It’s crazy how widespread is the counsel that “proverbs aren’t promises.” It’s ridiculously common for folks to treat it as a truism that requires no defense, only an assertion or brief explanation. And that explanation seems to require Prov 26:4-5 (or Prov 22:6) as a launching point, as though invoking “answer a fool … answer not a fool” makes the truism self-evident.
Consider an Example
Case in point. Here is a nursing professor doing a wonderful thing for his church, seeking to encourage them to read the Scripture and dig more deeply into God’s glorious word. I trust that he serves faithfully in his role as a church elder and music coordinator. He wants to read God’s word well and help others read God’s word well. However, he falls prey to the unexamined truism that unintentionally undermines an entire book of the Bible desperately needed in our generation.
And notice that, in the process, he turns “proverbs aren’t promises” into a homemade proverb that makes a promise. This brilliant biblical poetry is now reduced to “principles” but not “promises,” whatever that actually means. But if these “principles” cannot be relied on to promise the truth to us, then, as Bruce Waltke put it, how could a psychologically well person ever trust what God says in this book?
And as a result, the truism’s effect is the opposite to its intended effect: It only motivates people not to read and study the Proverbs. Why spend my time here, when I can spend my time in a different book of the Bible that does promise something? A book that provides fully reliable truth I can bank on, and not just “principles” that are merely possible or likely but you can never be sure?
I can’t really blame this blogger, though, as he’s merely quoting a commentator. The problem is not that a few people think this way. The problem is that everybody holds to this tradition as handed down from the elders without really considering its consequences.
Notice how, right in his opening paragraph, the writer linked above contrasts proverbs with the “promise” of John 3:16. “Are these promises in the same way the John 3:16 is a promise?” He clarifies by quoting an unnamed commentator: “Proverbs are not magical words that if memorized and applied in a mechanical way automatically lead to success and happiness.” But are we to presume that John 3:16 is?
You might say, “of course not.” But please follow the logic as presented. If:
- Proverbs are not promises, and
- A “promise” means something is “a magical word…applied in a mechanical way” that “automatically leads to success and happiness,” and
- John 3:16 contains a promise,
then John 3:16 is a magical, mechanical, and automatic word.
In other words, a person can apply John 3:16 like this: “What a great deal! God loved me (and the whole world) so much that he gave his Son! That means that if I just believe, I will never perish! I will have eternal life! I can therefore jump off a skyscraper without a parachute, or walk in front of a dump truck, and nothing bad will happen to me! I won’t perish! No believers in Christ will ever die young. Or die at all.”
Not What Promises Are
Of course that’s not how this blogger or anybody else believes John 3:16 ought to be applied. That would be a magical, mechanical, and automatic use of that promise, doing violence to what it really means and to how promises actually work in the Bible.
But nobody in their right mind treats any promise of the Bible that way. Not the promise of John 3:16. Not the promises of the Prophets. Not the promises of covenant blessings and curses in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. Every one of those promises requires qualifications and a covenantal or cultural context to be properly understood. Just like…the sayings of Proverbs.
Therefore, when a proverb makes a promise, we should not treat that promise mechanically, either. So I agree fully with the intent of the statement that “Proverbs aren’t promises.”
But the solution to that tragically mistaken use of the Bible’s promises (magical, mechanical, automatic) is not to maintain the oft-repeated yet self-defeating claim that “proverbs aren’t promises.” If proverbs really are not promises, then that conventional proverbial saying must not be a promise, either. And if proverbs aren’t promises, there is little reason to dive deeply into the book of Proverbs to mature as a person or society. And so we continue suffering our cultural and generational folly, experiencing the covenantal consequences of what God promised in the book of Proverbs. “When the righteous triumph, there is great glory, but when the wicked rise, people hide themselves” (Prov 28:12).
Can we please instead find the courage to acknowledge that some proverbs are, in fact, promises? Let’s instruct people that the Bible’s promises are not magical, mechanical, or automatic. But let’s also euthanize the false and confusing reflex that communicates that, because proverbs are not mechanical, they are not “promises.” Stating the matter that way has only misled people and created worse problems than those we attempted to solve.
For further defense of this thesis, please check out “Why ‘Proverbs Aren’t Promises’ is Still Misleading.”
