Proverbs 22

Reputation outprices wealth. Given the choice, and life keeps offering it, take the good name over the great riches. A name is the one asset that spends everywhere and cannot be bought back once sold.

Strip away the accounts and the rich and the poor are the same creature: made by the LORD. One fact under every economic difference, and everything Scripture says about human dignity grows out of it.

Prudence has weather eyes. The sensible man sees trouble forming and steps out of its path; the naive walk on into it and pay the toll.

The low posture ends up holding the high goods. Humility joined to the fear of the LORD is the soil where riches, honor, and life tend to grow. The grain of the world, not a wage agreement.

The crooked road is booby-trapped by its own nature. The person who guards his soul solves the problem by route selection: staying far from the road where the traps are laid.

Early formation runs deep and lasts long: the grooves cut in childhood tend to guide the whole road. A strong statement about the power of formation. Not a guarantee with a warranty card, and never issued as an audit of the parents of prodigals.

Money is power, and debt is submission to it. Two statements of observed fact, delivered without a single command, and carrying a lifetime of warning between the lines.

Injustice is seed, and the harvest is sorrow, the footnote reads "trouble," for the sower himself. And the rod he swings has a shelf life: the power behind oppression fails before oppression finishes its plans.

Generosity begins in the eye before it reaches the hand. The generous eye, literally the "good eye," sees need without looking away, and the giving follows: it is his own bread he shares.

Some conflict has a name and an address. Remove the scoffer and the quarrels leave with him; they were never free-floating, they were his luggage.

Clean heart, gracious speech, royal friendship: the pattern the sages observed. That combination is what thrones are starving for.

Truth has a bodyguard. The LORD's own eyes keep watch over knowledge, while the words of the faithless, however loud their moment, get overthrown on His schedule.

The sluggard has a lion. Asked why the work is not done, he produces a predator in the streets, absurd enough to excuse everything and check nothing.

Seduction is a pit dug with words, and the fall is pictured with terrible seriousness: it belongs to a man already far from the LORD, moving under displeasure his own drift invited.

Children do not arrive wise: folly comes factory-installed, and loving correction is the tool that loosens the knot. A prescription for real formation, not a license for rage.

Two money strategies that look opposite and end identically: squeezing the poor to grow rich, and lavishing gifts on the rich to buy favor. Both bet against the grain of God's world.

Do not move the old boundary stone. In a world where a stone in a field was the land deed, relocating it was theft in slow motion, usually from a neighbor too weak to stop it.

Excellence gets noticed upward. The man who excels in his work, the footnote reads "is prompt in his business," skilled and diligent both, ends up standing before kings rather than laboring unseen.