The Boomerang of a Deaf Ear Text: Proverbs 21:13
Introduction: The Divine Echo
The book of Proverbs is intensely practical. It is a divine manual on how the world actually works, not how we might wish it worked in some sentimental daydream. God has built certain principles into the very fabric of the cosmos, and one of those foundational principles is the law of the harvest. What you sow, you reap. What you give, you get. And, as our text for today makes abundantly clear, what you refuse to hear is precisely what you will not be heard saying.
We live in an age that is awash in phony compassion. Our culture loves to signal its virtue concerning the poor and the downtrodden. We have entire governmental departments and vast, soul-crushing bureaucracies dedicated to "helping the poor," which more often than not means keeping them dependent, managed, and miserable. This is the compassion of the scribes and Pharisees, who devour widows' houses and for a pretense make long prayers. It is a noisy, clanging gong of self-congratulation.
But the Bible cuts through all that noise with a sharp, two-edged sword. It is not concerned with your expressed sentiments, your hashtags, or your political loyalties. It is concerned with your ears. Are they open or are they shut? Specifically, are they open to the actual, concrete cry of the poor man in your path? Because according to this proverb, the functionality of your own mouth when you cry out to God is directly connected to the functionality of your ears when the poor cry out to you. God has wired the universe in such a way that our mercy and our prayers are part of the same spiritual circulatory system. If you clamp the artery of mercy to your neighbor, do not be surprised when you find the artery of grace from God clamped in return.
This is a terrifying principle for the smug, and a glorious one for the humble. It establishes a divine echo in the world. The sound you make in your brother's life is the sound that will come back to you from heaven. If you are a sound of mercy, you will hear mercy. If you are a sound of silence, you will be met with a profound and eternal silence.
The Text
He who shuts his ear to the outcry of the poor Will himself also call and not be answered.
(Proverbs 21:13 LSB)
The Deliberate Deafness (Clause 1)
Let us look at the first part of this equation.
"He who shuts his ear to the outcry of the poor..." (Proverbs 21:13a)
The language here is active and deliberate. This is not a man who simply fails to hear. This is a man who "shuts his ear." He hears the cry, but he makes a conscious decision to stop it up. He puts his fingers in his ears. The Hebrew implies a deliberate act of hardening oneself. The poor man is making an "outcry," a shriek for help. This is not a polite suggestion; it is a raw, desperate plea. And the man in this proverb actively decides to ignore it.
Now, we must be biblical here. The book of Proverbs elsewhere makes it very plain that poverty can be the result of laziness, folly, and sin (Proverbs 10:4). We are not commanded to subsidize sloth. True Christian charity is not about creating dependency, but about fostering industry and righteousness. But the Bible is equally clear that poverty can be the result of oppression, misfortune, and injustice. And God takes our treatment of the genuinely needy very, very personally. "Whoever oppresses a poor man insults his Maker, but he who is generous to the needy honors him" (Proverbs 14:31).
The man who shuts his ear is not making a careful, discerning judgment about the cause of the poverty. He is simply shutting his ear to the outcry. He does not want to be bothered. His comfort is more important than his brother's crisis. He is insulating himself from the harsh realities of a fallen world. He is the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, who saw the man bleeding in the ditch and crossed over to the other side. They shut their ears to the man's silent outcry.
This is a profound diagnostic of a heart that is out of fellowship with God. The apostle John puts it this way: "But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God's love abide in him?" (1 John 3:17). John uses the language of a closed heart; Solomon uses the language of a shut ear. The meaning is the same. A lack of practical, tangible compassion is not just a minor character flaw; it is evidence that the love of God is not dwelling in that person. It is a spiritual dead giveaway.
The Divine Retribution (Clause 2)
The second clause of the verse is the inevitable consequence. It is not a threat; it is a simple statement of fact about how God's world operates.
"...Will himself also call and not be answered." (Proverbs 21:13b)
Here is the boomerang. Here is the echo. The man who refused to answer the call for help will find that his own calls for help go unanswered. And the ultimate call for help that any man can make is in prayer to God. This proverb is telling us that there is a direct connection between our horizontal relationships with men and our vertical relationship with God. You cannot be right with God and wrong with your needy brother.
This principle is woven throughout the entire Scripture. The Lord Jesus taught it plainly in the Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy" (Matthew 5:7). The inverse is necessarily true: Cursed are the merciless, for they shall receive no mercy. The apostle James, whose epistle reads like a New Testament commentary on Proverbs, says it with bone-chilling clarity: "For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment" (James 2:13).
Your mercy to others is the litmus test of whether you have truly received God's mercy yourself. If you have been forgiven a debt of ten thousand talents, it is utterly incoherent for you to then go and throttle your brother for a debt of one hundred denarii. The unforgiving servant in Jesus' parable (Matthew 18) cried out for mercy and received it. But because he refused to show mercy, he found himself in a place where his own cries were no longer answered. He was handed over to the torturers. This is what Proverbs is teaching in seed form.
This is not to say that our mercy earns us salvation. We are not saved by our good works. But we are saved unto good works. A faith that does not produce mercy is a dead faith; it is no faith at all. It is the kind of "faith" that says to a cold and hungry brother, "Be warm and filled," but does nothing to help him. It is a useless, demonic faith. And the prayers that come from such a faith are just noise. God shuts His ear to them, just as that man shut his ear to the poor.
Seeing Christ in the Poor
This proverb finds its ultimate fulfillment and its sharpest edge in the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. In Matthew 25, Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats. The dividing line between those who enter eternal life and those who go into eternal punishment is their treatment of "the least of these my brothers."
"'Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.' ... 'Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.'" (Matthew 25:41-43, 45)
Notice the astonishment on both sides. The righteous are surprised to learn they were serving Christ, and the wicked are surprised to learn they were neglecting Him. This means that our service, or lack thereof, is not about a calculated effort to earn points with God. It is the spontaneous, un-self-conscious fruit of our true nature. Those who belong to Christ see the needs of others and meet them, because the Spirit of Christ is in them. Those who do not belong to Christ are fundamentally self-centered, and so they shut their ears and close their hearts.
When you hear the outcry of the poor, you are, in a very real sense, hearing the cry of Christ. He identifies with His needy people. To shut your ear to them is to shut your ear to Him. And so, on that final day, when you call out, "Lord, Lord," He will say to you, "I never knew you." Why? Because when He called out to you, through the parched lips of the thirsty and the shivering frame of the naked, you did not know Him. You shut your ear.
Conclusion: The Open Ear of the Gospel
So what is the solution? Is it to frantically start giving money to every person who asks, hoping to store up enough good deeds to get God to listen to us? Not at all. That is just another form of works-righteousness, another way of trying to put God in our debt.
The solution begins where everything begins, at the foot of the cross. We must first recognize that we are the ultimate poor man. We are spiritually bankrupt, naked, and destitute. We have nothing to offer God. Our only hope is to make an "outcry" for mercy, a cry for grace based on nothing in ourselves, but only on the finished work of Jesus Christ.
And the glorious good news of the gospel is that God does not shut His ear to that cry. "For 'everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved'" (Romans 10:13). God the Father, because of the blood of His Son, has His ear perpetually and eternally open to the desperate cry of the repentant sinner. He answers that prayer, every single time.
When you have truly had your cry heard by God, when you understand the magnitude of the grace you have been shown, it revolutionizes you. It unstops your ears. You receive the Spirit of the merciful God, and you begin to become merciful yourself. You begin to love your neighbor not as a project, not as a way to earn God's favor, but as a genuine, heartfelt response to the grace you have received. Your open hands are the result of your open ears, which are the result of God's open ears to you.
Therefore, let this proverb search our hearts. If you find that your ears are frequently shut to the needs around you, do not simply try to pry them open with willpower. Go back to the gospel. Remind yourself of the state you were in when Christ found you. Meditate on the infinite grace that heard your cry. And as the love of God floods your heart anew, you will find that your ears, and your heart, and your hands will begin to open naturally. And you will find, blessedly, that when you call, your Father will always be there to answer.