"The fury of a king is like messengers of death,
but a wise man will appease it."
The wise person drills into the anger of the leader and brings peace. Sometimes even the leader has not clearly thought through their expectations, but they know what they wanted to happen did not happen and that is why they are angry. The question of this proverb is what do you do when your authority is really angry? Do you have the skills to defuse the situation or are you just helpless in the face of unmet expectations?
This is so obvious in our day and age. It can be revealed by the questions: What are you reading? What are you watching? We have a whole society who consumes the trash in the magazines and tabloids as though it were true or significant. We are as a society feeding on folly. Celebrities in the midst of their pretentious selfishness make declarations and act immorally and our society cannot get enough of it. But we do not have the same interest in real information: learning, spiritual development, marital harmony, family cohesion.
If you feast on the tabloids, the entertainment news shows, and the celebrity rags, you will be living out the truth of this verse and will be yourself moving in the direction of folly and fools. Do not spend your one life following selfish people. Instead, give yourself for an eternal reward to follow hard after the God who has already loved you by sending His Son to pay for your sins.
The word translated intelligent is the word bin which is the common word for understanding. It is a quality which accompanies wisdom and is needed to make sense of life. The mind of the person who wants to understand why things happen to themselves and others wants facts and information.
The word knowledge is the word daat which means information, data, skills. The person of understanding will not base their life or decisions upon that which has no solid basis in reality. There must be real facts to support what they do.
Solomon is trying to get us to give up chasing and consuming the rumors that swirl within every society. These rumors are the nonsense stories about what selfish rich and famous people do. Who cares? Don't get sucked into it.
Instead, realize that at any point in our lives there are situations, decisions, and difficulties that we need to seek out real information about. Become a person of understanding by going after facts and information that surround your situations and your decisions. Do not give much time to hearing about the lifestyle of the rich and famous except to remember that the love of money is the root of all sorts of trouble, and he who would go after it will pierce themselves with many a pang.
Be a person who seeks for knowledge not the latest rumors about who is getting together, who is splitting up, who is popular and who is not.
Until tomorrow,
Gil Stieglitz