Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh:
For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.
Gluttonous people generally attract other gluttonous people. They attend the same churches, play in the same bingo games, go to the same gambling halls, and live together in the same homes. People are communal, and they tend to rub off on one other. Just as alcoholic parents often produce children who have problems with alcohol, families who have trouble with gluttony will produce more children who have trouble with gluttony. While there may be households that are given to wine and overeating, thank God there are also repenting households! When a family comes to Christ, they will begin to purge the sins that once dominated their lives. They will gather to read God’s Word, worship Him together, and bury their gods as Jacob did before his family worshiped God at Bethel.
If you were to study the correlation between income level and obesity in this country, you would find a significant proportion of obese persons belonging to the welfare class. The same thing can be said about those addicted to alcohol. There may be a few rich people who are burning through their wealth as they drink themselves to death, but men and women who live to eat and drink alcohol have given up on work. They may work some, but it is only to earn a little money to stuff more food in their mouths. How sad that people live for physical sensations on the tongue or in the digestive tract! Because these people are more interested in eating than working, they will eventually produce a terrible drag on the economy. Family economies will die first, and then the welfare economies will collapse too.
There are, however, two contributing sources to the problem of poverty which we see identified in this particular proverb. First, there is the problem of over-infatuation with comfort food and drink. But verse 21 also states that “drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.” Undoubtedly, this must refer to a love of physical sleep, the activity that turns a man into a limp rag who is hardly motivated to do anything. The reason that twenty-five to thirty-year-old young men are the only demographic making less money than they did thirty years ago is that they have lost their motivation and focus. They are out of touch with reality. They have become very, very drowsy. Their lives are made up of popular movies, music, and Internet games, and their true identities are increasingly confused with their online virtual personalities. This presses them into a dream-like state, a pretend world. This phenomenon is repeated in places like Europe, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and China. In a hundred years, billions of people will better understand the force of this truth: drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.
It is better that a person would sooner live to work than to eat, sleep, or dull their senses by living in pseudo-realities. But Christians do not live to work, and they certainly do not live to eat or to waste time. Neither do they work to eat, in the basic sense. They live, work, and eat all to the glory of God!
1. What happens to families in which fathers give way to gluttony or drunkenness? What happens to families in which fathers repent of their sins of gluttony or drunkenness?
2. What are two contributing sources to the problem of poverty?