Commentary - Proverbs 16:26

Bird's-eye view

This proverb gets right down to the engine room of human motivation. Solomon, in his God-given wisdom, is laying out a foundational principle of what makes the world tick. A man works because he needs to eat. It is as simple and as profound as that. This is not a lament, but rather a statement of how God has wisely ordered the world. Our creaturely desires, the most basic of which is the desire for food, are not a design flaw. They are a feature. They are the blinking fuel gauge that God installed to get us up and moving. This proverb is a cornerstone for a biblical understanding of economics, work, and the right way to understand our own desires.

The text dismantles the gnostic notion that spiritual things are good and physical things are base or evil. Not at all. Your stomach growling is a gift from God, intended to produce diligence, provision, and ultimately, a thriving society. It is a glorious thing when a man's appetite works for him, and not against him. The sluggard's appetite works against him because his desires are untethered from the labor that would satisfy them (Prov. 21:25). But for the diligent man, his own hunger is his best foreman, his most persistent project manager. This is a celebration of the created order.

Outline

Context In Proverbs

Proverbs 16 is a chapter dense with observations about God's sovereignty and human responsibility. We have verses on the Lord establishing a man's steps (v. 9), the Lord weighing the spirits (v. 2), and the Lord determining the outcome of the lot (v. 33). In the middle of all this high theology, we get this earthy, grounded, practical observation about a man's grumbling stomach. This is not a disconnect. Rather, it shows that God's sovereignty extends to all things, including the mundane realities of breakfast, lunch, and dinner. His grand purposes are worked out through the most basic of means.

This verse is part of a collection of Solomon's proverbs that contrast the wise with the foolish, the diligent with the lazy. It fits hand-in-glove with other passages that extol the virtues of hard work (Prov. 14:23) and warn against the ruin that comes from sloth. The principle here is that God has hardwired reality in such a way that diligence is rewarded and laziness is punished, and He uses our own bodies to teach us this lesson daily.

Key Issues

A Worker’s appetite works for him

Let's take this clause by clause. First, "A worker's appetite works for him." The word for appetite here is nephesh, which is often translated as soul or life. This is significant. We are not talking about some low-level animal instinct that we should be ashamed of. We are talking about the animating principle of a man's life, his very soul. His soul labors for him. What you want, what you desire, what you long for, is meant to be a powerful engine for good.

The problem is not that we have desires. The problem is sin, which corrupts our desires. One of the great blunders Christians can make, particularly in the realm of economics, is to confuse God-given self-interest with fallen selfishness. They are not at all the same thing. It is in your self-interest to eat when you are hungry, to come in out of the rain, to provide for your family. This is good and right. Selfishness is when you pursue those things sinfully, demanding that others provide them for you, or pursuing them at the unjust expense of your neighbor. But the desire itself, the appetite, is a created good. It "works for him." It is an ally, not an enemy.

For his mouth urges him on

The second clause gives the reason: "For his mouth urges him on." The King James says his mouth "craveth it of him." The Hebrew pictures the mouth compelling him, pressing him into service. Your own body makes demands of you. This is the way God designed the system. Before the Fall, Adam was put in the Garden to work it and keep it (Gen. 2:15). Work is not a result of the curse. Toilsome, sweaty, thistle-producing work is the result of the curse (Gen. 3:17-19), but work itself is part of our created purpose.

And God built in the motivation. He did not just give the command to work; He gave the appetite that makes the work desirable. This is a gracious provision. He doesn't just crack the whip. He sets a feast at the end of the day and gives us the hunger for it. This is why Paul can say with such blunt force, "If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat" (2 Thess. 3:10). Paul is not being cruel; he is simply reapplying the fundamental creation principle that Solomon lays out here. To sever the connection between work and eating is to sabotage God's good design. It is to keep a man's appetite from doing the good work it was designed to do for him.

So the Christian is not someone who tries to extinguish his desires. He is someone who, by the grace of God, brings his desires into submission to Christ and allows them to fuel righteous labor for the glory of God and the good of his neighbor. We are to hunger and thirst for righteousness (Matt. 5:6), and we are also to labor for the food that perishes, doing it all in the name of the Lord Jesus.

Key Words

Nephesh, "Appetite" or "Soul"

The Hebrew word nephesh is a rich one. While it can mean "appetite" as it does here, its core meaning is "soul" or "life." It refers to the whole person, the seat of desires, will, and emotions. Using nephesh here tells us that the drive to work is not some detached, mechanical function. It comes from the very core of who we are as living beings. God made us as desiring creatures, and this is a central aspect of our souls. Our souls labor for us by means of these desires.

Context: Self-Interest vs. Selfishness

It is crucial to get this distinction right, because whole economic and political systems are built on getting it wrong. The Bible's endorsement of self-interest is not an endorsement of greed. Self-interest says, "I must work to feed my family." Selfishness says, "I will take from your family to feed mine." The proverb before us commends the former as the engine of a productive society.

Socialistic and utopian schemes fail because they declare war on this basic, God-ordained reality. They try to motivate men with appeals to "the common good" while denying them the personal stake in their labor. But God has designed the world such that the common good is best served when individual men work diligently to serve their own households. When a man's appetite works for him, he builds, he plants, he creates, and the overflow blesses the entire community. Confounding this with selfishness is a profound theological error with devastating practical consequences.

Application

First, we must thank God for our appetites. Thank God that you get hungry. It is a sign that His created order is still operating in you. Do not despise these basic drives; see them as the motivators God intended them to be. When your stomach growls, it is a call to diligence, a reminder to be about your work.

Second, teach this to your children. A society that gives people things without requiring work is a society that is actively destroying them. It is robbing them of the dignity and the satisfaction that comes from labor. We must not sever the divinely-established link between effort and reward. Let a young man's desire for a car be the thing that "urges him on" to get a job.

Finally, let this physical reality point to a spiritual one. If a physical hunger is such a powerful motivator for physical labor, how much more should our spiritual hunger drive us to the things of God? We are to "labor for the food that endures to eternal life" (John 6:27). We should have an appetite for the Word of God, a hunger for righteousness, a desire for fellowship with the saints. And we should allow that holy appetite to work for us, urging us on in the work of the kingdom until the day we sit down at the marriage supper of the Lamb, our hunger satisfied in Him forever.