Proverbs 22:1-11

A Good Name Better Than Riches, Etc.

Pro 22:1-11

We are here taught that favour is better than silver and gold. The word "favour" signifies the peculiar sweetness or loveliness which excites and elicits the love of other men; it also means that the expression of the favour of others is elicited by the grace that is within ourselves, and that we increase our own graciousness by the approbation of those who look on, observing with gratitude how large are our resources of amiability, forbearance, long-suffering, meekness, and other fruits of the Spirit. Favour wins love, and favour confers the blessings of love on others. A good name is more than mere reputation. We are often reminded that reputation is what a man is said to be, and that character is what a man is in reality. Many a man may have a good name who does not deserve the honour, simply because he is imperfectly known, because his power of concealment is great, because he can draw round himself a garment of impenetrable darkness, within which he can work deeds of evil without his iniquity being known. Repute that is merely the result of calculation is a bubble that will burst and leave its possessor poor indeed. We are not to understand that it is impossible to have both a good name and great riches; it is perfectly possible to have both, as has been illustrated in numberless instances; but where we can only have one it is the good name that is to be chosen in preference to great riches. Sometimes we are called upon to choose one or the other of two blessings. No wise man will deny that great riches create great opportunities for doing good, or that they release the mind from the canker of anxiety. Persuading ourselves that such is the case, it is difficult to quench our ambition, which operates in the direction of the accumulation of wealth. When we are at the point of election, having to choose between a good name and great riches, we are at the very crisis of life. Only an inexperienced man will reduce the energy of the temptation to a minimum. It is indeed a great temptation when riches are placed within reach, and when a man is called upon to decide between being wealthy and being well-reputed. Riches are seductive, are false in all their suggestions, are unable to realise their own promises, and so men are misled, disappointed, and ultimately confounded or ruined by the very friends to whose protection they had confided themselves. Great riches can only be used in one world, whereas a good name can be carried throughout all spheres, and will abide through the lapse of all duration. We cannot have a really good name amongst men until we have a good name with God; we cannot have a good name with God until we accept his conditions and utterly repudiate our own. A name that is really good is more than a name, it is a character, it is the expression of a spiritual wealth, it is the exemplification of a deep and holy reality of conscience, rectitude, and beneficence. Names should be characters, names should be realities, names should be doors that open upon hearts that are hospitable homes, yea, that are very sanctuaries of purity, wisdom, truth, and every form of goodness.

"The rich and poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all" ( Pro 22:2 ).

It may seem to be hard on the part of Christian observers to say that the poor are always with us in order to develop the piety and beneficence of the rich. Such, however, may be the fact. The world would be poorer but for its poverty. Society would be robbed of one of its supreme opportunities of spiritual and social culture but for the poverty, the weakness, the pain, the destitution of many men. Whilst the critic says this, the Christian must feel it. The Christian is not a mere constructor of society, an architect of fortune, a theorist who says that this and that and something beyond are essential to the perfect structure of society; when the Lord Jesus said, "The poor ye have always with you," he was not remarking upon a mere fact in social economy, he was pointing to a deeper fact in the purpose of God in his marvellous education of the world. The nursery softens the whole household, the sick-chamber turns the house into a sanctuary; so in the great general world, poverty, sickness, helplessness, blindness, every form and aspect of destitution, may be looked upon as needful to the deepest and completest education of the soul. The poor man is at your door, not to be looked at, but to be helped; not to be regarded as a symbol in social arithmetic, but as a heart needing sympathy and brotherhood. When the rich look upon their duties in this light they will be no longer rich in any sense that implies vulgarity, self-confidence, or vanity of any kind: they will be stewards, trustees, men put in trust for the good of others, and who will only enjoy their night's repose as they can look back upon a day of beneficent activity and sacrifice. Then they that are rich will act as if they were not rich, because they will place no confidence in silver and gold, but will simply use them as mediums for the comfort and strengthening of others. In this way religion will sanctify political economy, and political economy will become an obedient servant of the highest spiritual conception and impulse. If the Lord is the maker of us all, the Lord is also the judge of us all. The whole arbitration is in his hands; he knows whether we have helped the poor, or whether we have stifled their cry, or charged their prayer with hypocrisy so as to save ourselves from inquiry and expenditure. The Lord is not ashamed to be regarded as the maker of the poor; he made the poor, not that they might continue to be poor, but that they might continue to elicit the affectionate attention of those who are in better social circumstances. It is true that poverty is often self-induced, or that it can be traced to criminality, indifference, incapacity, and the like; but to regard all poverty as explained by this fact is to ignore all the largest and truest mysteries of life; poverty has a mission in society; poverty ought to be saved from suffering; it may be used to show how dependent one man is upon another, but that dependence should never be allowed to drop into servility on the one hand, or to be regarded as a mark of dominance and contempt on the other. Let the rich man consider that he might have been the poor man, and that reflection will chasten him when he begins to magnify his own ingenuity and to talk proudly of his own commercial capacity. The richest man has nothing that he has not received, and all his treasure he should hold, not as proprietor, but as trustee.

"A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished" ( Pro 22:3 ).

Passages of this kind should be read with care, or they may seem to minister to a kind of ingenuity that is superficial and selfish. We have often had occasion to point out that there is a little prudence as well as a great prudence: a prudence that merely takes care of itself, and a prudence which never seeks its own life, or makes any selfish calculations about its own comfort. "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." We are not called upon anywhere in the Bible to make little calculations, small and selfish arrangements, to build for ourselves little refuges that will hold nobody else: we are called to farsightedness, a large conception of men and things and divine purposes, and to such a calculation of the action of the forces of the universe as will save us from needless trouble and assure us of ultimate defence and protection. Foresight is everywhere taught in the Bible, but not a foresight that is of the nature of selfishness. We are called upon to read history so as to transform it into prophecy. Men who have an opportunity of reading the action of ages ought to have no difficulty in forecasting the future; providence is the same, moral demands and relations are unalterable; we have behind us century upon century of human development, enterprise, speculation, and should therefore have no difficulty in saying what will happen on the morrow, or what will happen in five centuries. About the details we of course know nothing, but the details are the least part of the prognostication: say ye to the righteous, it shall be well with him: say ye to the wicked, it shall be ill with him: this is an eternal prophecy; nothing can modify it or set it aside permanently; come and go as circumstances may, ever and anon we shall hear the solemn judgment pronounced upon human action, that the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment and the righteous into eternal life. We shall treat history frivolously if we look only at detail and incident and transient colour: all local circumstances change, but the central truth abides, that they that do good shall come forth to everlasting glory, and they who do evil shall descend into everlasting confusion. Why say that we know nothing about the future when we know everything about it that is worth knowing? Why live as if we had no vision of the times to come? The future has been painted with a vivid hand in Holy Scripture; we know exactly how heaven is constituted and how hell is populated, and there is no mystery about either condition that is not of the nature of detail or passing incident; the character which is the key of the whole mystery is open to our scrutiny and immediate estimation. If men will not take heed of great moral ordinances or spiritual standards, they will pass on and be punished. They must not look upon such punishment as arbitrary; it is part of the nature of things, it is the pulsation of the life of creation: punishment follows error in all worlds, and must do so, not as a mere chastisement, but as a solemn and inevitable consequence. Here we find the whole philosophy of moral existence. At this point the simplest minds may become philosophical by adopting the grand conception of life which expresses itself in the fact that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. This is true wisdom; herein is the fear of the Lord, and herein begins the solemn action of the soul which expresses itself in aspiration, in religious hopefulness, and in religious confidence; that action which rises first into desire, then into prayer, then into praise, into praise because God has vindicated his throne, showing it to be established in righteousness, and has vindicated his promises, showing them to be the flowers which grow in the garden which his own right hand has planted. Thus again we come upon the two classes, the prudent and the simple, the false and the true, the right and the wrong; he who would add to these classes any section in which he would find comfort because of wrong-doing trifles with the economy of God, and will be punished by daily disappointment and final punishment with infinite confusion and mortification.

"The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. He that soweth iniquity shall reap vanity: and the rod of his anger shall fail. He that hath a bountiful eye shall be blessed: for he giveth of his bread to the poor" ( Pro 22:7-9 ).

These are instances of the operation of the law of cause and effect. The rich ruling over the poor is a necessity which cannot be easily controlled; no mechanical arrangement can bring the relation to a proper point of forbearance and magnanimity; until the heart is made right all economical adjustments will fail at point after point. When rich men rule over the poor they show the lowest kind of power; yet there is a sense in which wealth ought to rule over poverty, the sense of beneficence, direction, and succour: the poor man ought to be able to say, The more the rich man has the more I have; he is trustee and steward, and he will not see me want within the limits of reason. The latter part of verse seven is a caution against borrowing. The borrower has to submit to many humiliations which are painful to him: he has to make calculations and arrangements, to withhold judgments, and to change the very tone of his speech, lest he should offend the man who can punish him by demanding the fulfilment of his bond. "Neither a borrower, nor a lender be." The philosophy of the eighth verse we have had occasion to prove day by day in the development of ordinary life. Bad seed never comes to good fruit. Oftentimes men sow iniquity without ever reflecting that seedtime is followed by harvest; they had a kind of grim joy in sowing iniquity, they describe it as "sowing their wild oats"; they do not stop to consider that after the sowing will come the reaping: herein is an inevitable and inexorable law: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Whom should a man blame? Should he blame providence? Should he reflect adversely upon the economy of nature? Should he describe himself as unlucky, unfortunate, and worthy of commiseration? On the contrary, he should say, Here is a proof of the divine sovereignty and of the inexorableness of law; here is a distinct testimony to the fact that we are not living a haphazard life, without bound, without purpose, and without judgment, but we are pursuing lines of thought and effort which must end in practical consequences. When the bad man puts in his sickle to reap darkness and the ashes of death, he should say to himself as he looks upon his empty hands, Lo, this also confirms the judgment and power of God. In the ninth verse the picture is seen on its reverse side. Instead of a man who sows iniquity we find a man who sows beneficence and gives his bread liberally to the poor, who studies the necessities of his age and neighbourhood, and ministers to them with Christian hospitality. What is the consequence in this instance? Precisely the reverse of the consequence in the former instance. The man whose eye is bountiful and whose hand is liberal is to be blessed. The word "blessed" can never be fully explained in language; it must be explained in the heart and by the heart; and when the heart has whispered to itself all the gospel it can conceive as expressed by this word "blessed," there will still come before the heart visions of further beneficence and grace and honour, yea heaven upon heaven, for it would seem as if God could never give back enough to him who regards the poor as his children and looks upon the helpless as furnishing the field and sphere of beneficent operation. How wise is the Bible in all these practical philosophies! Here is a book that protects the poor, that guards men against borrowing and all the servility following upon excessive obligation; here is a book that declares the issue and consequence of the sowing of iniquity; and here is a book which proclaims the blessedness of beneficence and self-sacrifice. It is upon these grand bases that the claim of the book to be considered divine is founded. They are not metaphysical or philosophical bases in any sense that can only be comprehended by intellectual penetration and culture: they are philosophical in a practical sense, in that they can be tested by the simplest man in the simplest duties of life. Every Christian can be a commentator upon passages like this; it is not necessary to know the original language or to parse the mere words with grammatical accuracy: every loving heart can stand up and prove the blessedness of the bountiful soul, the sacredness and the happiness of beneficent activity.