Proverbs 23:22 Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and
despise not thy mother when she is old.
Hearken is not a word you hear a great deal so
let me define it the Biblical way by contrasting verses.
Genesis 4:23 And Lamech said unto his wives,
Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech: for
I have slain a man to my wounding, and a young man to my hurt.
Genesis 49:2 Gather yourselves together, and hear, ye sons of Jacob; and
hearken unto Israel your father.
Hearken carries with it further the idea of responding
positively to what you hear.
Exodus 3:18 And they shall hearken to thy
voice: and thou shalt come, thou and the elders of Israel, unto the king of
Egypt, and ye shall say unto him, The LORD God of the Hebrews hath met with us:
and now let us go, we beseech thee, three days’ journey into the wilderness,
that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God.
Zechariah 7:11 But they refused to hearken,
and pulled away the shoulder, and stopped their ears, that they should not
hear.
Despise, which we have studied before, means to
hold in low regard or to view with contempt, and is a synonym of hate.
Leviticus 26:15 And if ye shall despise my
statutes, or if your soul abhor my judgments, so that ye will not do all my
commandments, but that ye break my covenant:
Psalm 102:17 He will regard the prayer of the
destitute, and not despise their prayer.
Amos 5:21 I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your
solemn assemblies.
Matthew 6:24 No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and
love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye
cannot serve God and mammon.
The Hebrew and by inference the Christian is to
listen to the instruction of his parents, to hear what his father has to say.
Notice the mention of “old” in the passage. Even when parents are aged they
have something to say that will be a benefit to you. You should not ignore it.
I’m not saying that a grown man or woman raising a family must get permission
from parents before doing anything but they have been down the road before you
and do have something to say about your situation.
Christians are to hear what they have to say and
to not view them with contempt when they are old. Too often, in a rapidly
changing society, we mistake technology for progress. But, essentially the
value of moral judgments don’t change whether you are wealthy and your parents
are poor, whether you are educated and they are not, whether you are full of
health and they are sick. Even when they’ve made bad choices that have led them
to a distressing point in their lives you can learn from that.
Even if you view them as failing as parents, YOU’LL learn
that parenting isn’t easy. Even if you view them as failures, YOU’LL learn that
life’s fortunes can turn on a dime. Even if you view them as stubborn and set
in their ways, YOU’LL learn that you, too, will become more set in your ways as
you grow older and that it is comforting in a stressful, ever changing world to
have stability.
The way this verse is constructed it does, like
many Bible verses, make multiple points with an economy of words. You are to
hearken to both your father and mother and to despise neither when they are
old. Only a stubborn fool would say, “well, I guess literally this means I
don’t have to hear what my mother says and I CAN despise my father when he is
old.” Use some common sense and see how wonderfully the Bible is constructed,
how economical the usage of words, and how deep the meaning.
Proverbs 23:23 Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom,
and instruction, and understanding.
This would be simple to grasp if you just
thought of telling someone to go out and purchase a King James Bible, the
Authorized Version, the only one published under the authority of a king whose
name, James, is the English version of the Hebrew name, Jacob (through Jacobus,
the Greek version), who was also named Israel by God. This Bible has the power
invested in it by God to change your life, your mind, and your attitude if you
read it and submit to its authority. It should be the Christian’s final
authority in all matters of faith, practice, and doctrine.
Truth, wisdom, instruction, and understanding
come from the Scriptures.
2Timothy 3:16 All scripture is given by
inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for
correction, for instruction in righteousness:
John 5:39 Search the scriptures; for in them
ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me (Jesus
Christ.)
John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man
cometh unto the Father, but by me.
1Corinthians 1:24 But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ
the power of God, and the wisdom of God.
We know that the Bible is given by inspiration
of God as the verse in 2 Timothy says. We know that the Scriptures includes the
translations and copies Timothy would have been raised with as no sane person
believes he had Moses’ original manuscripts in his hands. So, all this talk
about only the originals being inspired, work which we have never seen and no
one on this earth that you know today can see, as they are gone, is just
modernistic arrogance and rubbish.
We know that inspiration is not word for word
dictation but understanding from God for several big reasons;
Job 32:8 But there is a spirit in man: and the inspiration of
the Almighty giveth them understanding.
2Peter 3:15 And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even
as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath
written unto you;
Knowing that discerning the originals is
not as important to God as you would think. For no one has ever had the
originals of Jeremiah’s writings except a few doomed and desperate men who
destroyed them.
Jeremiah 36:32 Then took Jeremiah another
roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein
from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of
Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like
words.
So, translations and copies can be inspired, if God gives
that understanding to the people who perform the translation or the copies. ALL
SCRIPTURE means as long as its Scripture, it’s given by inspiration of God. The
King James Bible is an inspired Bible. When a preacher gets up and says he’s
now going to read from God’s error free and perfect word and doesn’t believe
that word he has in his hands is error free and perfect then he is a liar and
should be run out of the pulpit.
William Lyon Phelps, Lampson Professor of
English Literature at Yale University, writing in 1922 in the introduction to
his book, Human Nature in the Bible, said;
“We Anglo-Saxons have a better Bible than the
French or the Germans or the Italians or the Spanish; our English translation
is even better than the original Hebrew and Greek. There is only one way to
explain this; I have no theory to account for the so-called "inspiration
of the Bible," but I am confident that the Authorised Version was
inspired.”
Even a unsaved scholar is capable of
understanding things that so called Christian scholars in colleges from Bob
Jones University to Crown College of the Bible do not.
So, get you a KJB and read it from cover to
cover, over and over again until Christ either calls out His church or you are
called home in death.
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