Too Much of a Good Thing – Proverbs 25:16-17

In Perelandra, C. S. Lewis’ wonderful tale of an Eden-like world where Ransom, his main character, finds he must prevent another “fall” like Adam and Eve’s, Lewis describes Ransom’s first experience of Perelandrian food: 

Now he had come to a part of the wood where great globes of yellow fruit hung from trees…the rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open.  Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and…after a moment’s hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips…It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures…For one draught of this on Earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed…it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty.  And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do…Yet something seemed opposed to this ‘reason’…for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again.  Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity.

If you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it.  Let your foot be seldom in your neighbor’s house, lest he have his fill of you and hate you. (Proverbs 25:16–17, ESV)

We have a proverb of our own, “It is possible to have too much of a good thing.”  That is the wisdom reflected in these two proverbs.

We are given to greediness.  We find something good and we want to indulge it and not let it go until we make ourselves sick with it, whether it be money, food, relationships or power.  This greed is born from our fear that it is up to us to take care of ourselves and protect our future, when it fact real freedom and protection comes from trusting God to take care of us.  But we don’t trust Him, so we keep shoveling it in.  And it hurts us.

The relational aspect of this is filled out in the second proverb.  Setting our foot in our neighbor’s home too often is an aspect of our relational greed.  We want to be with them for the security that brings.  In this case, however, the warning is not how that will make us sick, though it certainly does (think co-dependency, enmeshment, etc.), but how it will make our neighbor sick.  Our greediness with them will lead to their hatred of us.  If they are healthy at all it will lead to their desiring to separate from us.

We don’t need such clinging to things or others to make it in life.  We need the Lord.  Will we trust Him?