The Architecture of a Godly Society
Introduction: A Culture at War with Time
We live in a culture that has declared war on the created order, and one of the front lines in that war is the battle against time itself. Our modern world is obsessed with the cult of youth. We have creams and surgeries to erase the honorable lines of age from our faces, we have retirement homes to hide the elderly away from public life, and we have a pervasive entertainment industry that tells us the only life worth living is the one lived between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Young men are told to extend their adolescence indefinitely, and old men are told to feel ashamed of their own frailty.
Into this frantic, foolish denial of reality, the Word of God speaks with a calm and settled authority. The book of Proverbs is intensely practical, giving us the divine blueprint for a sane and stable society. And in our text today, we find a foundational principle for that society, a principle of mutual honor and complementary glory that our world has long since forgotten. God has designed the stages of a man's life to work together, like stones in an archway. To despise one stage is to weaken the entire structure.
The world wants to pit the generations against one another. It wants the young to resent the old for their authority and the old to despise the young for their energy. This is the classic revolutionary tactic: divide and conquer. But the wisdom of God builds; it does not demolish. It shows us that the strength of the young man and the wisdom of the old man are not competing glories, but rather two essential pillars that uphold a righteous community. To understand this proverb is to understand something essential about godly masculinity and the architecture of a flourishing Christian civilization.
The Text
The honor of young men is their strength,
And the majesty of old men is their gray hair.
(Proverbs 20:29 LSB)
The Glory of Green Wood (v. 29a)
The first clause lays down the glory assigned to the first stage of manhood:
"The honor of young men is their strength." (Proverbs 20:29a)
The word for honor here can also be translated as glory or beauty. This is not a reluctant concession. God is not saying, "Well, young men don't have much wisdom, so I suppose we can praise their muscles." No, their strength is their divinely appointed glory. This is a direct affront to the effeminate sensibilities of our age, which often views masculine strength as inherently toxic or dangerous. The Bible says it is an honor.
This strength is not just about the ability to lift heavy things, though it certainly includes that. It is the raw, kinetic energy of youth. It is the capacity for hard work, for risk, for building, for fighting. It is the engine of civilization. Young men are the ones who are meant to break new ground, fight the battles, and lay the foundations. When God wants to overthrow a wicked one, He says to the young men, "I have written to you, young men, because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you, and you have overcome the wicked one" (1 John 2:14). Strength, sanctified by the Word, is a holy weapon.
But this glory comes with a profound responsibility. Strength without direction is just vandalism. A river that stays within its banks can generate power for a whole city; a river that floods is a catastrophe. The glory of a young man's strength is only truly glorious when it is channeled, disciplined, and submitted to the wisdom of his elders and the law of his God. A young man's strength must be put on the altar. It must be strength for something, for someone. It is strength to protect the weak, to provide for a family, to build the church, and to defend the faith.
Our culture offers two satanic perversions of this glory. The first is purposeless strength: the man who spends all his energy in the gym building a body that does nothing but admire itself in the mirror. This is vanity. The second is rebellious strength: the man who uses his power to tear down, to dominate, to serve his own appetites. This is tyranny. The biblical vision is of covenanted strength, strength laid at the feet of Christ for the good of His people.
The Majesty of Seasoned Timber (v. 29b)
The second clause gives us the corresponding glory of the latter stage of manhood.
"And the majesty of old men is their gray hair." (Proverbs 20:29b LSB)
Just as strength is the honor of the young, gray hair is the majesty, the splendor, of the old. The gray head is a crown. But notice, it is not the gray hair in itself that is glorious. Another proverb qualifies this for us: "Gray hair is a crown of glory; it is gained in a righteous life" (Proverbs 16:31). The gray hair is the outward sign of an inward reality. It represents a life lived, battles fought, lessons learned, and sins repented of. It is the visible emblem of wisdom.
An old man cannot compete with a young man in the realm of strength. If he tries, he becomes a fool, a pathetic figure. But a young man cannot compete with a godly old man in the realm of wisdom. The old man has the advantage of perspective. He has seen the seasons of life come and go. He has seen the long-term consequences of both foolishness and righteousness. He has learned that the shortcuts are usually the longest way around. He is the seasoned timber, hard and dense, that can bear the weight of leadership.
This is why the Scriptures command such deep respect for the aged. "You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord" (Leviticus 19:32). Notice the connection: honoring the old is linked directly to fearing God. Why? Because to despise the wisdom that God grants through a long, righteous life is to despise God's own ordained method of instruction. The old men are to be the repositories of a people's history, their theology, and their practical wisdom. They are the living libraries of the community.
Of course, this too can be perverted. An old man who has not learned from his mistakes, who is bitter, foolish, and set in his sinful ways, is a tragedy. His gray hairs are not a crown, but a monument to wasted time. As Ecclesiastes says, "Better was a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice" (Ecclesiastes 4:13). The majesty of old age is not automatic; it must be earned through a life of walking with God.
The Symbiotic Relationship
The genius of this proverb lies in its parallelism. It sets these two glories side-by-side not as rivals, but as allies. A healthy church, a healthy family, a healthy society requires both. They are designed by God to be in a symbiotic relationship.
The young men provide the energy, the power, the "get it done." The old men provide the wisdom, the direction, the "here's how we should do it." Strength without wisdom is a runaway train. Wisdom without strength is a detailed blueprint with no construction crew. The young men need the old men to keep them from charging headlong into disaster. The old men need the young men to carry out the vision that their frail bodies can no longer execute.
King Rehoboam's folly is the classic illustration of this principle ignored. When he took the throne, he was faced with a decision. The old men, who had served his father Solomon, gave him wise, temperate counsel. But Rehoboam rejected it. He turned instead to the young men he had grown up with, and they gave him arrogant, testosterone-fueled advice. "My little finger is thicker than my father's waist," he was to say. The result? The kingdom split in two (1 Kings 12). When the young men refuse to listen to the old men, the kingdom always splits.
We see this dysfunction all around us. We have churches run entirely by the sensibilities of the youth, chasing every new fad and abandoning all doctrinal stability. And we have churches run entirely by crusty old men who refuse to let the young men lead, dooming the church to die out with their generation. The biblical pattern is one of mentorship and succession. The older men teach and empower the younger men. Paul tells Titus that the older men are to be "sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness," and they are to teach the younger men (Titus 2:2-6). This is how the faith is passed on. The energy of youth is harnessed by the wisdom of age, and the church moves forward from strength to strength.
Conclusion: Building the Arch
This proverb is not just a nice observation about life. It is a command. It commands the young man to honor his God-given strength by using it for righteous purposes and by submitting it to the counsel of his elders. It commands the old man to honor his God-given station by cultivating wisdom, living righteously, and patiently mentoring the next generation.
And it commands us, as a community, to honor both. We must make room for the young men to work, to lead, to take risks, and even to fail. We must stop treating them like perpetual adolescents. We must call them to the glorious, strength-demanding tasks of dominion. At the same time, we must cultivate a culture of deep respect for our elders. We must seek out their counsel, listen to their stories, and care for them in their frailty.
When these two glories are recognized and honored, they fit together perfectly. The strength of the young man is the upward thrust of the arch, full of power and potential. The wisdom of the old man is the keystone, locking everything into place, giving it stability and permanence. A society that has both is strong and beautiful, able to withstand the pressures of the world and to stand for generations as a testament to the wisdom of its Architect.
Let the young men therefore rejoice in their strength, and offer it to God. And let the old men rejoice in their gray hair, for it is a crown of glory found in the way of righteousness. And let us all rejoice in the God who has so wisely ordered our lives for His glory and for our good.