Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

A sluggard says, “There’s a lion in the road,
    a fierce lion roaming the streets!”
As a door turns on its hinges,
    so a sluggard turns on his bed.
A sluggard buries his hand in the dish;
    he is too lazy to bring it back to his mouth.
A sluggard is wiser in his own eyes
    than seven people who answer discreetly.
Like one who grabs a stray dog by the ears
    is someone who rushes into a quarrel not their own.
Like a maniac shooting
    flaming arrows of death
is one who deceives their neighbor
    and says, “I was only joking!”

• Proverbs 26:13-19

Proverbs 26:16 ”The ignorant are ignorant of their ignorance.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

The Message

The first twelve verses of this chapter were on the fool, someone who says there is no God.  But what about the person who doesn’t care one way or the other?  Paul says in Romans 1 that there is no excuse for not seeing the signs that God is real, and He loves you.  But if you are a sluggard, a lazy person who can’t lift a finger or a brain cell to even think about God, what then?

The sluggard talking about a lion roaming the streets is someone using any kind of an excuse to not even leave the house.  The metaphor of the door is obvious to see, and you can imagine a sluggard rolling over and drifting back off to sleep.

And I have known people who were too lazy to eat.  When you bring them to the table, they might put food on their fork and never lift the fork.  Then when prodded, it may take three or four attempts before the fork reaches its mouth.  People with eating disorders could speak in great volumes about this condition, but I have known people that after fasting for two or three days, they are no longer hungry anymore.

But then we come to the conclusion that a sluggard feeds upon himself or herself.  I like Rev. MacArthur’s quote.  He relates a sluggard to someone who is ignorant.  There is a difference in ignorance and stupidity.  Ignorance means that you might be able to learn but you fail in reaching a minimum acceptable understanding.  Being stupid means you have difficulty in learning.  So with those definitions, the difference is that the ignorant is a sluggard with regard to learning.

I have heard Proverbs 26:17 misappropriated, but the United States has been known to be a peace keeper around the world.  This gets the United States into fights that were not ours to start with, but many are due to preexisting treaties.  If our neighbor is in trouble, the USA will come to the rescue.  But sometimes that rescue causes the USA more harm than good.  But on a personal level, if you are the person that can make a situation better, you should step in, knowing that you may not come out of the situation unscathed.  But in some cases, you must know when you would be in over your head and calling the emergency number for the country you are in is the wise thing to do.

The metaphor of Proverbs 26:18-19 is farfetched, but I have seen similar things.  There are neighboring children who love bouncing bottle rockets off your windows.  If they were a little smarter and more skilled, they would have achieved their goal of shattering the windows, if they only had better aim from further away.  But no, the bottle rockets bounced off the windows and then exploded at a safe distance away.  A lot of noise, but nothing broken.  I am sure that if they were successful and the police arrested them, they would say, “But I was only joking.”

And now let us sing.

The following song is You Don’t Love God if You Don’t Love Your Neighbor.  This is sung by Rhonda Vincent.  This bluegrass song is hard to sing with a straight face.  It carries a good message, but can you truly live up to it?

Closing Prayer

Dear Lord,
We need Your wisdom.  Help us to value wisdom.  These proverbs talk about being a sluggard, staying out of those unwinnable fights, and foolish pranks or deliberate mischief.  With about any of the proverbs, loving our neighbor explains why that proverb is a bit of wisdom for us.  The sluggard’s ways affect the neighborhood, but especially themselves.  We need Your wisdom, Lord, to know when to fight, and when it is not our fight at all.  But always, if we think of our neighbors and manage our behavior to promote good will, there might be less fights and less foolish pranks.  And when we are helping our neighbors, they won’t be calling us a sluggard.  In thy Name we pray.
Amen

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.