Friendship

April 01, 2022

Proverbs 17:17 

A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. 

In this first part of the 21st century, there are five times more people living alone as there were nearly one hundred years ago. It is doubtful that the world has ever been so lonely as it is today, with all of its big cities, busy schedules, materialism, anonymous lives, and transience. People hardly stay in the same place for more than a couple years at a time. Just visit a hospital Intensive Care Unit in a metropolis and count the family or friends sitting in the waiting rooms; then you will understand the severe isolation that defines our world. Over six or seven generations, we have been carefully trained by our social systems to live without friendship. If we had a childhood friend, friends in the workplace, or friends in a church, we learned to move away from those friendships regularly in our lives. Friendship is almost dead in our world. 

But not so in God’s world! According to this text, a true friend loves through thick and thin, through bad times and good times. However, challenges often come within friendships when we move to a new town or church that is away from friends. It is quite possible that the friends we have moved away from will cease to be our friends, and we may be hesitant to create close friendships again because we expect those friendships to fail as well. This is the trajectory of many friendships. But against all this comes the biblical definition of friendship. A true friend loves at all times, and a true brother will stick by you through adversity. Of course, it is true that we cannot be friends with everyone we know, and the Bible is careful not to prescribe that. Some people are able to cultivate more friendships than others, but the more acquaintances you make, the harder it can be to establish true friendships. Still, the principle of the matter stands—be a friend. Learn true friendship. Find a friend and stick with him all the way to the end. 

Proverbs 17:18 

A man void of understanding strikes hands, and becomes surety in the presence of his friend.

Although much of the “modern” world relies upon debt, rentals, and long term contractual arrangements, these economic systems are always fraught with peril. The final chapter of the American empire will forever testify to the truth of these wise sayings! Our banking systems are based on nothing but debt. They played cards with the devil and raised the odds a thousand times! They borrowed trillions of dollars, and then they borrowed on the IOU’s! Banks encouraged people to get rich by borrowing to buy a house in what they hoped would be a perpetually inflating market. Then the banks turned the mortgages into play money, and investors bought the play money (or derivatives) with money from those who consumed less than they produced through investment and insurance companies. But in the end, everybody borrowed more than they produced until there was plenty of money, and as the poet Kipling said, 

“...there was nothing that money could buy, 

and the gods of the copybook headings said, 

‘If you don’t work you die!’” 

Lending to a stranger is one thing, but this particular proverb speaks to the matter of lending to a friend or even renting a home to a friend. What happens if your friend finds he is unable to keep the contract or fails to uphold his side of the bargain, due to a loss of a job or some other circumstance? You would find it far better to give the home to your friend and thereby retain that friendship than to risk losing your friendship over the rental. You could lend the property to your friend free of charge, but this can also be risky. Should he return the property to you in worse condition, this also might threaten to erode the integrity of your friendship. 

Because we have wandered so far from a biblical economic system, these ideas are quite foreign to us. But they provide good, solid wisdom. What we find in Scripture is the priority of friendship. Our friends are precious, and relationships always trump economics. 

For related commentary, reference Proverbs 6:5 and Proverbs 11:15. 

Family Discussion Questions: 

1. What is the definition of a friend? Are we good friends in our family, and do we have anybody we could call a true friends? 

2. Is it wise to lend money or rent your house out to a friend? What might be a better way to help out your friend?