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Proverbs 2:22 · World English Bible

Proverbs 2:22 Meaning But the Wicked Will Be Cut Off

But the wicked will be cut off from the land. The treacherous will be rooted out of it.

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What does Proverbs 2:22 mean?

This reads like a sentence passed on persons, but the cutting off is not the destruction of anyone. What is rooted out is the way of seeing that made wickedness seem real in the first place, the belief in separation that dresses a brother as an enemy.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Proverbs 2:22 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

This reads like a sentence passed on persons, but the cutting off is not the destruction of anyone. What is rooted out is the way of seeing that made wickedness seem real in the first place, the belief in separation that dresses a brother as an enemy. When a mind forgives, it is the guilt that is uprooted, not the one it was projected upon.

Nothing that God created can be cut off from the earth. Only the false idea of a self opposed to love has no soil to grow in, and it withers the moment the mind withdraws the belief that fed it.

The earth: the field of the mind where thoughts take root, the ground in which only love can finally hold and fear finds nothing to grow in

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Christian Psychology lens

Live Proverbs 2:22 today

  1. When you feel yourself sorting someone into the category of bad person, separate the thing they did from who they are. One of those can change by tomorrow.
  2. Say something genuinely good about a person you find hard, out loud, to someone else. It starves something in you that you will be glad to lose.
  3. When you are criticized at work, go after the actual problem and leave the person who raised it alone. The problem is the only thing worth pulling up.

Who have I quietly written off, and what would it cost me to let that go?

The same truth in other traditions

Buddhism · Dhammapada

Hatred is never ended by hatred, only by love. What gets uprooted is the enmity, not the enemy.

Taoism · Tao Te Ching

The way acts without forcing, and things settle of themselves. Stop contending with what is wrong and it loses the hold that struggle gave it.

Judaism

The sages tell of a wife correcting her husband's prayer: the wish should be that sin cease, not sinners. The aim was never the person, always the thing growing in them.

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