Proverbs chapter 10

vs 22

Not without work, just without painful toil. And it's not an offer open to everyone either. It's a blessing that comes from God.

vs 23

It's interesting thinking about people finding pleasure in different things. I mean, don't you sometimes think about what you'd so if you were a supervillain? Apparently wicked people do that.

vs 24

So in fact both of them get what they think about a lot - it's just that the righteous desire something, and the wicked dread it. And I suppose we all want what we want, rather than what we fear.

vs 25

The storm of judgment? I mean, storms themselves don't pick on wicked people. It must be metaphorical then.

vs 26

In other words, painful. Lazy people are painful to try and use.

vs 27

An interesting idea. I wonder if anyone has ever done a survey on it.

vs 28

Not that the ambition or the goals of the wicked never add up. If your ambition is to hurt someone, I'm sure you'll succeed in short order. It's more that with wickedness, you don't really end up going anywhere - what you see is what you get. You can dress it up or whatever, but it stays what it is.

vs 29

I'm not sure what it means here. Is the way of the Lord "the way you do things for the Lord" or "the way the Lord does things"? I'm sort of thinking the second one - because how would the first one be a pain to the wicked, unless it's painful not to do it I guess.

vs 30

Interesting verse, referring perhaps to the land of promise. The idea being that God's promises stick to righteous people, but they seem to wash off the wicked quite easily.

vs 31

Unfortunately it's not always silenced. It will be eventually, I guess. Maybe the idea is that generally their words won't stand up to the words of wisdom - that the peverse will be silenced by the weight of wisdom.

vs 32

I don't think by 'finds favour' they mean what makes people happy to hear. I think they mean what is acceptable to the right thinking mind, if you like. Sometimes you don't want to hear wisdom, but you can't deny it. Well, you can deny it, in the same way as you can try to believe the sweet sounding words of a liar. You'd like to think that when the brown stuff hits the spinning thing, we'd listen to what makes sense instead of what sounds good. But it's not true.

See, this is the thing about proverbs. Because it's all of these witty little sayings about how the world works, we are perfectly legit in using our commonsense to extrapolate their meaning. Sometimes when you're learning about God, you have to take commonsense and put it on hold - and don't think that's because it's a lie, you have to do the same with particle physics. But not here. Commonsense (within a model of Godly acceptance of the tenets of wisdom thus given) reigns here. Perhaps that's one of the missions of Proverbs - it's to rock your commonsense just enough to show you that all it takes is a tweak to the common understanding of the world regarding the nature of God and the objectiveness of wisdom, and a lot of things fit in very nicely.