“A servant will not be corrected by words: for though he understand he will not answer.”—29:19.
Interpretation.—By “a servant” is to be understood “a slave,” or one of a slavish spirit. Sullenness is among the fruits of slavery, and betrays itself in refusing all signs of intelligence when under reproof. The “counsel” here given is to masters, and it is implied that if even a son may require the discipline of the scourge (vv. 15, 17), much more will mere words not suffice to correct a slave-like temper in a servant.
Illustrations.—How plainly had the servile spirit of fear taken the place of the filial, loving spirit in our first parents and in Cain, when they endeavored to evade well-merited reproof by offering sullen excuses to their Maker! Job had this addition to the trials which sorely exercised his patience, that his servant, when he called him (one of those abject creatures who fall away in time of adversity), gave him no answer, not even when he entreated him with his mouth (Job 19:16). Jesus warns us that “that servant which knew his Lord’s will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to His will, shall be beaten with many stripes” (Luke 12:47).
Application.—Slavery, or any approach to it, must be repugnant to God’s will, if for this reason only that its usual effect is the destruction of all that is noble and generous in man. In particular, it substitutes for free and loving service a grudging and reluctant service in the spirit of bondage and of fear. Both parents and masters should beware of so straining their authority as to crush the will and forfeit the affection of those under them. They will suffer for it themselves in so great a loss of influence that their words will cease to produce any good impression, and they will rule only by force. What more painful to one who has the feelings of a man than to have to deal with a fellow creature in whom those feelings have become deadened, if not destroyed? You give your orders, but his one aim is to avoid obeying by pretending not to comprehend them. You reason with and would fain win him to a better mind, but he has become too stolid even to wish to amend. It remains only to dismiss him your house, or to employ a sharper discipline than words. The relation of master and servant has been well laid down in the New Testament. The master is to rule as one who knows that his Master also is in heaven, to whom he must render an account. The servant must serve as the servant of Christ become “the Lord’s free man” (Eph. 6:6, 9; 1 Cor. 7:22). Then, as there will be no oppression on the one hand, neither will there be on the other that proud, dogged, resentful silence, which is even more offensive and hard to deal with than pert answering again.
Pearson, C. R. (1881). Counsels of the Wise King; or, Proverbs of Solomon Applied to Daily Life (Vol. 2, p. 169). W. Skeffington & Son. (Public Domain)
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