This chapter keeps returning to things nobody can actually see — a heart’s counsel, a child’s true work, a false balance’s weight, the LORD’s own candle searching a belly no one else can enter — as if the real business of a life happens somewhere no human eye ever quite reaches.
A study in Proverbs 20 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 16 min read
Wine Is A Mocker
“Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. The fear of a king is as the roaring of a lion: whoso provoketh him to anger sinneth against his own soul.”
Proverbs 20:1-2
“‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: And whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.’… Never was traced by human hand a more vivid picture of the debasement and the slavery of the victim of intoxicating drink. Enthralled, degraded, even when awakened to a sense of his misery, he has no power to break from the snare.”
Ellen G. White · The Ministry of Healing, p. 330
White reads this verse straight into the wine-warning that closes Proverbs 23, treating the two passages as one continuous picture of the same bondage — “is not wise” here, “has no power to break from the snare” there, the mocker’s deception and the drunkard’s slavery named as the same trap at two different stages.
“It is an honour for a man to cease from strife: but every fool will be meddling. The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall he beg in harvest, and have nothing.”
Proverbs 20:3-4
“Every fool will be meddling” is the very half-verse Ellen White already paired with Proverbs 17:27 in her own list of business maxims — restrained speech and restrained strife treated there as the same discipline wearing two different faces.
Counsel In The Heart Of Man Is Like Deep Water
“Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out. Most men will proclaim every one his own goodness: but a faithful man who can find?”
Proverbs 20:5-6
“Will draw it out” assumes real wisdom takes effort to reach even in someone who has it — not a quality lying on the surface for anyone to notice, but something a patient, understanding listener has to work to bring up.
“The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him. A king that sitteth in the throne of judgment scattereth away all evil with his eyes.”
Proverbs 20:7-8
“His children are blessed after him” extends integrity’s reward past the man who actually possessed it — a legacy inherited rather than earned, the second generation blessed for a character that was never, strictly speaking, their own.
“Who can say, I have made my heart clean, I am pure from my sin? Divers weights, and divers measures, both of them are alike abomination to the LORD.”
Proverbs 20:9-10
The question in verse 9 has no comfortable answer built into the text — it stands alone, unresolved, right before a chapter that keeps naming abominations, as if the reader is meant to sit in that silence a moment before moving on.
Divers Weights, And Divers Measures
“Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right. The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, the LORD hath made even both of them.”
Proverbs 20:11-12
“Parents should be models of truthfulness, for this is the daily lesson to be impressed upon the heart of the child. Undeviating principle should govern parents in all the affairs of life, especially in the education and training of their children. ‘Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right.’”
Ellen G. White · Child Guidance, p. 151
White does not read this verse as a comment on the child alone — a mother who prevaricates, she warns, can educate her own children into deceivers, the child’s transparent doings functioning as a kind of report card on the honesty actually modeled at home.
“Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty; open thine eyes, and thou shalt be satisfied with bread. It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer: but when he is gone his way, then he boasteth.”
Proverbs 20:13-14
“It is naught, it is naught” catches a haggling buyer talking down goods he privately values highly — the very repetition betraying the lie, a complaint said twice precisely because the buyer does not believe it himself.
“There is gold, and a multitude of rubies: but the lips of knowledge are a precious jewel.”
Proverbs 20:15
“A multitude of rubies” is deliberately overwhelming abundance, and knowledgeable speech is still weighed as the rarer, more precious jewel — scarcity, not quantity, setting the true price here.
Bread Of Deceit Is Sweet To A Man
“Take his garment that is surety for a stranger: and take a pledge of him for a strange woman. Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel.”
Proverbs 20:16-17
“Filled with gravel” turns a pleasant meal into a mouthful of grit without warning — the sweetness of deceit is granted as real while it lasts, the verse’s whole force landing on how completely, and how suddenly, that taste changes.
“Every purpose is established by counsel: and with good advice make war. He that goeth about as a talebearer revealeth secrets: therefore meddle not with him that flattereth with his lips.”
Proverbs 20:18-19
Ellen White quotes this exact sentence on the very same page as the “every fool will be meddling” half-verse cited earlier in this study — her own list of Proverbs for “the merchant, the artisan, the director of men in any department of business” running two verses from this chapter side by side with two from Proverbs 17.
“Whoso curseth his father or his mother, his lamp shall be put out in obscure darkness. An inheritance may be gotten hastily at the beginning; but the end thereof shall not be blessed.”
Proverbs 20:20-21
“Obscure darkness” makes the punishment fit the crime with unusual precision — a curse aimed at the very people who gave a man life answered with a lamp, his own source of light, put out completely.
Say Not Thou, I Will Recompense Evil
“Say not thou, I will recompense evil; but wait on the LORD, and he shall save thee.”
Proverbs 20:22
“Mournfully He bids them, ‘Resist not him that is evil: but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ These words were but a reiteration of the teaching of the Old Testament…None were justified in avenging themselves, for they had the words of the Lord: ‘Say not thou, I will recompense evil.’”
Ellen G. White · Thoughts From the Mount of Blessing, p. 70
White places Christ’s Sermon-on-the-Mount counsel not to resist evil directly on top of this verse, insisting the two are not a new command replacing an old one but “a reiteration” — Solomon’s proverb and Jesus’s teaching named as the very same instruction, given centuries apart.
“Divers weights are an abomination unto the LORD; and a false balance is not good. Man’s goings are of the LORD; how can a man then understand his own way?”
Proverbs 20:23-24
The scale-tampering warning of verse 10 returns almost word for word — the third such exact repetition in this book so far, Solomon apparently convinced that this particular sin is common enough, and quiet enough, to need saying twice.
“It is a snare to the man who devoureth that which is holy, and after vows to make enquiry. A wise king scattereth the wicked, and bringeth the wheel over them.”
Proverbs 20:25-26
“After vows to make enquiry” describes a vow made carelessly and only questioned once it is already binding — the snare sprung not by the vowing itself but by the second thoughts that come too late to matter.
The Spirit Of Man Is The Candle Of The LORD
“The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, searching all the inward parts of the belly. Mercy and truth preserve the king: and his throne is upholden by mercy.”
Proverbs 20:27-28
“Searching all the inward parts” makes conscience an interior light no one else can carry for another person — every hidden thing this chapter has already named, from the wicked buyer’s true valuation to the deceitful bread’s aftertaste, exposed here from the inside.
“The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the gray head.”
Proverbs 20:29
The verse gives each age its own honor rather than ranking one above the other — a young man’s strength and an old man’s gray head named as two different kinds of glory, neither one required to envy the other’s season.
“The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil: so do stripes the inward parts of the belly.”
Proverbs 20:30
The chapter’s closing line pictures pain itself as a kind of cleaning agent — a bruise doing work no gentler correction could reach, reaching, like the candle of verse 27, all the way to a place words alone had already failed to search.
