Are You Asleep to Your Responsibilities?

Proverbs 6:9 Updated American Standard Version (UASV)
⁹ How long will you lie down, O sluggard?
    When will you arise from your sleep?

How long will you lie down, O sluggard: Here how long (עַד־מָתַי ad mathay) if taken literally, it is a question about the length of time, or it can be taken as a sarcastic rhetorical question, “are you going to sleep forever!” Let’s go back to the Bible background of a worker who is gathering crops during the harvest time. He is working from daylight to dark because it is imperative that the crops not be left too long in the field when they are ready for harvest, toward the end of May or in the first week in June. The weather is hot, and it rarely rained in the Promised Land in ancient times during the harvest time. Harvest time meant the entire family, all of its members, would be living in the fields until the harvest was over. Thus, the sluggard, a lazy, sluggish person who is always lying down on the job, would be very unwelcome, family or not. The harvest of saving souls today through our evangelism is comparable. Are we going to be asleep to our privileges when we could be sharing the Gospel (biblical truths) with others, lying down on the one Job that Jesus Christ gave all Christians (Matt. 24:14; 28:19-20; Ac 1:8), as opposed to being prepared to make a defense for the faith? – Colossians 4:6; 1 Timothy 6:12; 2 Timothy 2:15, 25; 1 Peter 3:15; Jude 1:3

When will you arise from your sleep: The sluggard is seen here as sleeping. This, too, is a rhetorical question, such as the Good News Translation GNT (TEV) “When is he ever going to get up?” Using two rhetorical questions, Solomon has tried to awaken this slothful one from his idleness and laziness.

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