At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
He that tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread: But he that followeth after vain persons shall have poverty enough.
Proverbs 28:19
There are some things we shouldn’t have to be told, but because we are a sinful race, we do have to be told them, and repeatedly. Notice the upshot of this particular proverb. If you work hard and intelligently in the field, you will have plenty of food. But if, instead of this, you chase after the fellow promising rainbows for everybody, you are going to have plenty of something else, and that something else is poverty. Some people are grain farmers and other people are poverty farmers. In either case, you will always get plenty of whatever you are growing.
There are two applications of this that we should make. The first is to remember that we are dealing with proverbs about real life, not axioms in geometry. “All hard workers have plenty of bread” is certainly true, but it is not true the same way that “all triangle have three sides” is true. There are exceptions, but there are not so many exceptions that it should in any way alter the way you live. Working hard is the right thing to do, period, and it usually pays off. But even when it does not “pay off,” it was still the right thing. Hard work and diligence are valued by all of God’s true disciples, as they are found in every nation.
But the second application is that in our day there are certain liars (the same kind of vain persons that our proverb mentions) who are maintaining that things like industry, hard work, showing up on time, diligence, and so on, are “white” values, and that to live in this way is to perpetuate white supremacy. If you are struggling to understand how anybody could argue for anything so stupid, that probably means that you were educated in white supremacist categories, and are still trapped in them.
But God’s Word is always sure, even if Solomon was white, and people who pursue vanities like this are pursuing poverty. They will find it, and if they don’t repent, their only consolation in that poverty will be that they successfully stuck it to the Man. Showed him.
