Proverbs 4:24 Commentary and Bible Study

‘A froward mouth’ – the Hebrew here literally is this, a distorted mouth. The Hebrew word is something which is like a twisted tree, gnarled and distorted, and all over the place, whereas the second word, perverse, simply means bent. So, it is not the same, distorted, and bent. And the two ideas are these, that in speech on the one hand, sometimes we get things entirely out of proportion, and we have a twisted-up view of things. It is distorted, it is unreal, and we have somehow got ourselves into this. By our complaining or our self-justification, we have talked ourselves into a twisted distorted, unreal view of things. On the other hand, a bent view of things, as the word is used in the Hebrew Old Testament, speaks of deliberate deceit. We are twisted in the sense that we deliberately lie.Now this is in the context of the son when he runs the farm. Here is a typical human failing. We are inadequate for something maybe, we are not up to it, and therefore it gets on top of us, and we begin to moan and complain, and whenever anything goes wrong we explain it as being his fault and her fault. We so justify ourselves and defend ourselves that in our moans and complaints and explanations we do not consider our own inadequacy, our own need to do better. We begin to take a distorted view of everything. We take the most gloomy, negative view, and that demoralises everybody, in the family, on the farm. Nobody wants to work for us, nobody believes us, nobody takes us seriously. On the other hand, we may get into dishonest ways, and half-truths, and then of course the farm will fail. What a mess the son will make of it because he is a person of either distorted speech, or dishonest speech; nobody knows where they stand with him.