Proverbs 7:22 Commentary and Bible Study

Solomon here has one picture within another, or one on top of another. Here is a bullock being driven to market to be slaughtered. If the steer or the sheep in the field knew that the farmer coming towards it was about to load it onto a lorry to drive it to the slaughterhouse, surely it would run wildly in the other direction. The farmer would probably have great difficulty trying to catch it if it really wanted to escape. But as it is, it goes quite easily into the corner of the field where it is guided by him, and once it is there he has little difficulty guiding it down a narrow race and up onto the lorry. It has left it too late to get away. It is the thoughtless steps of the animal that are presented here. In days of old the animal would have been walked to market across the fields or down the lanes. Why should this journey be any different to any other journey? the bullock asks itself, as it wanders along grazing by the way? Ah, but it does not know what is in the mind of the farmer. So the young man goes on not realising how skilfully Satan herds him towards his lusts. It is a fearful picture of ignorance.The last picture here seems to be of a young person who has vandalised and stolen, and now they have caught him, they have found him guilty and have sentenced him to the stocks. The villagers are going to throw things at him. But as he goes to the stocks, being a fool, he thinks this is a great accomplishment and he grins at everybody and skips along and bows and so on. He thinks he is notorious. This has somehow made people respect him and he just does not see that he is being taken to humiliation, being locked in the stocks where people will treat him as an object of shame. And the village will gladly do so. He is such a pest, he is such a nuisance, that they hope that somehow they will humiliate him and he will not want to go through that again. That kind of thing was done in olden times. But he cannot see it, he thinks he has triumphed.