Proverbs 4:22 Commentary and Bible Study

This is still the farm illustration strictly speaking. These words are life-giving instructions from the father to the son on how to run everything. They are life and health also. The father would teach the son no end of things that only needed to come into play when there was trouble. If you are anything of a gardener, you have doubtless seen some of these books that tell you all the different diseases, and blights and problems, the endless little pictures showing the different kinds of insects, and so on. What a lot there is to remember, if you are going to be at all proficient at it. But you can imagine in those days that the children had to learn all these things. Once in every five, six, seven years, there may be a particular kind of blight, or pest, or problem, and they had to know what to do, how to handle each one, how to recognise each one, or they would be wiped out. The environment was not pest-free in those days. And so a lot of instruction was passed from father to son, and then suddenly it was required. So the father would say to the son, you may think a lot of this is not relevant, you may think we have never seen this particular problem since I have been alive, that we have never had so many droughts in a row, and the need to setup certain types of irrigation, and plant a particular type of crop, which gets on better in those conditions. We have never had to do any of these things. These words are not only life and sustenance, they are health as well. These words alone will enable the rising generation to cope with all the different problems.