The Meaning Of Life

https://biblehub.com/nkjv/proverbs/11.htm

Boy, do I have some dishonest scales in my house!

Oh, okay. That’s not what Verse 1 is saying? Back in Biblical times, they went by the weight of currency. Today, real silver coins are worth more that today’s mixed metal coins, but back then, all coins were silver or gold, or perhaps some other metal. Then, they went by the weight of the coin rather than the mint (penny, nickel, dime, etc. And because they were trading precious metals for goods, the weight of the metal dictated what the coin was worth, and as you can imagine, there were probably some businessmen that had adjusted the scales in their favor, thus the need for the proverb.

But I still think my bathroom scales are an abomination to the Lord.

And talk about Verse 2 hitting home! I can remember when I was young and eager to excel as a firefighter, and I would accomplish something that I thought was a milestone, then someone would let the air out of my sales. Once, as a brand new arson investigator, I investigated a fire in a mobile home. I determined the fire had started in the hot water closet, then began looking for the source of ignition. It was an electric hot water heater, and I found some electrical wiring that was burned, had shorted out, indicated by thinning of the wiring and balls of copper where attached to it where the molten wiring had splatter.

Back at the station, I was boasting how lucky I was to have found that, because the trailer was pretty much a total loss, completely gutted, and finding that specific shorted wiring that caused the fire was “lucky”, even though I was hinting at how good of a fire investigator I was. About that time my boss said, “How do you know the short was what caused the fire, or that it was the result of the fire?

If I could have, as my mother would say, dug a hole and crawled into it, I would have. I hadn’t even considered that the wire could have shorted out when the insulation burned off in the fire. After that, I decided maybe it was better to be humble, lest I be cut off at the knees again.

And Verse 22 is a phrased used often in our society. “As a ring of gold in a swine’s snout, So is a lovely woman who lacks [h]discretion.” I wonder how many people realize that wisdom came from the Bible? Read on, there are more.

My wife was always a better person than I. See the worst in the world, I had become quite cynical about things and people. But she loved to help others, financially that is. I remember being frustrated because she was giving money away to people that I didn’t think deserved it. But she eventually wore off on me. Her wisdom was, “If you give someone money, it is a gift. It is their business to choose how to use that gift.” After that, I found myself more generous. I still might give a stern warning to the recipient, “I trust you will use this wisely”, I would say as I handed them money. And eventually it got to the point that it was actually fun to be generous.

Each one of the verses in these proverbs could be reviewed and studied individually, but there isn’t time or space for that here. I once did a year long study of the Book of Revelation, verse by verse. A similar program could easily be made for the Book of Proverbs. But as you can in these here, there is a lot of instruction about your mouth, about lying, about deception, about boasting. And most of them all boil down to this. “You have two ears and one mouth; use them in proportion.”

Blessings in your study of the wisdom of Solomon.