The Power of an Adjective
The poor man and the oppressor meet together; the LORD gives light to the eyes of both. -Proverbs 29:13
Adjectives and adverbs are powerful things. Watch this.
“Because the obese man couldn’t even get off his couch, he remained unemployed.”
What are you picturing here? Is it a guy that is gluttonous and lazy? As a society we tend to associate a word like “obese” with being lazy, unkempt, and unwilling to work. Most people carry around the bias that if you are obese, it is almost entirely your fault. By adding that one little adjective you’ve lost sympathy for our dude stuck to his couch. Now, look what happens if I drop the adjective and insert an adverb at just the right spot.
“Because the man couldn’t even get off his couch, sadly he remained unemployed.
You might be asking a few questions here about this guy. Why can’t he get off his couch? Is it laziness? But more than likely you’re mind goes to a helpless chap. He’s been injured or inflicted with some physical malady. When I add the word “sadly”, unless you’re a real heartless fellow, you fill in the blanks and figure he’d have a job if he could.
Adjective and adverbs are powerful things. They make a judgment and shape a story. By two little words I was able to turn a helpless guy needing our help into a seemingly worthless fellow who is bearing the consequence of his own actions.
It’s much easier to make people into monsters and heroes. Think of all the adjectives we use to describe those who are politically and ideologically on the other side of our debates. We keep a litany of these adjectives in our pockets, quickly accessible. At the blink of an eye, we can pull out some of our favorites and attach them to a person. What happens in your opinion when “Carl” becomes Crooked Carl and “Larry” becomes Lying Larry?
Our propensity to label, minimize, and turn people into monsters and villains is not new. I think Proverbs 29:13 points to this very tendency. Here we have “the poor man” and “the oppressor”. We don’t know why the guy is poor—but that he is juxtaposed with an “oppressor” evokes sympathy within us. But it could just as easily be translated “Creditor” and “Debtor”. That would give us a bit more room for imagination.
Is the debtor an irresponsible fool who keeps borrowing money that he cannot repay? Does he need to take a money management course and stop purchasing things until he has cash to fund it? Is he a debtor because of his own laziness? Or is he in such a pickle because of a twisted economy that keeps him under thumb? That happens too. He might have been born into poverty and the “system” keeps taking advantage of him. Your “Dave Ramsey course” isn’t going to work in corrupt Zimbabwe. (Notice my adjective there).
We might tell different stories of the creditor too. Is he an oppressor that increases his wealth upon the backs of the poor? Does he find vulnerable people and charge them exorbitant interest rates—always keeping them under his tyrannical rule? Or is he a good guy who uses his wealth to assist people who are strapped economically? Lending a guy a bag of seed to get his crops out and then expecting pay back when the crops come isn’t treacherous.
This uncertainty might help us get a little closer to the original intention in these proverbs. Because we tend to shape our stories based upon where we find ourselves. The poor man might be tempted to consider every lender to be an oppressor. He has money, you don’t. He was born with an advantage, you weren’t. Those cold realities can, as we’ve noted, lead to turning someone into a villain. It’s easier that way. You don’t have to deal with gray areas. You don’t have to deal with his hard work that accompanied the silver spoon in his mouth. It’s easier to make him a fat-cat banker.
The same is true for those who are on the higher end of the social spectrum. It’s easier to label “the poor” as lazy and in that situation because of their own fault. We can even throw out a few adjectives like drug-addled and really help ourselves out. It’s much easier than dealing with why someone has given up and is attempting to drown out their despair with a narcotic. Those are hard questions. It’s much easier to make them a villain.
This is all why this Proverb is so beautiful. The poor man and the oppressor—regardless of what kind of monsters we’ve made them—have one thing in common. The playing field is now leveled. Maybe they are both monsters. But the LORD gives light to the eyes of both. That’s another way of saying that God has created them, God sustains them, and God is the one who gives them life.
Now we could do some villainous things to a text like this. We could say that God is the reason why someone is in the position of wealthy and another is in the position of being poor. And you might have some other proverbs to back you up on this. And we can, especially if we are on the better part of the equation, pat ourselves on the back that our blessed status comes from the hand of the Almighty. I suppose that’s another way you can use adjectives—this time to platform yourself instead of cutting the legs off your enemy.
The text itself isn’t intended to lead us to such a conclusion. Rather it’s meant to inform a king—and maybe anyone who picks up this text afterwards—how we ought to consider others. And it’s not as monsters and villains. We are to consider them, and ourselves, as those created in the image of God.
Here we get to use some beautiful adjectives like “created” or “God-reflecting”. Those are adjectives that have power too, if we’ll use them.