Sluggards

Crumbling Ruin

Those humanists who are also capitalists assume that men prefer to work, rather than repose. Because God daily preserves and upholds His creation, they are largely right. Faced with the threat of starvation, most men will find the energy and willpower to work. When offered the opportunity to make progress and improve their lot in life, most will willingly work to achieve it.

But when faced with a choice of payment for work versus payment for doing nothing, many find the choice a bit more difficult. Moreover, receiving "entitlements" can quickly transfer into a lifestyle choice. At root here is an unethical and immoral heart. The biblical character that most comprehensively describes the spiritual state of such a person is the sluggard.

Derek Kidner, in his 1964 commentary on Proverbs, now regarded as a classic in many quarters, writes about the sluggard (pp. 42-43):

The sluggard in Proverbs is a figure of tragi-comedy, with his sheer animal laziness (he is more than anchored to his bed: he is hinged to it, 26:14), his preposterous excuses (“there is a lion outside!” 26:13; 22:13) and his final helplessness.

Kidner identified four features of the sluggard according to Proverbs:

(1) He will not begin things. When we ask him (6:9, 10) “How long?” “When…?”, we are being too definite for him. He doesn’t know. All he knows is his delicious drowsiness; all he asks is a little respite: “a little…a little…a little…”. He does not commit himself to a refusal, but deceives himself by the smallness of his surrenders. So, by inches and minutes, his opportunity slips away.

(2) He will not finish things. The rare effort of beginning has been too much; the impulse dies. So his quarry goes bad on him (12:27) and his meal goes cold on him (19:24; 26:15).

(3) He will not face things. He comes to believe his own excuses (perhaps there is a lion out there, 22:13), and to rationalize his laziness; for he is “wiser in his own conceit than seven men that can render a reason” (26:16). Because he makes a habit of the soft choice (he “will not plow by reason of the cold,” 20:4) his character suffers as much as his business, so that he is implied in 15:19 to be fundamentally dishonest…

(4) Consequently he is restless (13:4; 21:25, 26) with unsatisfied desire; helpless in face of the tangle of his affairs, which are like a “hedge of thorns” (15:19); and useless—expensively (18:9) and exasperatingly (10:26)—to any who must employ him. . . .

Kidner continues:

The wise man will learn while there is time. He knows that the sluggard is no freak, but, as often as not, an ordinary man who has made too many excuses, too many refusals and too many postponements. It has all been as imperceptible, and as pleasant, as falling asleep.

The sluggard is an all-to-familiar alter-ego. When the spirit of the sluggard becomes widely disseminated, society fragments and crumbles and the rust never sleeps.

Hat Tip: Justin Taylor