Verse of the day · September 23
What is the haste that Proverbs 21:5 warns against?
Two people, both of them busy. Only one ends up poor.
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The thoughts of the diligent tend only to plenteousness; but of every one that is hasty only to want.
Proverbs 21:5
The hasty man is the one the proverb ends on, and he is the easier of the two to picture: a thing enters his head and he is already doing it. He never gives himself long enough to think it over, and he is into the job before the thinking is finished. He goes at his business rashly, and takes no counsel on it. And the hurry is not only in the doing; it is in what he is hurrying toward. He wants to be rich, and he wants it soon, and he has made up his mind that he will be, right or wrong. The diligent man's thoughts tend only to plenteousness, which is plenty; the hasty man's only to want, which is being poor.
Further down the same chapter there is another proverb, about a man whose hands refuse to labour. He is as able to work as anybody, there is work in reach of his hands and his mind, and he will not do it. Neither of today's two men is that man. Both of them are busy.
Diligence here is not a mood; it is a way of working. A man who wants to live plentifully and comfortably in this world must not shrink from the hard and troublesome parts of his business; he must take every opening it offers him; and what he does he must do with all his might. And he is a thinker as much as a worker — he works his plans out carefully in his mind, and then he goes after them. His thoughts are as necessary as his hands, and looking ahead is worth as much as the labour.
There is a limit on all that strength, and it is in the line itself: the man it commends is set against a man in a hurry. So the diligence stops short of hurry — not rushing himself, and not rushing the people around him. Steady still goes far in a day.
Another proverb near the end of the chapter draws a man who goes about it that way: as for the upright, he directeth his way. Directing his way means considering it, and considering is what today's line is about: thoughts, before the hand goes near the work. He does not ask what he has a mind to and then go and get it; he asks what he ought to do, and what God requires of him. He does not force his way, he directs it.
What generally comes of diligence like that is prosperity and plenty; a man like that is usually thriving, and will have enough to live on. And the chapter says at its close where the outcome lies — however well a man has got himself ready, it is God who gives the safety. No man's plan stands against God.
The hasty man's hurry does not keep him honest, and it does not keep him wise. He is greedy for gain and will take it by fair means or foul, rushing to get rich by cheating, or by a project that was never thought through, and both roads end in poverty. The proverb that comes straight after today's verse names one of those shortcuts — treasure got by a lying tongue — and calls it a vanity tossed to and fro. Money that came in that way gives him no comfort and nothing he can lean on. His own conscience and other men's judgments keep it tossed about, and he is never left at peace with it. And one turn of providence or another carries it off.
And the ruin, when it comes, does not need to come at him from outside. The plans he laid to raise himself are the things that bring him down. And it does not land on him alone; he takes his family down into poverty with him.
Both men in this proverb had a plan, and each expected his to raise him. Much of the distance between them is the interval between having the plan and acting on it: one takes his time over a thing before his hand goes near it; the other has already begun. The second man was not ruined for lack of an idea. He was ruined by the one he had, put into action before he had finished thinking it. Finishing the thinking was each man's to do. What the plan came to in the end was not in either man's hands: the horse is prepared against the day of battle, but safety is of the LORD.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made