Proverbs 17:16-21

Here is the riddle the rest of the chapter answers. The fool holds the price of wisdom — the tuition money is right there in his fist — but he has "no heart to it." And that is the deepest problem in the world: Christ, the cross, heaven, glory — all of it purchased, all of it freely offered, the price laid in our very hands — and the one thing needed is a heart for it, and that heart is the gift of God, and apart from grace it is not there. Thousands would rather go sleeping to hell than toiling to heaven. The Gadarenes had the Pearl Himself standing in their country and asked Him to leave. Privileges, talents, opportunity, time — all of it is purchase-money for wisdom, and a man can hold every coin and still buy nothing for want of a heart.

Against that bleak verse comes one of the warmest in the book. A real friend loves at all times — not in the sunshine only — and a brother is born for adversity, made for the hard day. Earth's friendships are like little isolated pools left in a dried-up summer riverbed, each mirroring a broken bit of heaven — and adversity is the wind that drives the chaff away and leaves the wheat: it shows you which friends were real. But every earthly friend has a limit. One man told of holding his only brother's pale forehead until the aching stopped in death — and then even that born brother had to let go. And that is exactly where this verse finally points: "in the day of your deepest adversity even a born brother must let go his hold — that extremity is the opportunity of your best Friend." There is a Friend who was, in the deepest sense, "born for adversity" — born into our world only because His family was in distress, who "sticketh closer than a brother" (Proverbs 18:24) and never lets go. The first answer to the heartless fool of verse 16 is the Brother who came for the hard day.

Back to plain prudence: only a man "void of understanding" — a man without heart, the very lack named back in verse 16 — rashly shakes hands to guarantee another man's debt and puts his own family at risk. Be generous, but do not pledge what isn't yours to lose; befriend no one at the price of injustice to those who depend on you. And yet lift your eyes once, because here the gospel whispers again: had not the hands nailed to the cross been stricken in suretyship for us — pledged to pay a debt that was not His — the handwriting against us could never have been cancelled (Colossians 2:14). He became the Surety no prudent man would dare to be. That is the eternal exception, not a pattern for our reckless co-signing.

A man who loves to fight loves sin itself, though he would never admit the charge — he calls it standing on principle. And "exalting the gate" is reaching above your station — pride in display, building bigger than your means, putting on a front. Henry's line is sharp: he makes his gate so large that his whole house and estate go out through it. Note the verbs: the lazy man merely waits for ruin, but the proud man actively seeks it — sends a coach to go and fetch his own destruction.

A crooked heart never finds the good it grasps at, and a twisted tongue trips its owner into trouble. At bottom this is the sin of insisting on your own way against the whole moral order of the universe you live in — "let me have anything but my own way" is the prayer of a wise man; "let me have my own way" is the road to finding no good in anything.

A foolish child is a grief that gnaws — sharpened by the father's quiet knowledge that his own indulgence or prayerlessness may have let the folly ripen. There is no preaching to a parent in this grief, only one direction for it to go: let the godly parent expect everything from prayer. The God who made you breeds you, every patient day, far more truly than you ever bred your children — and He knows this sorrow from the inside.