MAIN HOMILETICS OF Proverbs 11:22
PRECIOUS THINGS POSSESSED BY UNWORTHY OWNERS
I. There is an analogy between gold and beauty.
1. They are both gifts from God. Whether a man possesses gold by inheritance or as the result of labour it is a gift from God. In the first instance no praise or blame is due to him for being a rich man, he can no more help it than he can help being in existence. And it is no less a gift from God when it has been earned by toil (see Homiletics on chap. Proverbs 10:22). Beauty is also a gift from God, those who possess it deserve no honour for being beautiful, those who lack it are not to be despised on that account.
2. Both have a certain value. Gold may add much to a man himself, it increases his opportunities of spiritual and intellectual growth. It enables him to add much to the joy and comfort of others, to give them opportunities of growth also; a rich man can, if he pleases, serve his generation most effectually by a right use of wealth, and thereby increase a thousandfold his own happiness as well as that of others. Beauty is precious also. A woman who possesses physical beauty possesses an influence which she can use, if she pleases, as a lever to raise the moral tone of those who come under her influence. A beautiful woman may use her beauty so as to earn for herself a good reward, and gladden the hearts of her fellow-creatures.
3. Both may make their possessors worthy of praise or blame. Although neither praise nor blame can be attached to the possession of them, much may be to their use. He who uses gold as we have just indicated will receive the “well done,” which is the highest praise that man can receive (Matthew 25:21). But if, like a sponge, he sucks up all the blessings that his gold can give into his own life, and leaves others unsuccoured and unblest, he will deserve, and he will receive, the sentence passed upon the rich by the Apostle James (chap. Proverbs 5:1). So with the use or the abuse of beauty. For the right use of this gift of God, praise will be accorded to its possessor, for its abuse she will be called to render an account.
II. Gold and beauty, each in a wrong relation. An ornament of gold is a fitting and becoming adornment of the human person. But the same thing in a swine’s snout is utterly out of place; the conjunction of the two strikes us as entirely incongruous. But it is not more so than to find a fair face united to an unlovely soul—to a soul which lacks the purity and modesty without which a woman is the most repulsive of God’s creatures. For the word translated discretion evidently means womanliness—virtue, and when we see a beautiful face and find that it belongs to one with a foul spirit, we seem to see heaven and hell united in one person. The analogy goes further; the swine uses his snout to grovel in the mire in search of that which will satisfy his animal and swinish nature, he could put a jewel of gold to no other use. And the woman of the proverb does the same with her beauty. She debases this jewel of God’s own workmanship to the vile use of satisfying her own grovelling and lawless desires, and thus renders the resemblance most striking.
ILLUSTRATION
Nearly all the females of the East wear a jewel of gold in their nostrils, or in the septum of their nose; and some of them are exceedingly beautiful, and of great value. The Oriental lady looks with as much pleasure upon the jewel which adorns her nose as any of her sex in England do upon that which deck their ears.—Roberts.
OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS
We cannot, if we are ourselves right-minded,—if we have even good sense, apart from piety—admire such beauty. It hardly deserves the name. True loveliness consists not in the mere exquisite symmetry of features. It cannot exist without expression. To constitute true beauty, the countenance must be the index of the mind and heart—of what is intellectual and what is amiable.—Wardlaw.
The most direct proverb, in the sense of “mashal,” or similitude, which has yet reached us.—Plumptre.
Beauty is an earthly jewel, and is a comely ornament, where God and nature have bestowed it. But if there be no discretion to consider whence it cometh, and by whom it is preserved; if there be no understanding to perceive what the nature of it is, to what at last it cometh, and how soon it fadeth, it is then but as a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout.—Jermin.
God makes no more reckoning of sinful people without understanding, than of brute beasts without reason. Though they have human nature, and carry the shape and form of men and women, with best show, yet if there be nothing but flesh and blood and sinfulness, no beauty nor bravery, make the best of them, is more acceptable to Him than is the basest of all the other creatures. It is a very homely comparison wherewith the Holy Ghost disgraceth the wicked in this book, and yet so true, that He toucheth it again in the New Testament (2 Peter 2:22).—Dod.
It is small praise, saith one, to have a good face and an evil nature. No one means, saith another, hath so enriched hell as beautiful faces. Art thou fair? saith an author; be not like an Egyptian temple, or a painted sepulchre. Art thou foul? let thy soul be like a rich pearl in a rude shell.—Trapp.
Beauty in the possession of an unthinking woman is more dangerous than a drawn sword in the hands of an idiot.
Beauty, unaccompanied by virtue, is as a flower without perfume.