26.4.18

Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 10:2-3

Treasures of wickedness profit nothing,
But righteousness delivers from death.
The Lord will not allow the righteous soul to famish,
But He casts away the desire of the wicked.

Proverbs 10:2-3 (NKJV).

Biblical interpretation is not an easy thing, in part because it wasn't written in a single "go", and often without a lot of commentary from the era of origin, so while we can find considerable amounts of commentary and veritable textbooks written about the Bible now, we can't make the text say something that it doesn't and claim that we're being honest about our scriptural interpretation.

Taken most literally, all by itself without any context of the rest of scripture, it is easy to see how this bit of wisdom is simply wrong. Wickedness does profit, in this life at least. There are many righteous souls that have died from starvation.

While there are hints as to a bigger context, "profit" being contrasted with death, if taken literally again this wouldn't make sense in that the righteous die just as frequently as the unrighteous.

Context and meaning then don't come from just this little passage by itself "versus the world", and helps to highlight how there are themes and patterns of wisdom given throughout scripture, and you have to actually have read all of scripture in order to start picking them up yourself.

You have to read and re-read and then learn something completely unrelated and come back and read it again from a different perspective. The scriptures aren't changing at any point, they're trying to say the same thing the whole time, but our capacity to perceive the truth that is presented is contingent, and it changes over time, so it's not that "new truths" were inserted for our benefit, but that they were there the whole time and we just didn't see them.

The "treasures of wickedness profit nothing" because in the end, everyone dies physically, though Solomon is likely referring not to physical death, but spiritual. This theme of death not being physical started way back in Genesis with the serpent asking Eve "Did God really say you would die?"

Immediately after eating the fruit, neither Adam or Eve physically died, so the death was not a physical one, but spiritual. In the same manner, while those familiar with this theme from scripture will automatically begin connecting the dots to the larger connotation, to the memetic quality of the passage, if you just took this by itself it would seem entirely easy to disprove and show to be complete foolishness.

The second portion of the passage even moreso, if you do not know that the "life" being discussed, the nourishment, is not the physical but the spiritual. For those who are righteous, even though the body may suffer and die, their spirit is alive and well, being tended to by God on regular basis.

I hammer on this because, on the surface, God seems to make many promises to those who follow and obey that translate to material gain or satisfaction. The "problem" is that the writers of scripture are accounting for "dimensions" of understanding beyond just what's literally written on the page. They're relying on folks at least grasping that there is complexity, subtlety, nuance.

Without diving into downright gnosticism, re-read the passage and think of it entirely in spiritual terms, in the terms of how you will spend eternity after judgement by God. Separate the physical and the spiritual and understand that the analogy, the similarity, is not meant to be taken literally, but to be taken figuratively in trying to demonstrate a deeper truth through a dynamic that we'd already be familiar with and could then pattern the dynamics of understanding after.

A secular example of this is drawing parallels between plumbing and electrical systems. If you are familiar with how water flows through pipes, the properties of water and whatnot, there are a great many details about electricity which are also understood, despite the fact that we cannot literally see or observe electricity doing these things in the same way that we could with plumbing.

It's the use of an observable dynamic to help understand a hidden one that works of a similar pattern.

In eternity, it won't matter if you were a king or a pauper, what God judges is not your material success but your spiritual success, how well you lived your life according to the perfect standards God has set. Obviously, we all fail to meet this high standard, so it's not in what we did that determines our inevitable fate, but what we did with the works of Jesus Christ.

Do we place our faith in their ability to save us, or do we place our faith in our own works, hoping that they'll be worth anything at all? Do we trust in the fruits of wickedness, of our denying the order that God has set in place, to attempt to pay our fare across the river into the afterlife ourselves, or do we instead give up all claims of glory to make much of Jesus Christ instead?

Our actions betray our allegiances, our priorities.

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