a King for God

Proverbs 31:6 Give strong drink to the one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress

This verse in context holds much greater meaning then if it were to be pulled and thrown at someone. Honestly this verse alone could very easily be misrepresented. A little background, we know that King Lemuel is actually what some say a “poetic” name for King Solomon. The Solomon we see all throughout scripture, the son of King David. So Solomon would have first herd this proverb from his mother Bathsheba. I wonder why they would use the name Lemuel in this verse instead of Solomon. As we know, names in the bible hold a greater meaning then face value, God is constantly changing the names of characters in the bible, usually holding different meanings. The name Lemuel actually means “for God”, therefore we could read verse one as “The words of a King for God. An oracle that his mother taught him.” These words were spoken to Solomon in his earlier years, he had not yet walked out his life as a King and experienced all that the Lord would bring him through. But with this in mind, knowing that Solomon would become the wisest man on earth, the Lord used his mother to speak into his life. If we fast forward to the later years in his life, we see he treasured this teaching for what it was, “The words of a King for God”.  I also think of the words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes 2:11 “Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after the wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.” If we look at the life of Solomon even in the previous verses of chapter 2 we see that he drank, and drank in excess. But in his striving after a meaning to life, he realizes outside of God, there is nothing that can fill that God shaped void. After looking at Solomon’s life, the validity of what his mother is telling him in these verse takes on all the more meaning to me. He understood that the wisdom of a mother was to be treated with a reverential fear. How do I know this, he says it with confidence in Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” The life of Solomon is one that no other man has or will ever live to the fullness he lived it. Everything he did he did it greater than anyone will ever be able to do. So taking all this into consideration I would encourage you to take the gems proverbs has to offer.

Application:
I will commit to going daily through the proverbs for the next month, reading the chapter that correlates with the days date.