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Proverbs 10:18 · World English Bible

Proverbs 10:18 Meaning He Who Hides Hatred Has Lying Lips

He who hides hatred has lying lips. He who utters a slander is a fool.

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What does Proverbs 10:18 mean?

The ego works in two directions and calls both defense. It hides its hatred behind a smiling face, and it flings that same hatred outward as an accusation against a brother, and in each case it is doing one thing: throwing its own guilt somewhere it will not have to see it.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Proverbs 10:18 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

The ego works in two directions and calls both defense. It hides its hatred behind a smiling face, and it flings that same hatred outward as an accusation against a brother, and in each case it is doing one thing: throwing its own guilt somewhere it will not have to see it. To conceal the fear or to hurl it makes no difference, for both deny that the trouble was ever within.

What is called foolishness here is simply the failure to recognize this. The mind attacks a figure in its own dream and believes it has dealt with something real, when the only correction needed was to look inward and forgive.

Lips: the mind at its outer edge, the mask that either buries fear behind a false calm or hurls it as an accusation at another.

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Live Proverbs 10:18 today

  1. When you are irritated with someone today, ask what the irritation is telling you about yourself before you decide what it says about them. Give it one honest minute.
  2. If you find yourself being warm to someone's face while writing them off inside, close the gap in the direction of warmth. Either mean the kindness or have the harder conversation, but stop running both.
  3. Before forwarding the screenshot or repeating the story about what someone did, stop. It is going to feel like fairness and it is going to work like a stone, and you cannot take it back once it lands.

What am I accusing someone else of that I have not looked for in myself?

The same truth in other traditions

Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius

Nothing is more wretched than the mind that runs circles around everything outside itself and never looks within. The accusation aimed outward is the inspection avoided.

Buddhism

The arrow of anger you fire at another passes first through your own hand. What you throw away does not leave you, it only comes back disguised.

Sufism · Rumi

Yesterday you were clever and wanted to change the world. Today you are wise and are changing yourself, which is the only place the work was ever possible.

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