“Like the one who seizes a dog by the ears
is a passer-by who meddles in a
quarrel not his own.”
After we prayed, said our declarations of, “I’m a child of God! He loves me so I love me!”, and recited our intro, my kids jumped in right away with this proverb. Between the three of them, they knew and sited a time when one stepped over the line and got involved in a conflict that they had no part in. We found out the dog’s name: “Nunya Bizness.”
We also talked about the “passer-by”, who we previously saw in v. 10, as a new character in the book of Proverbs. One who is ignorant of discernment and has no interest in either house, Wisdom’s or Folly’s. We spent a moment talking about their fate. “Are they better off not knowing what lies ahead?” I asked. Is that true in any case of life? Consider a path that contains signs along each side warning of falling rocks, or steep cliffs. What happens to those who ignore them? Or those who take the ‘blue pill’ in the movie, The Matrix? Are they protected somehow if they are obedient to the machine? Much like an eclipse that happens regardless of will or emotion, the fate of the ignorant is an early grave.
Then we came to the ‘REAL’ question: “How did Jesus fulfill this proverb?” We then talked about the difference between ‘fulfilling’ and ‘obeying’ the proverbs. We then saw how it was Jesus who grabbed that dog’s ears and gave it a shake. The ‘quarrel not His own’ was the one between God and man, for Jesus was innocent, as in Hebrews 4:15. But unlike a passer-by or a Baha’i teacher, He didn’t detach Himself from this world but saved us from ‘Sin’, the dog’s REAL name, and faced its danger to that early grave. God raised Him from the dead and opened a Way for us and the passer-by to be saved, 2 Corinthians 5:14-21.
We thanked God that Jesus, like in His parable of ‘the Good Samaritan”, Luke 10:25-37, was no passer-by, and made our salvation His business.