“The Lord’s blessing enriches, and he adds no painful effort to it. As shameful conduct is pleasure for a fool, so wisdom is for a person of understanding. What the wicked dreads will come to him, but what the righteous desire will be given to them. When the whirlwind passes, the wicked are no more, but the righteous are secure forever. Like vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so the slacker is to the one who sends him on an errand. The fear of the Lord prolongs life, but the years of the wicked are cut short.” (Proverbs 10:22-27 CSB – Read the chapter)
When the first man and his wife ate fruit from the tree God told them not to eat from, thus introducing sin into the world, God took some time after their disobedience was revealed to tell them about exactly what they had unleashed on themselves. One of the things He said specifically to the man was that sin was going to bring futility to his work. He would spend his life working the ground by painful effort. What was once a purely joyful activity was going to become hard for the sake of being hard. Now, anytime work is experienced as the joyful effort God created it to be is a blessing. Solomon reminds us of that here at the beginning of this next batch of proverbs. Let’s talk about that and some others today.
Read the rest…
