Sleep Personified

*Do not get in bed *with sleep, *or else her poverty *will overtake you; *open your eyes, satisfy yourself *with true bread. (MAST)

Proverbs 20:13 (NKJV)

13 Do not love sleep, lest you come to poverty; Open your eyes, and you will be satisfied with bread.

*[Do not get in bed] literally, the human desire for an object. But is most often associated with the intimate but “created” aspect of the nature of love. It can mean, to flirt, to love, or to lust after created objects of desire. The proverb isn’t condemning, however, sexual sin [directly]. Solomon is not aiming at “only” a bed defiled by fornication and adultery but uses the sin of fornication to address the sin of laziness. It’s like killing two birds with one stone. Laziness is like the sin of fornication (Pr.5:1-10;7:18-27). It robs the soul of what is truly life. So Solomon is stating this at a level where men of low degree can understand it. The man who loves sleep is no better than the man who gets in bed with a prostitute (Ps.62:9). That’s the analogy that this wise king of Israel is making. You are flirting with laziness when you love sleep (Pr.21:25). The spiritual man is self-controlled and will limit his sleep. His conscience is set to wake up to the sound of the Lord’s voice, and the snooze button cannot work to silence his alarm to spiritual convictions. But to the man of high degree, he compares the love of sleep to a marriage bed. If you look upon this verb with a positive eye (i.e., to say, with respect and goodwill), the love of sleep is like being chained to laziness. Once you made your bed, your bed makes you in the mind of a man who loves an undefiled sexual union. But when applied to sleep, she is a wicked taskmaster that robs you of life, liberty, and happiness. Why? Because a defiled bed is unholy, and the Christian’s happiness is in the image of holiness (Ps.89:15;119:1;Matt.5:8;13:16-17).

*[with sleep] symbolically, sleep. But sleep is being personified. It is the feminine absolute for sleep. Sleep, then, is to have a master. She is the object of the subject's affection. She is to come under the control of the lover's fantasy. But as with all objects of affection, there is always resistance. Therefore all objects of affection come with baggage, a weight of responsibility. In order to come under the control of this love, there must be mutual satisfaction. But whether this sleep is committed to satisfying the needs of her master or is promiscuous by satisfying herself, the subject always is charged to carry the weight of her baggage. And so the following reflexive Hebrew verb is passively conjoined by the ownership of this feminine noun. Therefore this act of love comes with reflexive baggage. Poverty is the baggage of this love, and this lazy man hides under the covers of her delusion all through the night (Pr.7:16-18).

*[or else her poverty] expectantly, lest or unless. It is a conjunction that unites the two verb stems in a reflexive phrase. It is a cause and effect conjunction. It doesn’t operate like the standard but, and, or conjunctions, but it helps demonstrate the effective clause of the causative stem. It joins the two verbs but differentiates the active voice from the passive voice. The verb, love, functions in the active voice of the second person while the verb, dispossess, functions in the passive voice in the second person. Therefore the verb form is not joined to the subject but rather to the object of the subject’s love. Her poverty or the poverty of sleep is the effect of this joined verbiage. Poverty begins with her as baggage, but it is his love that marries them together. The lazy man wills to marry the two but is not willing to carry the baggage (Pr.19:24). Nevertheless, the baggage is always at the doorstep ringing the bell to reside in his bed. Therefore the baggage never goes away (Pr.7:19-20).

*[ will overtake you] reflexively, to dispossess. But looking only at the Qal form of the Hebrew verb, it means, to take possession of or to inherit. You can be a passive recipient of an inheritance, but that’s not the verbs' reflexive action. Remember that there was the conjunction that differentiates the subjects but of whose actions are reflexively joined. Therefore these verbs are actively working against each other. The lazy man is acting to take possession of this sleep, but this sleep is what possesses him. So he is actively losing this battle. The verb here can also mean, be heir, in its Qal form. But again, the verbs are reflexive to each other, working against each other. The verbs, then, are not reigning together in harmony by the grace of this action. This action is really a reaction that possesses no grace, and without grace, it cannot have any life (1Pet.3:7;Tit.3:7;1Jn.2:16). She is a poverty that only offers him death because her love has no happiness within it (Pr.20:17). Death, then, is his only solution, but this death affords him no relief (Ecc.2:22-24;1Cor.15:32;Isa.22:13;Rev.14:11). Therefore this poverty is utter unhappiness because its foundation is utter unholiness (Rev.9:11;20:3;Gen.1:2;Jer.4:21-28). It is a poverty that sucks upon the breasts, but her breasts are dry with no milk (Hos.9:14;Pr.5:15;Isa.28:9). The lazy man loses his soul to this lust of bread (Matt.16:26), for her bread doesn’t have any leaven of love within it (1Jn.2:16). Her bread rides him all through the darkness of the night but handcuffs him to his bed of hopelessness in the dawning of her light (Matt.6:23). Her poverty is like a ball of solid iron chained to his feet that he must drag across his imagination of what is good to eat (Rev.2:14,20;17:3-4;Acts 7:41). He is nothing more than asleep in a fantasy land of a reality that keeps him behind the bars of guilt and shame (Dan.12:2;Php.3:19). He is blinded by her poverty because he sees it as the riches of her fame (Jer.46:12;Ezk.16:14-15;Rev.3:15-19), and cannot hear the conscience of his own reason (Jer.6:10;Acts 28:26), for he has made his bed in her little game (Job 17:11-16;Ps.6:6;139:7-8).

*[open your eyes] literally, to unstop. Should we isolate this from the context of the eyes, the verb can refer to a stream or river that was dammed up or closed off. So the word picture is of a stream that is stopped up. But if we apply this to what is behind the eyes (Lk.11:34), it is referring to the wellspring of life within the heart (Pr.4:23;16:22;18:4). This stream of life, however, was dammed or shut up to this lazy man (Isa.8:20;50:10;Jer.4:23;Amos 5:20). It was once a stream, but it is a stream that no longer flows (Acts 1:6;3:20-21). This lazy man's eyes are a dry bedrock of a stream stopped up by the nature of sin (Joel 1:20;Hos.9:16;Job 14:11-12). Therefore this is a poetic imperative to repent, a command to open up the streams of repentance so that you can come out of this fantasy land (Acts 3:19;Rom.13:11;1Cor.15:34). Stop resisting the inward call to believe and awake in the Light that is truly light (Eph.5:8-16). Stop damming up your soul to indulge in your vanities (Ecc.11:4-8). Behold what is truly bread (Jn.6:33,50-51), and labor for it (Jn.6:27), for that is the bread that will truly satisfy (Lk.14:15;Jn.6:35). And that bread will make your love genuinely satisfying (Acts 2:46). But in order to open your eyes to that bread, you must turn your eyes away from the fantasy of this dying bedrock of a lifeless flow of sin (Mk.5:25-34). Your eyes deceive you (Acts 9:18;Eph.4:18;2Cor4:4), for your eyes seek only what your empty stream wants to taste and see (Gen.3:6); the reward of laziness, then, is death (Rom.6:23).

*[satisfy yourself] literally, to be fulfilled. This, too, is a second person imperative. There is no conjunction here, however, because these are two distinct commands. But these commands have a subsequent order. You will not fulfill the command to be satisfied if you do not first look away from your “empty bread” and be filled with the eyes of restoration (Acts 3:19-21;12:3,20-23), the eyes of repentance (Matt.12:33; 16:11; Jn.6:26-27; Pr.12:11; 22:9; 23:6; 28:19; 31:27; Mk.9:24; Lk.7:38,44). To behold this new bread, you must be given new eyes (Lk.11:33-36). Your eyes will not flow with remorse until they are given a water source or their life back (Jn.11:25). You cannot repent because you have a dry well (Heb.12:17). Digging deeper (within yourself) will only lead to a further well that draws deeper from its own darkness (Matt.6:23;Jn.4:39). This well has to tap into a new water source (Jn.4:10-11). So you must come to the well that cannot run dry; the well that always satisfies (Jn.4:13-15). This well doesn’t begin with you (Jn.4:16;1Cor.11:7-10). You don’t have the life source to fill yourself with this living water (Jn.3:5;4:15,17-18). You must come to the well that is not (in you) nor from you (Matt.11:28;Jn.7:37-39). The love of the Father is the Bread from above (1Jn.2:15;3:1). This love comes directly from the bosom of the Father (Jn.1:18;3:16). The labor of this love guarantees to satisfy because this love has its standard of life within the truth (Jn.4:23-24; Php.3:3). It’s not fantasy bread that has a good appearance but has a bitter taste (Ps.34:8;Heb.2:9). It is the bread that is as good as true in its invisible core (Rom.1:20), as it is good as true in its visible reality (Col.1:15;1Tim.1:17). This bread has a taste that ever increases its goodness because it is incorruptible to change (1Pet.1:22-2:3). It cannot increase life in itself but always increases its presence in those who taste its goodness (1Cor.15;1Pet.3:3-4). It is the bread that produces a change in a well that has run dry and transforms the bread that decays (1Cor.15:54).

*[with true bread] literally, bread. But again, this bread symbolizes the ever-increasing knowledge of God in the life of the soul that beholds Yahweh in the goodness of His pleasure to display the perfection of His glory (2Pet.3:18). His cross is the showbread that displays the work and character of God in all His attributes in the substance of His nature in one picture of His love (1Jn.2:5; 4:12,17-18; Jn.17:23; 19:30). Christ is the holiness of God’s love that promises to soothe the pain of sin’s guilt and heal the shame of sin’s destruction (Heb.12:1-2, 7, 12-14). The Holy Spirit of this bread is the substance of faith that will lead the body into the shadow of death with the surety of hope in the life of this victorious bread (Heb.11:1). The bread of his life satisfies death yet still provides life to the soul (Rom.8:9-11). The same bread that opens up the streams of this refreshing is the same bread that can fill the appetite of the empty soul (Matt.5:3).