Day 186. Proverbs 14-16

It is a little tempting to treat these proverbs like those little fortune cookies you get at the end of Chinese meal—and there is some superficial similarity between the two. But these proverbs, unlike fortune cookies, are the distillation of generations of thought and experience, and they demand to be approached with respect and thoughtful consideration. "A scoffer seeks wisdom in vain," the wise teacher says, "but knowledge is easy for one who understands" (14:6). The search for wisdom is a discipline that demands thought and meditation. So a proverb like this one—"Where there are no oxen, there is no grain; abundant crops come by the strength of the ox" (14:4)—is not about farm animals, as it may seem at first reading. When you approach it with respectful concentration it reveals itself to be about the dignity of those who do hard manual labor, who are too often taken for granted by the rest of us. But the abundance of any society is
based upon the "strength of the ox"—the hard work of those who toil in the hot sun in order for the rest of us to eat.
They are profound, and these proverbs, once learned, linger in your mind for a lifetime. When I was in fifth grade I had a teacher named Mrs. Fettig. She had had an interesting life--married at an early age to a professional rodeo bull rider, who abused and abandoned her with daughter my age named Sandra. Mrs. Fettig supported herself and her daughter by teaching school in Alexander, North Dakota—a hard row to hoe any standard. But she had her consolations. Mrs. Fettig was a devout Roman Catholic, and she loved the Book of Proverbs, quoting it more often than it was really appropriate to do so, actually. It is hard to imagine now, in a time when the Bible is pretty much banned from public education, but she had us learn many of them by heart and recite them in class. Of course, education was the original intention of proverbs, and so learning them by rote was completely in line with the intention of Solomon, who whoever compiled this book. I still
remember several I learned by heart under the—none to gentle, actually—tutelage of Mrs. Fettig, like this one—"A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger" (15:1). And this one—"Better is a little with the fear of the LORD, than great treasure and trouble with it" (15:16). And this one, which must have appealed to Mrs. Fettig on the basis of her own unhappy domestic history—"Better is a dinner of vegetables where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it" (15:17).
Chapter 16 dwells on the subject of God's sovereign reign over the universe and the world of human affairs. God is at work in even those things that seem in a superficial way to be only the twists and turns of arbitrary fortune and blind luck—"The lot is cast into the lap," the teacher says, "but the decision is the LORD's alone" (16:33). Human beings plot and plan, "but the LORD directs the way" (16:9). Or as we have all heard it put--man proposes, but God disposes. Everything is made for a purpose, "even the wicked for the day of trouble" (16:4). Nothing is outside the power of the LORD, and if we "commit our work to the LORD, our plans will be established" (16:3). It is a comfort really to consider that, beloved, and worth the struggle we sometimes have to believe it. But it is no such comfort to be told that "gray hair is a crown of glory" (16:31)--I knew it had to be good for something.