The sluggard says,
"There is a Lion Outside!I shall be slain in the streets!"
This is not what I expected the proverbs to say. I would have expected it to say "The coward says, 'There is a lion outside! I shall be slain in the streets!'" But it says, "sluggard", not "coward." So the controlling emotion here is laziness, not fear. But what does laziness have to do with the danger of a lion in the street? What is the point of the proverb?
The point is that the sluggard creates imaginary circumstances to justify not doing his work and thus shifts the focus from the voice of his laziness to the danger of lions. No one will approve his staying in the house all day just because he is lazy.
But they might sympathize with him and approve his staying home if there were real danger outside. So, to hide his laziness and justify himself, he deflects attention away from the truth (laziness) to an illusion (lions).
If we would be side people - people on the way to being "sages" - we must understand how our sinful human hearts and minds work. One profound Biblical insight we need to embrace is that our heart exploits our mind to justify what the heart wants. That is, our deepest desires precede the rational functioning of our minds and incline the mind to perceive and think in a way that will make the desires look right. It is an illusion to hink that our hearts are neutral and incline in accordance with cool, rational observation of truth. On the contrary, we feel powerful desires or fears in our hearts, andthen our minds bend reality to justify the desires and fears.
This is what the sluggard is doing. He deeply desires to stay at home and not work. There is no good reason to stay at home. So what does he do? Does he overcome his bad desire? No, his lazy heart exploits his mind to create unreal circumstances to justify his desire. He may even believe the creation of his mind. Deception can cross from moral depravity to mental derangement - from deceiving others to deceiving ourselves. ...
Thus Proverbs 26.16 says, "The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can give a discreet answer." Now why is that? Does laziness make people haughty? Not necessarily. But it does make them resistant to any truth that exposes their laziness. So when seven men say, "There is no lion in the street," the sluggard cannot concede. He must insist that his own answer is wise: There is a lion in the street. Otherwise his laziness is exposed for what it is. Thus truth is sacrificed on the altar of self-justification.
Its an old tale. From Cain (Genesis 4.9) to American presidents, truth has been sacrificed to desire, and the mind has been shrewdly employed by the darkened heart to shroud its passions. This is the point of Romans 1.18 - "They suppress the truth in unrighteousness." Truth is held hostage by the unrighteous commitments of the heart. The unrighteous heart then employs the mind to distract and deceive. As Jesus says, "Everyone who does evil hates the Light." (John 3.20) Doing the evil we love makes us hostile to the light of truth which will expose the evil and rob us of its fleeting pleasures. In this condition the mind becomes a factory of half-truths, equivocations, sophistries, evasions, and lies - anything to protect the evil desires of the heart from exposure and destruction.
We are all given to this. Our only home is the transforming work of God in our hearts to free us from the bondage of a hardened heart that produces a futile mind. This is Paul's diagnosis of the "futile mind" and the "darkened understanding" - they are rooted in hardness of heart. "Walk no longer as the Gentiles... in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart" (Ephesians 4.17-18). The root cause is a heart cause, not a head cause. The mind is darkened and made futile by rebellion in the heart.
This does not mean that lovers of truth should stop speaking truth and explaining truth and defending truth. But it does mean that we should pray for God to change hearts so that they can see the beauty of truth and love it - even if it begins with: There is no lion in the street and you are lazy. This devine work is what Paul gives thanks for in Romans 6.17, "But thanks be to God that though you were slaves of sin, you became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching to which you were committed." Obedience came from the heart. Thanks be to God. And if thanks be to God, then let prayers be to God. He is our only hope - to escape our own delusions and deliver others.
* Taken from Taste and See Meditations by John Piper
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