Proverbs 18:5 · World English Bible
Proverbs 18:5 Meaning To Be Partial to the Faces
To be partial to the faces of the wicked is not good, nor to deprive the innocent of justice.
What does Proverbs 18:5 mean?
Every judgment the ego makes is crooked at its root, for it sides with fear and condemns innocence, dressing the reversal as fairness. To favor the wicked and cast down the just is the mind mistaking its own guilt for a standard, elevating what attacks and overthrowing what is guiltless, because the ego cannot see straight while it looks through the lens of blame.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Proverbs 18:5 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
Every judgment the ego makes is crooked at its root, for it sides with fear and condemns innocence, dressing the reversal as fairness. To favor the wicked and cast down the just is the mind mistaking its own guilt for a standard, elevating what attacks and overthrowing what is guiltless, because the ego cannot see straight while it looks through the lens of blame.
There is a seeing that does not tip the scales. When the mind hands its judgment to love, it stops ranking one brother above another and finds the same innocence in each. What it called weighing the case was only the wish to be right about someone's guilt, and setting that wish down, it finds no one left to overthrow.
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Live Proverbs 18:5 today
- Go one hour today without ranking anyone, not the stranger ahead of you in line, not the person in the next car, not yourself in the mirror. Just let people be people.
- When you hear one side of a story about someone you know, hold off on the verdict until you have heard theirs. Being quick to the judgment is not the same as being right.
- In the meeting where everyone has already decided whose fault it was, be the one who asks what actually happened. Fairness usually sounds like a slower question.
Whose case have you already decided, without ever hearing it?
The same truth in other traditions
Taoism · Zhuangzi
Once you divide the world into the acceptable and the unacceptable, you have stopped seeing it. The scale was crooked before anything was placed on it.
Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius
You are not required to form an opinion about this. You can let the thing be, without the verdict, and your mind will be quieter for it.
Buddhism
The mind that is always weighing, this is better, that is worse, never rests. Set down the scales and the same world looks entirely different.
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