerprints and all these forensic science.
38:40They had eyewitnesses, and if there were two people who came forward and said, I saw that guy do it, that was enough, and that guy had to be executed.
38:51And to say that it's cruel or unjust or something to execute murderers is being cruel and unjust to the survivors, to the people who are left.
39:04Because now there will be more murder, and there will be more injustice.
39:09Yeah, and just the only real justice is that which is in accord with God's commandments.
39:17Anything that's opposed to them is unjust by definition, because God defines justice.
39:23I really don't carry myself talk all that much.
39:26It's just, though.
39:28What's that Hebrew word for ransom?
39:30I'm just curious.
39:31Ransom is kofar, or covering, and atonement.
39:38That's interesting.
39:39Brown driver, Briggs, apparently it's not exactly the same word as atonement, but it's certainly related.
39:46It's the same root.
39:48Okay.
39:49That's interesting.
39:51Yeah, kafar, 3722, is pretty sure that's the word for atonement.
39:58Yeah, to cover, that's to atone.
40:01So the only difference, actually, they're spelled exactly the same, so I'm not sure how they would tell the difference.
40:07Kof, peh, resh.
40:09There were no vowel markings in the original Proverbs, so those vowel markings would have to be tradition, or maybe derived from the Septuagint or something.
40:20And that actually makes it even more literal, that the death of the murderer is literally a covering for the death of the righteous who was killed.
40:31And you can look back at the story of Cain and Abel for an illustration.
40:36Cain killed Abel, and God said that your brother's blood is crying out to me from the ground.
40:41The just thing would have been for Cain to be killed.
40:44And he even said to God that if you kick me out and I go out there, whoever sees me is going to kill me because God has commanded that he should be killed.
40:53But it was God's mercy on Cain that allowed him to live.
40:59Ultimately, though, it's all part of God's plan.
41:02I don't really understand it, but we can see what happened from that.
41:06Cain's descendants were the ones who, at least traditionally, created the conditions that caused the flood.
41:14And, of course, death's descendants did it, too, because Noah was the only righteous man left, so they all had to have been in on it at some point.
41:22So that might not be an accurate tradition.
41:25There was a Nephilim that came down, too.
41:28Yeah, but they took advantage of something that, if the people were righteous, I don't think they ever would have had the opportunity to do whatever it was they did.
41:38Oh, yeah.
41:39Agree.
41:40So, Daniel, is there a particular proverb that puzzled you?
41:44I think I mentioned the one about the first one.
41:48It was the first one.
41:49Oh, okay.
41:51All right.
41:51What about surprise?
41:52I know puzzle and surprise are kind of overlapping.
41:58Yeah, those two kind of overlap for me on that first one.
42:03I wrote down verse 12.
42:05I don't remember what that one was.
42:06Look it up.
42:08The righteous one observes the house of the wicked.
42:10He throws the wicked down to ruin.
42:12Okay, yeah.
42:14It surprised me because of how aggressive it makes the righteous one sound.
42:19And the English Standard Version here capitalizes righteous one.
42:22And they're implying that the righteous one refers to God or at least to Jesus.
42:30And I don't think that's really what was intended.
42:33I think he's just saying that a righteous person observes the house of the wicked and he throws it down to ruin.
42:41And frequently, that's not really true.
42:44But really, what surprised me was just the Proverbs are usually not so gung-ho about the triumph of the righteous over the wicked.
42:54And in this case, I wrote that a wise and righteous man who has observed the chaos and pathology in the house of the wicked for any length of time will seize a good opportunity to destroy that house.
43:07Not because he hates the wicked man or his family, but because he loves his own family and his community.
43:14And that goes right back to the idea that the righteous have an obligation to remove the wicked from their midst.
43:22And not just, not for themselves, it's not necessarily out of self-defense, but there's nothing wrong with that.
43:27But it's to protect the entire community.
43:31Yeah, so in today's society, in today's society, the wicked are emulated.
43:37The wicked are lifted up.
43:39We try to become the trendsetters.
43:44So it's really, it's sad the place we find ourselves now.
43:50Yeah, and people who, we can, because righteous people didn't do this, because they didn't throw down the house of the wicked when they had a chance, now the wicked are running the whole country.
44:04One of the things that Solomon observes frequently in the Proverbs is that one of the differences between the righteous and the wicked is that the righteous are very forthright.
44:15They're simple to understand.
44:16They say what they mean.
44:18They're not complicated.
44:19Whereas the wicked are scheming, convoluted, they're complicated, and they're deceptive.
44:27And this is how good communities and good nations become rotten, because we often don't really expect other people to be scheming.
44:38Righteous people tend to take other people at face value.
44:42And wicked people are not dealing at face value.
44:46They're not dealing honestly.
44:47And even though they often believe that they are, they're really not.
44:52They are scheming and always working to undermine morality and a people's adherence to God's commandments.
45:01And over time, they will infect, like Levin, they will infect the entire organization, the entire nation, until they're everywhere.
45:14And then there's nothing you can do about it.
45:15It's too late.
45:16It happened when you weren't even looking, because you didn't think that your next door neighbor was trying to do that.
45:22And maybe they weren't consciously trying to do that, but that's what they were doing anyways, whether they meant to or not.
45:29It's always a little bit at a time.
45:32Verse 22, a wise man scales the city of the mighty and brings down the stronghold in which they trust.
45:40Same thing.
45:40Yeah, but why would you correlate that to what you're talking about?
45:45And that's a wise man is going to try to pull down the wicked that we were just talking about to avoid infection.
45:56I wonder what's this word for mighty here.
46:00Mighty is Gabor.
46:00So just a mighty man, strong man.
46:02That word doesn't necessarily imply anything bad.
46:06A mighty man is also like a great warrior is called a mighty man.
46:13So I'm a little bit puzzled why that word is chosen.
46:17I mean, I understand the point.
46:19The point is that this mighty man is a wicked one.
46:21He's a tyrant.
46:22But it is, this does have a different kind of spin than the other verse.
46:28Whereas the other one was, he's going to tear the whole thing down.
46:33But this guy's got to scale the walls.
46:36It's like, he's a serious underdog here.
46:39Yeah, he's got to take on.
46:41He's got to be wily.
46:43Right.
46:43He's got to take on the strongholds.
46:48He's got to take on the mores of where society is going in order to reclaim it.
46:55I would, I think it does go hand in hand with what you were talking about.
46:59Yeah, I think that this one is talking more about the strategy.
47:04Like the first one is talking about, this is what has to happen.
47:07This one is more talking about how does it have to happen?
47:10And you can't, like since, since the wicked right now run every major public institution,
47:17they run all of the education and they run the government, they run entertainment, everything.
47:22Like, you can't just confront them head on.
47:26You can, but I don't think you're going to get anywhere.
47:30This guy is scaling the city of the mighty.
47:33So he has to get inside.
47:35The fact that it says city, it suggests something established by the mighty.
47:41So you are taking on the establishment, almost literally.
47:46Yeah, he's an outsider.
47:47And he's having to scale it and get inside in order, excuse me, in order to bring it down.
47:57Yeah, there's, there's the case of, I can't remember which judge it was.
48:03The one judge who, I think he went to a Moabite king and he was a delegation from Israel,
48:11went there and they had this meeting and then they were getting ready to leave.
48:16And he says, oh, King, I've got a secret message for you.
48:19And everybody else leaves and he stays behind and stabs the Moabite king.
48:25There's an element of subterfuge.
48:27The wicked have established themselves and built their cities to subterfuge.
48:31And so it takes some, some wisdom to try to counter that.
48:38And while he is a snake, right?
48:41Yeah.
48:42Reminds me of another judge to, you know, Gideon with his 300 men and God sent him against
48:49the Midianites, I think.
48:50And God deliberately pared down his force to just 300 men and they didn't attack the
48:57enemy directly.
48:59They fooled the enemy into thinking that they were a lot stronger and more numerous than
49:04they were, you know, through, by using their clay jars with the lamps, they snuck into the,
49:09or got close to the camp and then they all broke their jars and blew their trumpets and rushed
49:12into the camp and the enemy fought themselves.
49:15So if you can find a way to make the enemy destroy himself, you know, by tearing down his
49:22walls, undermining his, the very things that he is trusting in.
49:27But I don't think that you can do that just through your own devices.
49:31I think that like Gideon in other examples in scripture, that takes God's help.
49:38Which brings me to the horses made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs
49:43to the Lord, which is not to say that we should not make ready our horses.
49:48We are supposed to prepare for battle, arm ourselves, gear up and show up ready to fight.
49:55But victory comes from God, not from our weapons.
49:59And I don't know exactly how to apply that in our current situation.
50:02So what else we got here?
50:05Is anybody offended by anything?
50:07Is anybody offended?
50:08We already talked about the quarrelsome wife.
50:10There are actually two verses on that one too, but I don't, we can talk about the other
50:15one if you want, but I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between them.
50:20Trust everyone is scanning through the chapter.
50:23Verse 28, I thought was an interesting one because it could be interpreted in two completely
50:27different ways.
50:29A false witness will perish, but the word of a man who hears will endure.
50:34The first part is easy.
50:35A false witness will perish because God's law commands that a false witness be punished
50:40with the same punishment that his intended victim would have gotten.
50:44So if he accuses somebody else of murder and he's a false witness, then he is supposed to
50:49be executed instead.
50:51But the word of a man who hears will endure.
50:54It depends on what it means by hears.
50:56I read one commentator who said, this is referring to a man who is listening, who is patient and
51:04hears out the entire case before he passes judgment.
51:07So this would be a judge and he's hearing both sides of the story so that he doesn't just
51:13listen to the false witness and his word will endure.
51:17The truth will come out essentially is what that's saying.
51:19And I read another commentary where it said, this is talking about people who hear and believe
51:26the false witness.
51:27And even if you execute the false witness, that lie is still out there and you can never
51:31take it back because now it's going to endure and other people are going to be repeating it.
51:37And I think both of those interpretations are true.
51:40I don't know which one is Solomon's intended meeting, but they're both accurate.
51:47Anyone else have any thoughts on that?
51:49I have some thoughts to share.
51:52Okay, go ahead.
51:53As we've gone along in these Proverbs from what I've been, as long as I've been a part
52:00of it, I noticed that this is like almost, this almost seems like an oral dissection of
52:09the Torah upon the history of Israel up to this point.
52:15And it almost seems very almost, it seems a lot like the Talmud sort of in certain aspects
52:25as far as wisdom, having wisdom in certain, but this is better than Talmud though.
52:31This is from God.
52:32This is wisdom from God that flowed through Solomon.
52:36It just seems to me that it comes across as being like commentary, sort of, and like a reflection
52:44upon what all that has happened up to this point.
52:47And it just seems to be broken down just so much, almost like the way Yeshua did with his Beatitudes
52:57and his teachings and parables, it almost comes across as a repetition of Yeshua being like Solomon
53:07and later on dissecting the past, reflecting upon, because he is, he's a descendant of David as far as his, his parents and his earthly
53:21parents and stuff, he's in line for the kingship of David.
53:27So it just comes across as being a prelude to Yeshua for me.
53:33That's the way it comes across.
53:36Yeah, I think in many ways, that's true.
53:39I know Tom Bradford, he interprets when people called Yeshua, the son of David, he interprets that as a reference to Solomon.
53:48They were saying that he was as wise as Solomon.
53:51I don't know if that's, if that's was a common idiom of the day, or that's something that he came up with on his own.
53:58I don't know.
54:00It is an interesting idea.
54:03Okay.
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