Posted on 10/27/2019 5:33:41 AM PDT by Pilgrim's Progress
“As the fining pot for silver, and the furnace for gold; so is a man to his praise. Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him” (Proverbs 27:21-22).
“As the fining pot for silver,” or to be refined, in the sense of purified, to get the dross out of it; “and the furnace for gold; so is a man to his praise.” A wise man, that is, the good man reveals purity by how he handles praise. Praise will test you. When people praise a fool, he gets all carried away with it. But, “as the fining pot for silver,” praise can purify.
When you get praised properly and you really know what you really are, it makes you think, “I really don't deserve that. Well, there's this thing wrong with me, and that thing wrong with me. If I am going live up to this, I had better get right.” Most people wouldn't think that praise could purify us, but when your heart is right with God, you know you don't deserve it, and you know that it’s really God that deserves the praise and honor. You begin to look within yourself, and say, “Boy! If I’m going to live up to this, I’d better get my act together!”
“Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.” No matter what you do to a fool, you can't really separate him from his foolishness. Now, to “bray” a fool is to bawl him out or rebuke him. And you rebuke him “in a mortar,” that's a vessel shaped like an inverted bell made of wood or metal, and when you bray him “in a mortar among wheat with a pestle,” that’s an instrument for pounding and breaking things. In other words, if you try to break a fool with words; bawl him out—you can do that, “yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”
“Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him” (Proverbs 22:15). But for an adult, it gets harder to do the older they get, and you get the point where God can’t break a man. What happens it that guy’s heart just hardens, and hardens and hardens, like Pharaoh. And God tries to break him. He did, didn't He? He did try. When you think about the plagues of Egypt; socially, financially, industrially; the whole business. He destroyed Egypt. It didn’t break Pharaoh. God just kept pounding, and pounding, and pounding. It just made him harder.
That happens sometimes, but there again, some other times God will pound on people and they will break. Thank God for that. The younger you can get to them, God doesn’t need to pound on them that much, the better the chance are breaking them.
Let’s read a chapter of Proverbs a day and see what God might have for us. As the Lord leads, share with us what God has shown you in a special way and by His grace let us build up a devotional repository. Let’s keep our knives and forks handy for some daily bread!
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