“The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence. Hatred stirs up conflicts, but love covers all offenses. Wisdom is found on the lips of the discerning, but a rod is for the back of the one who lacks sense. The wise store up knowledge, but the mouth of the fool hastens destruction. The wealth of the rich is his fortified city; the poverty of the poor is their destruction.” (Proverbs‬ ‭10‬:‭11‬-‭15‬ ‭CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the things we expect from the Scriptures, is for them to tell us how the world should be. The world isn’t that, and they give us guidance on how to get from here to there. Of course, there are plenty of passages that tell us how and why we are wrong. We naturally expect to find those there as well. And, all of this, of course, falls under the heading of judgment. One of the things we don’t expect to find in the Scriptures, though, our verses that simply tell us without judgment how the world is. While there are many proverbs that point us toward bringing our lives more in line with God’s righteousness, there are a few that simply describe the world as it currently exists. We find one of those in this next group of proverbs. Let’s take a look together.

One of the odd and interesting things about Proverbs is that it occasionally repeats itself. At least once there is a verse that appears twice verbatim. Other times, half of a doublet gets repeated. We find that in v. 11 here. If you read this verse and thought like I did, “Well, that seems familiar,” go back to v. 6 and you’ll see why. There we read, “Blessings are on the head of the righteous, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.” Here we find, “The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.”

This is obviously an idea Solomon really wanted us to catch. Let’s make sure we do. On the first part here, the person who is right with others and right with God speaks words that give life. Her words bring good into whatever situation she happens to be facing. Jesus’ brother, James, notes what a rare and difficult thing this is to achieve. Controlling our tongue is one of the biggest challenges we face. If we are able to successfully do that, there are very few personal challenges we won’t be able to overcome.

But the person who is committed to a path other than God’s – that is, the person who is wicked – hides all sorts of ugly things with her words. She smiles at you while rhetorically sticking a knife in your back. I think here about the person who uses false flattery to get what she wants. I think about the gossip who is always willing to dish on somebody else, especially if it happens to decrease their social standing while increasing hers. I think about the one who is just untrustworthy. If you tell her something in confidence, you can bet it is going to be repeated to someone who isn’t supposed to hear it.

The violence this wicked person conceals is mostly rhetorical, but that doesn’t make it any less destructive. Social violence can be just as devastating to someone as physical violence; sometimes more so. And note well that these kinds of habits are not merely vices that need some adjustment. These are the habits of the wicked. These are people who are not only not reflecting the character of God, they are living in active and intentional opposition to it. They are wicked.

“Hatred stirs up conflicts, but love covers all offenses.” Paul would later take the second half of this doublet and phrase it like this: Love covers up a multitude of offenses. When we reject another person and their interests – that is, when we hate them – we should expect nothing but conflict with them. When we hate another person we set ourselves in opposition to them in all that they do. When someone else sides with them about something, even something fairly innocuous, they have now positioned themselves as our enemy as well. The conflict we had has now expanded. This is why Solomon says that hatred stirs up conflicts, plural. When we take up the intensely tribal outlook that hatred always brings, we create enemies everywhere we go.

But love does just the opposite. When we have chosen someone intentionally to work for their good in all things, and especially to work toward the kind of good God has planned for them, we become willing to overlook a great deal. Things that should be offensive to us become merely speed bumps that we navigate around with ease. We come upon things that should cause conflict or otherwise divide us, and because we have chosen them and their good as our first priority, we latch onto the most generous and least offensive explanation for the situation or circumstance and move forward as if that were the actually the case. We refuse to take offense at things we can instead quickly forgive and move on. We love them through the frustration. Instead of covering up violence so that it can continue in secret, we smother it as if with a fire blanket and put it out entirely.

“Wisdom is found on the lips of the discerning, but a rod is for the back of the one who lacks sense.” The first part of this is pretty straightforward and unsurprising. Those who can clearly see what is the right path and what is the wrong path through a given situation will have words of wisdom worth heeding. Discernment is something everyone should strive to grow in, but there are some followers of Jesus who receive a special gift of spiritual discernment from the Holy Spirit as a part of their equipping to bless and encourage the church. You need to identify who these people are in your life and work to keep them close so that you always have their counsel available when you need it.

But for those who lack any sense, who keep making the same foolish decisions, who seem to just be stuck on stupid, they are going to run into the consequences of their choices. These are not the people you want to have around very much if you can help it. They will run into the hard consequences of their choices, and whoever happens to be with them when those consequences arrive will likely find themselves receiving some of the collateral damage that comes with them. These are people who may need your direction and wisdom, but you need to keep them mostly at arm’s length. Give them wise counsel, offer to walk with them in pursuit of it, but if they refuse to go in that direction, leave them to run into the wall of reality on their own. You don’t have to accompany people into trouble when you can see it waiting for them at the end of the path they are determined to walk.

“The wise store up knowledge, but the mouth of the fool hastens destruction.” Someone who is wise, who recognizes and pursues the good of God’s character in the world around them, is constantly growing in knowledge. They observe the world carefully and discern clearly how things work. They gather helpful information and process it with discernment so they better understand the situations and the people around them. But the one who is foolish, who is determined to walk in ways that deviate from God’s path, just keeps accruing trouble. He speaks words that cause frustration and anxiety for others. He says things that constantly bring hardship to himself. There is nothing good that comes out of his mouth. When you find that your words keep getting you in hot water, that should be a wake up call that you aren’t walking a path that is going to lead you anywhere good. Get off of that path.

“The wealth of the rich is his fortified city; the poverty of the poor is their destruction.” This one is odd. This is one of those rare proverbs you look at and wonder what deep truth it is trying to convey. And that’s a good thing to do. The proverbs are designed to invite meditation. There is obvious truth to them, yes, but the more we sit with them and reflect on them, the more broadly we can start to see their wisdom apply, with the Spirit’s help, of course. But ones like this is strike us as jarringly different from the rest. Most proverbs seem to have a kind of moral to the story built into them. This is bad but this is good. Or this is good but this is bad. Here we don’t immediately see any of that.

The wealth of the rich is his fortified city. A fortified city was a place of refuge against the various threats found in the outside world. The taller and thicker a city’s walls, the more likely it was to be able to withstand sustained attacks against its sovereignty. It was a place where others could run and hide when danger threatened. When disasters struck in the countryside, the people living there fled to the city. I’m reading a series of books in which an enormous horde of dragons are attacking the countryside. All the people living in the small towns and villages of the land are fleeing to the large and fortified cities for protection.

It seems patently obvious that the wealth of the rich offers that kind of protection to them. And it seems equally obvious that the poverty of the poor offers no such protections. It offers no security. When life threatens, their very poverty will abandon them and leave them totally vulnerable to whatever the world is throwing at them. When the fires ripped through Los Angeles almost two years ago, hundreds of homes were destroyed. Those folks who were sufficiently wealthy were obviously traumatized and inconvenienced by the whole thing, but they’ll be okay. They’ll be able to rebuild without too much trouble beyond California’s burdensome bureaucracy. But the poor? Their lot was infinitely more difficult.

The whole point of this last proverb in this set is simply to describe the world how it is. It’s offering neither condemnation nor commendation with its observation. It’s simply making the observation. There will yet be other proverbs that remind us that the fortifications apparently offered by riches are illusory at best. And there will be other proverbs that speak to God’s concern and care for the poor. There will be proverbs pointing to practices that can increase the likelihood of our becoming wealthy. And there will be proverbs directing those who are wealthy to be active in assisting those who are poor and vulnerable because of it. But this proverb is simply describing the world as it actually functions.

The Scriptures are honest about the world and how it works. They are hopeful in pointing toward God’s ongoing and ultimate plans to bring them back into alignment with how He designed them to work in the beginning after sin messed everything up, but they are also forthright about how things actually are. That’s one of the reasons we can trust them and why studying them carefully is always a worthwhile endeavor.