Verse of the day · September 8
What does it mean to walk with wise men in Proverbs 13:20?
The elders worth hearing out learned what they know from their own fathers.
He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.
Proverbs 13:20
Walking with wise men is not any one act. A man does it by keeping company with those that fear the Lord — conversing with them frequently in private about spiritual and experimental things, and walking with them in public in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord. He asks them for instruction and receives it, and he keeps up pious and profitable talk with them. Nothing on that list happens once. What he is promised for it stands in the future tense, and it names what he will be: he shall be wise.
Keeping good company is an evidence for a man that he would be good, Matthew Henry writes, since a man's character is known by the company he chooses. It is also a means of making him good — of showing him the way, and of quickening and encouraging him in it. One of those looks back at a man who has already chosen. The other carries on working after he has.
The proverb keeps the word companion for the other half of the line, and John Gill gives it to this man anyway: he that walketh with wise men is a companion of them that fear the Lord. By those means he grows wiser and wiser and gains a large stock of spiritual knowledge and experience. It holds in natural wisdom as much as in spiritual, and it holds for a man of any capacity at all. Every instruction in Henry's note sits on this side of the colon: he that would be himself wise must walk with those that are so, must choose them for his intimate acquaintance, must converse with them accordingly, and must ask and receive instruction from them. Henry adds two borrowed lines from Ecclesiasticus — miss not the discourse of the elders, for they also learned of their fathers, and be willing to hear every godly discourse, and let not the parables of understanding escape thee.
The whole verse comes down to a contrast between the benefit of good society and the evil of bad, in the single line JFB spend on it. Past the colon the instructions stop. Multitudes are brought to ruin by bad company, Henry writes, and everything he says about them after that is description. In these notes the fools are named by what they do: the company is made of evil-doers, and the Geneva Notes speak of their wickedness and their vices.
Not one of the verbs on that side of the colon is something the man sets out to do. The Vulgate has him becoming like them, and Gill takes that to mean being a fool as they are, and growing still more and more foolish. The Septuagint has him known — known by the company he keeps to be a fool also. Gill's own preference is that he shall be broken, ruined and destroyed. Henry sets out those three and a fourth beside them, that he will be made wicked, and then says it comes all to one. Set in that order they still make a sequence: he becomes like them, he is made wicked, he is known to be one, and he is broken.
The way there runs through participation: he is partaker of their wickedness, and bears with their vices, and so is punished alike as they are. Gill brings in a line of Paul's at the same point — evil communications corrupt good manners — and has it bringing a man to ruin and destruction. Henry puts a limit on who the ruin reaches, and the limit is strict: all those, and those only, that make themselves wicked will be destroyed. The companion falls inside it, because associating with evil-doers is how men are debauched, and so undone.
He is called a companion, which is a description rather than an act, and what happens next is done to him: he shall be destroyed. The ruin still arrives as something he did, because keeping the company was the doing of it. Men debauched that way are described working it out at the end, ascribing their death to the company they kept — naming as its cause the one thing they had been doing all along. By then they had become what they kept, and the becoming was the whole of the work. Of the two men in the verse, only one had to put any effort into what he became.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes.
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