NOTES for Pro 3:31

The fallen world often offers us solutions that appear temptingly simple, but when we resort to them, they lead us into a spiritual dead end, and sometimes not only a spiritual one. One example of such a temptingly easy path that leads to a dead end is violence. Sometimes it appears that violence can solve some long-standing problem, cutting the Gordian knot that cannot otherwise be untied. But on closer examination it always turns out that, after solving one problem for a short time, we have also created several other new ones, and they are often far more complicated than the one we thought we had solved.

Why is this so? Is the use of force always wrong? Obviously not, since even the Torah in some cases does not forbid resorting to force. The question is only whether it is used to keep the commandments given by God or to violate them. Strictly speaking, one can speak of violence only in the second case. And the most terrible thing here is not the use of force as such (in itself this action cannot be considered either good or bad), and not even the violation of justice toward one's neighbor (although that too is terrible), but the fact that force directed against a commandment given by God makes us His enemy and places a wall between Him and us that will be very hard to overcome. And the logic of the use of force is such that one act of violence inevitably leads to another, and the wall will rise higher and higher. That very wall, if it is not torn down, will block our road into the Kingdom. Forever.

What the Wise Man tells us today is, in essence, simple and obvious. It is roughly what each of us was taught in childhood by our mother, and roughly what is called the “moral law”: if you can help, then help; do not put off until tomorrow what can be done today; do not dig a pit for someone else; do not envy a scoundrel... Everything is simple. But the passage ends with a phrase which, according to the logic of the text (although this structure of a sermon may not seem obvious to a modern reader), is the conclusion of everything said above: “The wise will inherit glory, but fools disgrace.” This is not a continuation of the list, but its summation. For everything said above is wisdom, while rejection of the moral law is folly.

Hope in the Lord proves inseparable from trust in His wisdom, which immeasurably surpasses human wisdom, and from a sober understanding of the limitations of our own reason. Such an attitude toward reason involves neither excessive self-abasement nor a renunciation of the right to use our intellectual abilities: the human being remains the summit of Creation, made in the image and likeness of God, and reason is one of the Creator’s most important gifts; no one takes this away from us. Yet it is reason itself that helps us understand the precise moment when it encounters a task beyond its abilities, and then we can turn to the One who possesses greater wisdom.

The words “whom the Lord loves He chastens” may seem strange, but let us consider this: if God incomparably surpasses the human being and His deeds are unlike human deeds, can what human language calls punishment resemble the way people punish one another? What people perceive as punishment is in essence protection from evil, a warning against something worse, and in many cases the consequence of what we ourselves have done.