There is a great deal of discussion about if leaders care about us. As I discussed in another post, the God given role of government is to be a wrath against wrong, not to provide for us. We have a corrupt view of the purpose of government when we try to make it our care giver. Not only that, the wisdom of Solomon (which God had uniquely gifted him) lead him to warn against trusting generous rulers.
When you sit down to eat with a ruler,
Proverbs 23:1-3
observe carefully what is before you,
and put a knife to your throat
if you are given to appetite.
Do not desire his delicacies,
for they are deceptive food.
Consider the Source
First, we need to realize that a king wrote this. Solomon wasn’t some anti-establishment rebel with a conviction that rulers were an unnecessary evil and therefore never to be trusted. Yet he still doesn’t qualify “ruler” with words like wicked, as though there is only a certain type of ruler with whom you should be suspicious of and others from whom you can freely take gifts.
The warning is blanket. If a ruler in this world is seeming to be lavishing us, we should automatically be cautious. It doesn’t matter what their track record is or how friendly their speeches may make them sound. If it were Solomon himself offering to wine and dine you, he still advises you to control your appetites.
Appeal to the Flesh
While food is clearly the imagery used here, this applies to much more than your belly. If you’re sitting down with a ruler of any kind and they are offering you special privileges, wealth, etc… you are to keep a proverbial knife to your own throat. You are to take yourself captive so as to be in absolute self-control.
In the text, the gifts they’re offering are called “deceptive” because, while wealthy leaders can still be genuinely generous, if they’re appealing to you at all with the gift than it’s not a charity.
Ramifications of Surrender
Rulers have, throughout all of history, repeatedly used the offer of riches, opportunity, etc… to solicit support from those whom they believe will, in turn, serve them. It is one of the oldest tricks in the book to use the base desires of mankind against them to get them to sign away their own reason to support even the most wicked of rulers.
While we tend to think of bribery in terms of a person offering something to someone with more authority to get away with something, the opposite relationship can also occur. A ruler may be offering bribes to everyday people or those in the same position as themselves to earn support they haven’t earned honestly.
In fact, bribery from rulers is almost certainly more common because they have the means to offer more to people than the average citizen has to offer a ruler. Offer a king a piece of gold to pardon a crime and he would be insulted. A king offering a citizen a piece of gold to commit a crime and there would be plenty of subjects willing to take them up on it.
All sorts of wicked things have been done by those with authority who got there by dishonest means.
Don’t Be Bought
How do we apply this to everyday life? Most of us will never find ourselves being invited to dinner with a world leader. We won’t be having tea with the Queen of England any time soon! However, leaders offer all sorts of dishonest opportunities for cheap gain all the time.
How often do people running for an office in our government appeal to our fleshly desires in exchange for our support? Rather than us soberly considering what a candidate’s platform will do to ensure a crime-free and well defended state/nation, we can be intoxicated by dreams of easy riches, less accountability for our actions, or even spiteful payback against our own neighbors.
If we do happen to find ourselves being enticed by a person in authority, we should remember that their motives should be assumed improper by the very fact they are appealing to lower order desires rather than things that are truly important.
