Proverbs 19:5-9

PROVERBS 19:5, 9
In this, the Proverb reiterates the threats of the Torah, which warns against false witness and false oaths (Leviticus 19:12; Deuteronomy 17:6-7). These two verses are almost identical. Both begin with “A false witness will not go unpunished,” and in the second line both use the phrase “breathe lies.” The end of verse 9 is stronger. Verse 5 warns that the false witness will “not escape,” but verse 9 says that he “will perish.” There is an eye-for-eye justice here: False witness is a deadly assault on a person (Proverbs 25:18); killing a man’s character, reputation, good name through false witness is like killing him. It’s appropriate that the perjurer is treated like a kind of murderer.

The first context for these verses is the courtroom. They are not talking about lying in general, but about lying in a judicial context. According to the Torah, perjury was a serious offense. If someone testified falsely in court, he was to receive the punishment that would have been carried out against the accused (Deuteronomy 19:16-21).

The Proverbs seem to go beyond the Torah in their assurance that false witnesses will be punished. Perjury, after all, is not always detected and punished by human courts. One of the implications of these Proverbs is that there is a Court overshadowing the courts of this world, and that in this higher court the perjurer will not escape. From this, we can extend these verses beyond the courtroom. We live before the face of God, the Judge of all the earth. All our words will be brought into scrutiny. All our lies are a kind of false witness in the courtroom of the world. And liars will not go unpunished.

The Bible has a lot to say about false witness and lying. God is Word, and He is True, and as His images our words are to image the faithfulness of the eternal Word. Satan is a liar from the beginning, and insofar as sinners are remade into the image of this false “father,” we are liars (note the emphasis on falsehood in Paul’s florilegium in Romans 3). Lies meet so many human needs: We lie out of envy; we lie out of fear of exposure; we lie for vengeance; we lie out of hatred; we lie out of pride, to make ourselves look marginally better and others marginally worse; we lie to fulfill our lusts; we lie to enrich ourselves. Lies seem capable of making life rich, luxuriant, and sexually various. Ultimately, we lie because we hate Truth, that is, the God who is True.

Paul Griffiths begins his book, Lying, with this remarkable catalogue that demonstrates the interweaving of lies in our lives: “Lies bind the fabric of every human life. We lie to our loves when we whisper sweet nothings; we lie to the glowing screen when we process the words of our the words of our novels, poems, and (especially) autobiographies; we lie to the mirror when we smooth on the subtly deceptive unguents that replace our races with someone else’s; we lie to our children when we browbeat them with the image of our own imagined rectitude; we lie to our cocktail-party conversation partners when we artfully suggest someone wittier than ourselves is there, twirling the stemmed glass with implied profundity; we lie to our confessors when, kneeling in the attitude of contrition, we imagine what they’d like to hear in order to think us true athletes of the spirit; we lie to our students when we assume the position of omniscience; and we lie to ourselves when, self-deceived, we obscure our creatively diverse uses of the lie from ourselves and etch the dubious portrait of the truth-teller upon our souls with the acid of the lie denied. We are imaginatively masked, adorned with the lie, bedecked with the elegance of verbal dissimulation. To be so is the very mark of adult humanity.” Lying so colors and shapes everyday life that it is almost impossible for us to imagine what a truth-telling society might look like. But that is what the church is called to be.

PROVERBS 19:6-7
These verses go together by way of contrast, both (like v. 4) having to do with the connection between wealth and social influence. The noble man, the man who gives gifts, has many friends, and wields great influence; the poor man who cannot do or give any favors is despised even by his own brothers.

Verse 6 is a straightforward observation of the way the world works. There doesn’t seem to be any note of condemnation. There is no problem with people entreating a noble man – a man with connections and influence can help those without, as Elisha offers to help the woman of Shunem (2 Kings 4:13). The one who gives gifts wins friends, as David did after he recovered the plunder from the Amalekites (1 Samuel 30), or as Oskar Schindler did in order to save Jews. There is nothing wrong with using wealth to win friends and influence. Of course, such friends might abandon the generous man, especially if his money dries up (Timon of Athens). But the use of wealth in this way is not in itself wrong.

The poor man has no wealth to use, and brothers and friends flee. His words don’t bring them back. The only thing that would bring them back is wealth.

PROVERBS 19:8
The translation in the NASB (“He who gets wisdom loves his own soul; he who keeps understanding will find good”) is OK, but the Hebrew is more challenging: “He who gets heart loves his soul; he who guards skill will find good.” This raises several questions.

First, what does it mean to “get heart” or “acquire heart”? From the rest of the Proverbs, it’s clear that the heart that one should get is a heart that fears Yahweh, a heart oriented to wisdom (Proverbs 3:3, 5; 4:4; etc.). The Proverbs also frequently use the image of “purchase” or “acquisition” to describe the pursuit of wisdom (e.g., 4:5, 7). But here, the object to be acquired is described simply as “heart.” The Bible talks about corrupted and perverse hearts at times, but here the implication seems to be that someone who lacks a heart of wisdom is entirely lacking a heart. Elsewhere, Scripture talks about those who “lack heart” (Proverbs 10:13). For Hosea, by pursuing idols and foreign alliances rather than the favor of Yahweh, Ephraim has become silly and “heartless” as a dove (Hosea 7:11).

The heart is not the location of desire or feeling or courage in the Bible, but rather the location of thoughts, and, more generally, the location of life’s most fundamental directions and trajectories. “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also,” Jesus says. The heart is the secret (cf. Luke 2:51) source of our actions and words – secret to men but not to God (1 Samuel 16:7). We follow our hearts; out of the heart come the wellsprings of life; and someone without “heart” has no direction, purpose, orientation in life. The heart is the location of “love” in the Augustinian (not the romantic) sense: Our lives are directed by what we love.

Our hearts, in another biblical analogy, are tablets on which we write the words of the wise (Proverbs 3:3; 7:3). What is written on the tablet of our hearts is what directs our life, which is why the Torah and the Proverbs exhort us to keep the word of God on our hearts (Deuteronomy 6:4-6). But sin can be written on the tablets of our hearts as well (Jeremiah 17:1), and ultimately it is only the Spirit who can engrave God’s law on our hearts. This is one of the promises of the gospel (Jeremiah 31:33; 2 Corinthians 3). In terms of Proverbs 19:8, we could say that the gospel fulfills the demand to “get heart,” something we cannot do ourselves.

19:8 tells us that the one who gets heart loves his own life or soul. Getting heart is a way of preserving life, of ensuring that our lives go well. If we lack hea

rt, we wander aimlessly, flitting like doves. When we lack heart, we need to be beaten with the rod to give us heart. It’s in our best interests to seek and acquire heart. It’s a proper form of self-love.

The second line of verse 8 moves from “acquisition” to “preservation” or “guarding.” It’s possible to get heart and then squander it, to gain a measure of wisdom but fail to nurture and protect it. The seed of the word goes into some hearts but then is snatched away by the devil or is choked out by the cares and temptations of life. Once the word is given, it must be guarded and preserved. Mary stored up things in her heart, and treasured them. She guarded them like precious jewels, brought them out on occasion to gaze at them in astonishment. When the word goes into our heart, we are called to guard those things in the same way. Guarding is a priestly vocation in Scripture (Genesis 2:15; Number 1:51). As the priests and Levites guarded the treasures of the house of Yahweh, so each of us as priest is to guard the treasure committed to us, placed in earthen vessels.

The object of guarding is not “heart” but “skill.” Like the Hebrew word for “wisdom,” this word (often translated as “insight” or “understanding”) can refer to artistic skill (1 Kings 7:14). It also refers to God’s work in creation (Isaiah 40:14). When we seek and acquire heart, we gain skill in life. Because of heart, we can live our lives with artistry. This “artistic skill” in living is possible only because the Spirit of glory and beauty has written on the tablets of our heart.