“The one who corrects a mocker will bring abuse on himself; the one who rebukes the wicked will get hurt. Don’t rebuke a mocker, or he will hate you; rebuke the wise, and he will love you. Instruct the wise, and he will be wiser still; teach the righteous, and he will learn more.” (‭‭Proverbs‬ ‭9‬:‭7‬-‭9‬ ‭CSB‬‬ – Read the chapter)

Have you ever had someone try to give you advice you didn’t want? My guess is that you didn’t receive it so graciously. Perhaps if you had been taught by your parents to always be polite you expressed some gratitude, but inside you knew just exactly what you were going to do with that advice: nothing. And you were probably going to resent the person for giving it to you unsolicited in the first place. You might have even determined that you were going to do the opposite out of spite. In that situation, you were playing the part of a mocker. That’s not a great role to play. Let’s talk about it.

Correcting people who don’t want to be corrected is a fool’s errand. It’s a waste of time and energy and possibly even resources depending on how invested in the attempted correction you have gotten. You can tell them they are wrong until you are blue in the face, but it’s not going to do you any good. Nor is it going to do them any good because they’ve closed themselves off from being able to receive wise counsel.

Solomon understands all of this very well. These next few verses are literally really interesting as he makes this point. His counsel unfolds in two sets of threes. The first set offers criticism of people who are unwilling to receive wise counsel and gracious correction. The second set flips the coin to the other side to focus on describing the kind of people who are willing to listen to others when they might not be correct in their thinking or doing.

Let’s walk through these right quick together. The first person we meet in these verses is “the mocker.” This is a character we will run into several more times as we work our way through Proverbs. A mocker is not simply a person who makes fun of others. This is someone who derisively scoffs at the wisdom and character and commands of the Lord. He looks at what is right, rolls his eyes, and does the opposite. He snorts in the face of righteousness and wisdom and opts for his own path through life. The mocker is sure he knows better than anyone else who might be interested in offering counsel.

If you try to correct such a person, you are just setting yourself up for abuse. The mocker will immediately turn things around on you and point out all the ways you are actually the one in the wrong. A convincing or charismatic mocker will leave you feeling silly and wondering if perhaps you are the one who has been doing things backwards the whole time. He’ll leave you questioning things you once were sure were true and right. He will eagerly lampoon your willingness to play by the rules and color in the lines instead of exploring the much bigger world available to you outside of your restrictive little church bubble.

Unless you are solid enough in your faith to not wither in the face of such abuse and criticism, this is not a rhetorical battle you need to be engaging in. A confident and compelling mocker will delight in doing everything he possibly can to wreck your faith and drag you right down into his mud pit with him. I had a regular commentator on my blog here who was a committed mocker. I finally had to cut him off from the comments section because it had become abundantly clear that I was casting pearls before swine in making arguments for the truth to him, and letting him soapbox the comments section wasn’t serving anyone’s interests any longer.

Now, it is perhaps worth noting that Solomon doesn’t tell us not to correct the mocker, but merely that he warns us of the dangers. Sometimes offering correction is necessary. If we start down that path, though, we need to be aware and prepared for what it is going to bring. Before you dive into the abyss, you’d be better be sure you are very well prepared, that your lifeline is secure, and that you’ve got someone who can have your back if you need the help and support.

The next character we meet here is the wicked person. The wicked person is someone who is just plain evil. He delights in doing the wrong thing, in hurting other people. His aim isn’t simply to disrupt or distort like the mocker, but to destroy. If you stand athwart the wicked and rebuke them for their evil, you had better be prepared for a battle; you had better be prepared to get hurt. The wicked person won’t just argue with you in ways he thinks are clever, he’ll go straight in to wound you. This is not a conversation you want to get into unless you have a very good reason and a lot of help at the ready. It is probably better to take two or three others with you into a situation in which you’ll have to rebuke someone who is wicked.

In the third part of this first set, Solomon takes us back to the mocker. While rebuking a wicked person will result in your being attacked and even hurt, rebuking a mocker isn’t as likely to be so personally costly. But it will be relationally so. If you rebuke a mocker, he is going to hate you for it. If you tell him straight out that he is wrong, he isn’t going to be grateful that you have alerted him to the wrongness and to the danger of the path he is walking, he will hate you for shining light where he was perfectly content with his darkness. This isn’t such a personally risky thing to do, but if you think you are going to come away from this encounter with a relationship intact, you are likely fooling yourself.

Here, then, Solomon flips the coin around on us to give us the more positive other side of things. If you rebuke the wicked, you can expect to get hurt. If you rebuke the mocker, you can expect to lose the relationship. But if you rebuke someone who is wise, he is going to love you for it. Even wise people can occasionally drift from the path of righteousness to one that has them heading off in the wrong direction. Even wise people can sometimes do hurtful things or just wrong things that warrant a loving rebuke from a caring friend. If the person truly is wise, she will receive this feedback graciously and gratefully and your relationship with her will grow stronger and deeper than it was before. She will love you for it.

When you give instruction to someone who is wise, rather than resisting it or hating you for it like the mocker or the wicked person, she will receive it gladly, make the necessary adjustments to her life, and be all the wiser for it. If you set out to teach someone who is righteous, who is committed to the good and the right path and who is actively living in right relationships with the people around her, she will learn even more than she knew before. That is, she will be open to what you have to say, gladly receiving the knowledge so that she can align her life even more fully with the right path.

Now, Solomon presents all of this as a kind of heads up so that we are prepared if we go into these kinds of corrective conversations with the people around us. That is good and helpful. But let me invite us to consider things for just a moment from the other side. How do you respond when someone tries to correct or rebuke or instruct or teach you? Do you receive that with gratitude and humility, or do you sarcastically scoff that you don’t need the help; that you are just fine on your own?

To a certain extent your reaction probably depends on the person delivering the feedback to you, but God can use unexpected and even unwelcome sources to call us from the wrong path to the right one. If your reaction depends on the person, then you’ve got pride in your heart. You’ve got a bit of the mocker or even the wicked in you, and you need to deal with that. God gave Balaam instruction from out of the mouth of his donkey (I really wanted to phrase that otherwise, but it would have been needlessly distracting for some folks). Who knows where He might deliver your feedback from. You need to have a humble, teachable spirit that recognizes sound wisdom and counsel no matter what its source happens to be. The wise receive wisdom regardless of where it comes from. Make sure you are wise.