Solomon Says: Directives for Young Men

by Mark Horne

The father’s words and commands are to be “treasured,” while wisdom is to be sought as if it is hidden treasure (“seek it like silver”). In contrast to what his father is able to give him, only the Lord can give wisdom.

If a son has been raised by godly parents, then they have taught him important truths that he should remember and value. He should never abandon them. But those things are not enough. Like Solomon when he is about to inherit the kingdom, and like Adam needing a companion, every young man becoming an adult needs wisdom from God. He must search for and acquire her.

Some marginalize this part of Scripture as “law” versus “gospel,” or as Old Testament moralism, or as insignificant compared to other parts of the Bible. Don’t do that. Remember that what we do is who we become.

Sometimes people are willing to work, but only for a little while before they quit. Thus, the opposite of sloth isn’t “hard work” necessarily. Nor is it even “long hours.” Someone might boast in working long hours three days a month when the project requires more consistent, dedicated time than that. Long hours are necessitated in certain circumstances but not all. That is why

the antithesis of sloth is consistency or diligence.

So embracing diligence and avoiding sloth means being ruled neither by anxieties and fears nor by dreams and fantasies.

God’s rules and God’s wisdom are aimed at empowering you to make you capable of doing great things. Adam and Eve ruined their lives because they decided that God was trying to keep them down. The path of disobedience appeared to them to be the path of freedom. But it was entirely the other way around. The path of disobedience was completely scripted by Satan and they were allowing themselves to be manipulated by the serpent.

God wants to elevate you. The moment you let yourself think that his rules are an impediment to you rather than a way of unleashing your potential, you are a fool.

When many American teens get jobs, they do so to buy things they want over and above what their parents are willing to spend on them. This seems responsible but it means they get habituated to earning money for things they want to purchase and use immediately. That habit is insufficient for productive life as an adult.

As always, God wants us to be wise in order to empower us. Nothing in Proverbs indicates that it’s actually wrong to acquire and enjoy luxuries. But that enjoyment needs to be done in a way that doesn’t sabotage you as a person and rob you of financial freedom.

Nor should passages about a quarrelsome wife (Prov. 21:9, 19; 25:24; 27:15) be understood as a license to become a husband who quarrels with his wife about her quarrelsome nature.

The general point in Proverbs for a husband is that you should be grateful for your wife’s strengths and her loyalty and that you should work on being the best husband you can be. You should train yourself to be loyal to her alone:

harem of imaginary brides.

And establishing authority over yourself to form a trustworthy character is an extremely important factor in becoming qualified to have authority over others.

If you know you have to stop oversleeping, the most useless thing you can do is hope

to change your characteristic behavior the next morning when you normally ignore your alarm. Odds are you will just do it again. So you need to strategize to train yourself, just like a parent would do with a son or daughter facing the same issue. You need to make changes that will help build new habits that will make you a person who doesn’t oversleep.

Going back to the Bible’s use of oversleeping as an analogy for sloth and folly, think of how the people who have trained themselves to get up in the morning experience their alarm clock blaring in their ears. Do they groan and hit the snooze button? No. They get up. If they’re especially tired they might groan, but they usually don’t even consider the option of sleeping longer. If they think anything about it they resolve to get to bed earlier or get a nap when possible. They don’t struggle as those untrained in awaking on a schedule struggle.

Whether you realize it or not, what you are doing when you are young is building the man you will be. Build according to God’s blueprint from the start! An adult can repent, but he has the added hardship of having to demolish what he built wrong—to break his foolish habits as well as adopt wiser behaviors. How much better to start before you have had a chance to develop a flawed character!