CRITICAL NOTES.—
Proverbs 14:13. The heart is sorrowful, or “will be” (perchance).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF Proverbs 14:13
TRUE AND FALSE MIRTH
This proverb, as it stands in our English version, cannot be taken as universally true. The first clause is rendered by some translators—“Even in laughter the heart may be sorrowful” (see Critical Notes), and experience and Bible teaching both necessitate our giving a limitation to the second clause also.
I. Whether mirth will end in heaviness depends upon its character—therefore upon the character of the man who is mirthful. There is an innocent and right mirth, there is an ill-timed, guilty mirth. The end of lawful mirth is not heaviness. It is good for the body. A physician is glad to see his patient mirthful. He knows that it will act most beneficially, and assist his recovery to health. A mirthful man will not suffer so much physical injury from the wear and tear of life as one who is always sombre and melancholy. Lawful mirth is good for the mind. It is the unbending of the bow which breaks if it is kept always at its extreme tension. A man who is naturally mirthful—who is ever disposed to see men and things in their brightest colours, must be a creature of hope, and hope has power to surround those who possess her with a paradise of their own creation, which is very independent of outward circumstances. Natural, wholesome mirth will make a man much stronger to do and to bear all the duties and trials of life. But natural, lawful mirth is only proper to godly men. Christians are the only people in the world who have reason to be glad. All those who are worthy of the name ought to be able, amidst all the saddening influences of life, to hold fast such a confidence in God as shall leave room for the play even of mirth. But the man who is in a state of alienation from God has no reason to be mirthful, his mirth must be either feigned or the result of a thoughtless disregard of his own relations to God and eternity. The “end” of such mirth must be “heaviness.”
II. Laughter is not always an index of feeling. There is doubtless much that passes for mirth among the ungodly that is merely a blind to conceal intentions or feelings deeply hidden in the soul. The seducer laughs at the fears and misgivings of his victim, but his laugh is not the laugh of the light-hearted, God-fearing man. Its very ring tells any unprejudiced hearer that there is a flaw somewhere, and it is only assumed to enable him to effect his purpose. In such laughter there may not be present actual sorrow, but there is an entire absence of gladness of heart. But laughter often veils the deepest and most heartfelt misery. The poor drunkard will laugh at the debauchery of the past night while he feels a bitter consciousness of his degradation. Many a man laughs with his gay companions, and all the while sees a dread future rising up before him which he trembles to meet. The character of him who laughs will afford the best clue by which to determine whether or not the laughter is the outcome of genuine mirth.
OUTLINES AND SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS
Already the wise king was beginning to experience what he more fully states in Ecclesiastes 2:2; Ecclesiastes 7:6. Men’s very pleasures turn into their opposites.—Fausset.
Not of its own nature, of course; for a proverb has already said that there is a “joy” which is not our foe. Not this is always the case; but there is such a case. Because the wicked get nothing really but their “ways” (Proverbs 14:14).—Miller.
The sun doth not ever shine: there is a time of setting. No day of jollity is without its evening of conclusion, if no cloud of disturbance prevent it with an overcasting. First God complains, men sing, dance, and are jovial and neglectful; at last man shall complain, and “God shall laugh at their calamity.” Why should God be conjured to receive that spirit dying which would not receive God’s Spirit living?—T. Adams.
As soon might true joy be found in hell as in the carnal heart. As soon might the tempest-tossed ocean be at rest as the sinner’s conscience (Isaiah 57:20-21). He may feast in his prison, or dance in his chains.… But if he has found a diversion from present trouble, has he found a cover from everlasting misery? It is far easier to drown conviction than to escape damnation.… But the end of that mirth implies another with a different end. Contrast the prodigal’s mirth in the far country with his return to his father’s house when “they began to be merry.”—Bridges.
Every human heart carries the feeling of disquiet and of separation from its true home, and of the nothingness, transitoriness of all that is earthly; and in addition to this, there is many a secret sorrow in everyone which grows out of his own corporeal and spiritual life, and from his relation to other men; and this sorrow, which from infancy onward is the lot of the human heart, and which more and more deepens and diversifies itself in the course of life, makes itself perceptible even in the midst of laughter, in spite of the mirth and merriment, without being able to be suppressed or expelled from the soul, returning always the more intensely, the more violently we may for a time have kept it under, and sunk it in unconsciousness. From the fact that sorrow is the fundamental condition of humanity, and forms the back-ground of laughter, it follows that it is not good for man to give himself up to joy, viz., sensual (worldly), for to it the issue is sorrow.—Delitzsch.
There are two sorts of joys—the joy natural and the joy spiritual; the joy of vanity and the joy of verity; a joy in the creature and a joy in the Creator; a joy in a mutable thing and a joy in a matter immutable. The spiritual joys are the joys of the palace. The natural joys are the joys of prisoners. These are to worldlings that are without God seeming joys, because they know no better. They cannot get Penelope, they will be suitors to her maidens.… The godly are like the ant, they are first weary, then merry; but the ungodly are like the grasshopper, first they sing and then they sorrow.—Bishop Abernethy, 1630.