“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 143
“When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what [is] before thee: And put a knife to thy throat, if thou [be] a man given to appetite. Be not desirous of his dainties: for they [are] deceitful meat. Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom. Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for [riches] certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven. Eat thou not the bread of [him that hath] an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats: For as he thinketh in his heart, so [is] he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart [is] not with thee. The morsel [which] thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words” (Prov. 23:1-8).
Unusual for the book of Proverbs, here are a series of proverbs that should be taken together, taken in context. When you have the privilege of eating with a ruler, think about it before you chow down (v. 1). If you are the kind of person that causes “all you can eat” buffets to develop new policies, then you might as well cut your own throat, because that is what you are doing here (v. 2). Don’t help yourself to all his truffles because there is an optical illusion involved (v. 3). Don’t work (in this way) at being rich. Yeah, it seems the course of wisdom but it isn’t (v. 4). Riches pursued this way are a bunch of nothing (v. 5). Don’t eat the bread of a stingy man of wealth; don’t even want his food (v. 6). The way he is thinking is the way he actually is, and his invitations to help yourself should not be taken at face value (v. 7). You are gaining nothing here that you will not lose in the bathroom later (v. 8).
And so the principle here should be to disavow all attempts to get rich by schmooze-networking, caging the right invitation, glad-handing the rich and powerful. Labor not to be rich. This is not telling us to avoid faithful work over the course of our lives, asking God to bless it materially. That is actually one of His ways of confirming the covenant with us (Dt. 8:18). Scripture is saying that we are not to labor for wealth in the manner of a parasite. We are called to imitate the ant, and work hard. We are not told to imitate the tapeworm.
Just as a beautiful woman develops a sixth sense that enables her to tell why guys are sidling up to her (for reasons very different than what they are saying), so also rich people have a sixth sense for when someone is trying to tap into them. Many of them are not natively stingy, but have to act that way because of how people are constantly clustering round. The beautiful woman is not really a snow queen, but she has to act that way in self-defense. As with all proverbs, there are exceptions, but a good rule of thumb is that anyone who wants to make his projects go by hooking them to the resources of the wealthy would do well to memorize this passage.