Somebody Else Pays for Your Bad Judgment

A boss can lose his temper and go eat lunch. The employee he unloaded on may spend the afternoon wondering whether he still has a job.

That is a lot of power to put in the hands of somebody who thinks his mood is nobody else’s business.

The opening of Proverbs 31 deals with that kind of responsibility. Before the familiar passage about a virtuous woman, a mother teaches a king what can make him unfit to rule and whose cause he must defend.

The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him.

What, my son? and what, the son of my womb? and what, the son of my vows?

Proverbs 31:1-2

His title does not put him beyond his mother’s instruction.

Give not thy strength unto women, nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings.

Proverbs 31:3

She warns him against wasting his strength in sexual indulgence. The same chapter honors a virtuous woman, so making women themselves the enemy would miss her point. Lemuel is responsible for what he does with his strength.

Then she gets specific about drink.

It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine; nor for princes strong drink:

Lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted.

Proverbs 31:4-5

Look at who gets hurt.

Somebody comes before the throne with a real wrong to put right, and the man who can do something about it has made himself unable to judge properly. He might recover from the drinking by morning. That does not reverse a crooked verdict.

The next two verses keep us from turning this into a tidier passage than it is.

Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.

Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.

Proverbs 31:6-7

She speaks of drink as relief for the dying and distressed. Lemuel is being warned about a different kind of forgetting: losing his grip on the law while somebody else’s case is in his hands.

Most of us will never decide a case from a throne. We still make decisions that fall harder on somebody else than they fall on us.

A supervisor decides whether to hear an employee’s explanation before writing him up. A parent decides whether a frightened child gets time to finish the sentence. Alcohol is the danger named here. The reason she gives reaches any of us whose decisions affect someone with less power.

If you have already decided that the child is lying, you can turn every attempt to explain into another count of disrespect. By the time you finish correcting the child’s tone, the thing you were supposed to hear has disappeared.

The adult leaves satisfied that authority was maintained. The child learns that telling the truth is not worth the trouble.

That can happen in a Christian home with a Bible on the counter. Knowing the words does not excuse judging the person in front of you carelessly.

And the mother’s counsel does not end with the king staying out of trouble himself.

Open thy mouth for the dumb in the cause of all such as are appointed to destruction.

Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.

Proverbs 31:8-9 Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy.biblegateway.com

Here, “the dumb” means those unable to speak. Their inability to plead for themselves gives the king a duty to speak. It does not make their case less important.

That is worth remembering when somebody with less power cannot explain a problem as neatly as you would like. Being nervous in front of you is not evidence that they are wrong. Being poor does not make a person automatically right either. She says to judge righteously. The point is that lack of money or a voice must not decide the case before it is heard.

You do not need a crown to do something useful with this today. In the next conversation where you can overrule somebody, let them finish explaining what happened before deciding what they deserve. If you discover you were wrong, correct the decision, even if you have to say it in front of the people who heard you make it.

There may be someone who has been trying to tell you something for weeks. They should not have to catch you in a good mood to get a fair hearing.

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