Verse of the day · September 29

What does a just man fall into in Proverbs 24:16?

Somebody was waiting outside for the fall he would not get up from. He kept getting up.

For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.
Proverbs 24:16

This comes out of a father instructing his son. My son, eat thou honey, because it is good, he tells him. The honey stands for wisdom — as sweet to the soul as honey is to the mouth — and the son is told his expectation will not be cut off. Then he turns and speaks to somebody who had not been addressed at all: Lay not wait, O wicked man, against the dwelling of the righteous; spoil not his resting place. So there is a man standing outside somebody else's house, and the warning is for him. The son is still there, hearing it said.

What he is doing there is patient work, carefully planned. He watches the door to see who goes in and who comes out and what is done in there, hoping to catch the owner himself when he steps out. Or to get inside and strip it: pull it down, take whatever he keeps there. He is watching for the man's slips and stumbles too, to note them down and use them against him. And his hope is high, with reason. The man inside is weak and cannot hold on to the place, his circumstances are low and distressed, and he is nearly down already.

The man being watched is one who walks blamelessly by all the testimonies of God, and gives every man what he is owed. And that is not a man who only looks the part. He knows how unrighteous he is; he trusts Christ for a righteousness he does not have of his own, and has it counted to him; and the seeds of grace and righteousness have been planted in him, and he lives righteously in this evil world. The word used for his resting place is a word for a sheepfold: a sheep lying down, harmless and innocent, with a wolf outside.

And what the watcher is told next is this. For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again. It is not so much counsel as defiance: a man with that plan in his head does not take instruction. And the ones it is really meant for are listening in — the son the instruction began with, and the good people this man frightens. It is meant to put heart back into them. The first thing it does is agree with him. It grants him the fall.

There is not a word about sin in it, though — and this is the line people quote to say that the best man alive sins seven times a day on average. The word day is not in it either. The Hebrew word for falling here comes from naphal, and it is never used of falling into sin. The verse sets it against riseth up again, which makes it a fall into trouble and affliction. And the falls it counts are the ones the watcher is out there to cause: being trapped, stumbling, going down into distress and calamity.

Nor is seven a tally. It is a way of saying often, or many. There is another promise like it: the righteous man's afflictions are many, and the Lord brings him out of all of them, one after another. So the number sets no limit on how many times a man may go down.

Which makes the watching a waste of the watcher's time. Not that his attempts fail altogether. What they cannot do is finish the man: a plot laid against a good man is partly successful and never fully successful. God does sometimes let the hand of violence reach his tent, and the affliction press him down; and every time, he comes up out of it brighter and more refined than he went in. He falls seven times into trouble, and by the blessing of God upon his wisdom and his integrity he gets up again, sees his way through the trouble and sees better times after it. And the rising does not stop at better days in this life. He comes through great trouble, and at the end of it he enters the kingdom of heaven safely. That is the expectation the son was told would not be cut off: a hope of eternal life resting on Christ's righteousness, and not on his own.

The watcher is in the sentence too, and he falls as well. But the wicked shall fall into mischief. The man who expected to see the other one ruined, and to help it forward, is the one undone, and it is his own sins and his own troubles that destroy him. Nothing is said about him getting up. Mischief there is the word for evil, and the evil it reaches to is punishment: hell itself, out of which there is no deliverance at all. There he lies, because there is no strong arm over him to hold him up.

The man at the door had read the situation. The man inside was weak. He would not be able to keep the place. He was nearly down already, and he would go down again, and go down often. Every one of those falls, the sentence grants the watcher. What it will not grant him is the one he came for: the fall that has nothing said about getting up after it. That one the sentence keeps for the wicked, and the man at the door had put himself among them. So the falling was never what told the two men apart. What told them apart was that one of them had God getting him up again.

Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary, Adam Clarke and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made

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