Proverbs 20:2 · World English Bible
Proverbs 20:2 Meaning The Terror of a King Is Like
The terror of a king is like the roaring of a lion. He who provokes him to anger forfeits his own life.
What does Proverbs 20:2 mean?
The dreaded king and the roaring lion are the same figure the fearful mind is always constructing: a power outside itself, poised to punish, whose anger it must anxiously avoid. This threatening authority is guilt wearing a crown, the mind's own condemnation projected outward and then feared as though it came from elsewhere.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Proverbs 20:2 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
The dreaded king and the roaring lion are the same figure the fearful mind is always constructing: a power outside itself, poised to punish, whose anger it must anxiously avoid. This threatening authority is guilt wearing a crown, the mind's own condemnation projected outward and then feared as though it came from elsewhere.
To provoke such a power is to wound oneself, for the whole scene is happening within. There is no king out there to appease. When a mind withdraws the guilt it has cast into that towering shape, the roar falls silent, and it finds it was afraid only of what it had made.
King: the punishing authority the mind projects outward, its own guilt enthroned as a power to be feared. Lion: the roar of that projected guilt, the seeming menace of a threat the mind has placed outside itself.
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Live Proverbs 20:2 today
- Open the email or message you have been dreading all day, now, without rehearsing the worst version first. Most of the dread was yours, not theirs.
- With the person whose mood you quietly manage, stop managing it for one conversation. Say the ordinary true thing and let them be a person rather than a weather system.
- Before a meeting with someone who has power over you, remind yourself they are also somebody's tired colleague. Then speak as one person to another, not as a subject to a throne.
Who have I made larger than they are, and what did I hand over to make them that size?
The same truth in other traditions
Stoicism · Epictetus
The fearsome thing is not the event but your opinion of it. Remove the opinion, and the threat you were braced against has nowhere to live.
Hinduism · Advaita Vedanta
In dim light a rope on the path is taken for a snake, and the heart pounds for a rope. The fear was real. The snake never was.
Hinduism · Upanishads
Where there is seeming separation, there is fear. Nothing else can frighten a mind that has stopped dividing the world into itself and the other.
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