“My son, fear the Lord and the king, and do not join with those who do otherwise.” (Proverbs 24:21)
For the past few years I have enjoyed the writing of Theodore Dalrymple, a British psychiatrist, cultural commentator and gadfly! I am currently reading his Romancing Opiates: Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy. I won’t get into the premise of the book (though its pretty well contained in the subtitle), but in Romancing Opiates there is great illustration of the Biblical/Proverbial truth:
“Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools will suffer harm.” Proverbs 13:20
Speaking of a Heroin addict’s explanation of his condition as a matter of falling in with the wrong crowd, Dalrymple says this, “it is odd how I meet people who fell in with the wrong crowd, but I never under any circumstances meet any member of the wrong crowd itself…”.
Now on the surface this seems to suggest that Solomon didn’t get it quite right, at least according to Dalrymple. Is there a wrong or bad crowd that people fall into and are then led to do bad things? Sure, but there is something simpler in view here in the proverb that I think Dalrymple touches on. It is wisdom to walk with the wise, it is foolish to walk with a fool. In other words the choice of companions itself is an indication of where the chooser is in his or her thinking. Dalrymple puts it this way,
A man who says that he is easily led (a second order excuse of those who fell in with the wrong crowd) never uses this characteristic to explain his good deeds, good characteristics, or positive achievements. A man never claims to have been easily led to higher mathematics, the subjunctives of foreign languages, or unpaid work among the poor. People are influenced by the people they admire and wish to emulate: the admiration and the desire for emulation precede the influence.
A fool walks with fools and becomes even more foolish. It is a downward spiral. And we should say as well that it is certainly wise to choose companions who are wise and in so doing you will become wiser still.
A special note to our youth group:
The point of all this is simple. Be careful and prayerful in choosing companions. Your choices in friendship give you a clue not only about where you are headed, but where you might already be. And in keep in mind that companions are not just your flesh and blood friends, but your ipod, your Facebook and…well you get the point.
I am praying for you, especially as you begin a new school year, that God would bless you with friends that point you to Christ and that you would be that kind of friend too.
